Conference documentation: Theatre Sound as Collaboration. Part 3.4: Discussion of the Audio Papers

Collaboration in sound design and music composition for theatre curated by Adrian Curtin, Duška Radosavjlević and David Roesner

The full programme of the conference can be found here: https://theatermus.hypotheses.org/theatre-sound-as-collaboration-distributed-creations-shared-agencies

In this session we pay closer attention to the processes and dynamics of the collaborative relationships involved in, and between, sound design and music composition for theatre, past and present. We are not only interested in the creative dialogue between a sound designer and a composer (in those theatre cultures where this pairing conventionally exists), but also between the more abstract “functions” of contributing music and curating a sonic environment for a theatre performance – which often includes interweaving of musical cues, sound effects, acoustic conditions, aesthetics of voice amplification etc. Taking Bruno Latour’s “actor-networks“ as a prompt, we seek to consider how “collaborative agents” may well include spaces and environments, technologies, objects, instruments, interfaces, and artificial intelligences: how might the idea of creative partnerships extend to non-human or “more-than-human” entities? We also wish to discuss how collaboration between “sound“ and “music“ is articulated in teams, in practices where artistic responsibility is more evenly distributed, where traditional roles and job descriptions are suspended in processes of devising, and in institutions with fluid hierarchies.