Orbital Sound Ltd

Orbital Plunges to the Watery Depths of Creative Theatre

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Taking their sound design to its experimental limits, Fry & Downing deployed Stage Research's SFX software, which allowed a complex multi-channel sound design to be played back reliably using PC hardware. To further augment the dramatic impact, many live Foley sound FX were incorporated, which were created by the performers in the darkness. This prevented the production from seeming like a radio show and helped "bind" the recorded sound into the live performance.



Sound & Fury is an innovative collaborative production company directed by Mark Espiner, Tom Espiner and Dan Jones. It draws on the disciplines of Theatre, Foley work, sound design, music and story telling. Its key artistic interest is in developing the sound space of theatre and presenting an audience with new ways of experiencing theatre by heightening the aural sense.

Theatre Sound specialist Orbital recently sponsored Sound & Fury's groundbreaking production – The Watery Part of the World. Staged at The Battersea Arts Centre, it was performed in total darkness and uniquely relied exclusively on sound to convey an extraordinary piece of theatre.



Highly acclaimed by critics for its artistic vision, the production, based on the facts that inspired Herman Melville's Moby Dick, atmospherically recounts the tale of a Nantucket Whaling Ship, The Essex and the tragic fate of its crew in 1820 when rammed by an 85ft Sperm Whale and sunk.



Sound Designers, Gareth Fry and Caroline Downing, approached Orbital to supply a system, which underpinned the entire production – where form and content were perfectly married.



Fry explained:



" One of the biggest challenges was also the most liberating aspect of doing a show in the dark: we had to conjure a world purely through sound without relying on anything visual. In the dark, creating a world out of sound, we were able to shift location from the crows nest of a ship to below deck, then off underwater in a matter of seconds- the pace of the piece wasn't slowed down by set and costume changes."

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Taking their sound design to its experimental limits, Fry & Downing deployed Stage Research's SFX software, which allowed a complex multi-channel sound design to be played back reliably using PC hardware. To further augment the dramatic impact, many live Foley sound FX were incorporated, which were created by the performers in the darkness. This prevented the production from seeming like a radio show and helped "bind" the recorded sound into the live performance.



Sound & Fury is an innovative collaborative production company directed by Mark Espiner, Tom Espiner and Dan Jones. It draws on the disciplines of Theatre, Foley work, sound design, music and story telling. Its key artistic interest is in developing the sound space of theatre and presenting an audience with new ways of experiencing theatre by heightening the aural sense.