Another Getting There that requires a Roundabout Way.
I arrived in San Francisco June 1981 and by September was working at Magic Theatre as Sound Op for "Victims of War", directed by Robert Woodruff and fresh from the Bay Area Playwrights Festival. The Stage Manager was Scott Gibbs and his partner and fellow Stage Manager at the Magic was Pam Winfrey. As I continued at the Magic Theatre I worked with both of them several times and with both became more than acquainted with the Sound Design team of Terry Hunter and Nat Fast.
By 1983 I was effectively the mascot/minion of "Stereopolis Productions", the name Terry and Nat were using as a theatrical Sound Design team who were responsible for most of the sound heard if it was a wildly successful new play in San Francisco or Berkeley for a decade. I typically Engineered/Operated and refilled the pipe for them until I began my own career as a designer at the Eureka and Lorraine Hansberry Theaters.
We all knew Pam Winfrey through the Magic Theatre and at the time while still Stage Managing at Magic she was the Volunteer Coordinator at The Exploratorium yet to become the Director of the Performing Artist In Residency program she created, itself a daunting story to tell later. My recollection is that Pam contacted me with a proposal to put together a Sound Design themed exhibit for the upcoming Theatre Day '84 event at the museum based on Theatrical Sound Design and I turned to Nat and Terry to assist. It wasn't the last leap of faith Pam took on behalf that led to so many of my finer adventures.
From here on will be a fanciful telling of what I clearly didn't appreciate at the time enough to document well.
Within my apprenticeship I learned, among other things, how theatrical sound greatly differs from the other design elements, particularly in the way that it is at its best when it doesn't draw attention to itself, it being so well integrated into the overall production no one will notice the reinforced Subtext through Sound. The quality of "well integrated" is the moving target from show to show/director to director making my Job Description a Generality Specialist, to oversimplify.
The Exploratorium specifically wanted me to draw attention to Sound Design as a contributing partner to overall Integrated Design Esthetics so I went about some process of imagining and rejecting until I came up with a simple enough plan that could be achieved with the available gear of the time and the help of some Voice Talent colleagues from theater, Scott, Pam and Mark Petrakis.
The concept was to take an audience member and put them in a black curtained off area on a chair with a toggle switch on the arm for Audience Participation. I stood in low blue light to the side at a table with two reel-to-reel tape decks full of my cues, a mixer and all the speaker amplifiers waiting for the light to change when it was time for the audience to interact or not.
A cue may have entailed a quick cut between chapters (an abrupt change between tapes) or a lingering transition to make a journey between scenes (a slow non invasive cross-fade between soundtracks).
The sonic adventure would begin by accelerating forward from 0 to 200 MPH in a rocket chair.
The effect was achieved with a mix of original and prerecorded sound effects placed in primary speaker pairs in front and behind the chair instead from the side, Left and Right were cleverly placed side speakers reflecting off surfaces to enhance the sound effect of moving from front to back.
At a certain point there would be a malfunction and the jet was at risk of exploding. The audience member would be asked by a computer voice to decide to EJECT NOW! or ride to the end and hope for the best. The toggle switch on the chair's arm went to a light bulb that cued me when it changed.
The result of either choice is the Chair ejects up and flies high into the whistling air, a cawing bird flies by and then the sound of a remote din starts to get louder on the way down. It culminates in the sound of crashing through the roof and landing at a table in an old west saloon during a crooked poker game.
At a certain point in the poker game a player cheats and the Audience member has to decide to let it slide or call the no good cheating scoundrel out. Either way a fight breaks out, the Audience member is knocked out and awakes in the hold of a pirate ship at sea.
Following a swashbuckling interlude involving Captain Blood, the doors burst open and the crew drag the Audience on deck to walk the plank. The pirates give the choice of jumping or being pushed.
Either way there's a deep splash of water, a racing heartbeat that fades with a high pitched tone that stops... once you've drowned.
The location of the "exhibit" was inside The Library, the quietest possible public accessible place for something that had to accommodate the fairly wide dynamic and frequency ranges of the sounds. A clear memory is the need for the door to be closed because of the everyday deafening din of the Palace of Fine Arts full of people.
The audience sitting in a chair in a box without much light and a single push button toggle switch on the right arm rest attached to a light bulb in front of the Operator.
When the Audience Member made a decision and pressed the toggle switch a light bulb would go on or off cuing the Operator to switch tape decks. Or not at which point the tape would run to the end and be auto-followed by the next tape deck.
We only had two stereo reel-to-reel tape decks and a mixer so we only had 2 channels of sound with which to surround the Audience Member. My solution was to put sound Front and Back instead of Left and Right and to split the signal of each channel to three different speakers of varying sizes, in effect to create the effect in space of the Crossover built into typical consumer speakers. While the entire Left channel went into three different speakers each was sized to emphasize different ranges of the sound frequency spectrum and placed relatively to the Audience Member, lower frequency speakers further away than higher frequency speakers. We did it all with basic Sound technology, it lasted roughly 5 minutes and included 3 Interactive Audience decisions that slightly altered the experience but it was 1984 and it was open to the public and there was nothing like it before, as far as I know.