Technology earns its place, or it takes the place of something

What this publication is

Stage & Signal describes what technology does to live performance: to the work, to the people making it, and to the room it happens in. It is written for the people who will have to make it function on a Tuesday, in a building that was designed for something else, with the money that is actually available.

Every article here answers the same question in a different department. What does this change? A microphone extends a voice to the back row and moves the balance from the performer to an operator. A projected backdrop supplies twenty locations and gives up the way a painted cloth answers the lighting state. A recording preserves a performance in detail no memory holds, and quietly decides that whatever fell outside the frame did not happen. None of those trades is a mistake. Making one without noticing is.

How it is written

We name mechanisms rather than issuing advice. Not watch your levels, but gain before feedback falls about six decibels each time the distance from source to microphone doubles. Not treat the room, but reverberation time falls inversely with absorption, so the first material does most of the work and the next lot does very little. A mechanism can be checked, argued with and applied to a situation we have never seen. Advice cannot.

Every figure carries its source and the type of that source, and where a source has an interest in the answer we say so. Manufacturer literature is treated as advocacy, because that is what it is. Standards bodies, regulators and published engineering literature are treated as stronger, and named. Numbers that cannot be traced to a stated method do not appear at all, and where we have left one out on purpose we say that too.

Each article ends with a section headed what we cannot verify. It contains real limits rather than a disclaimer, including, where it applies, this publication's own interest in the answer.

What is deliberately absent

There are no gear reviews and no named product compared against another, because that is the mechanism by which publications in this field come to be funded by the companies they cover. There are no procedures for regulated or dangerous work: mains distribution, rigging, pyrotechnics and lasers are described as work, with an account of who is qualified to carry it out, and nothing here should be used as an instruction. Legal material names its jurisdiction, is general, and is not advice.

Nothing is sold here. There is no booking, no membership and no donation. Where a question belongs to another profession it is sent there: vocal technique to a singing teacher, hearing to an audiologist, contracts to a lawyer.

Who it is for

The reader we have in mind is competent and short of time. A stage manager working out whether a linked cue will help or will fire during a hold. A designer deciding whether a hall can take the projection the model assumes. A music director who has been handed a click and wants to know what it takes away before agreeing to it. A general manager reading a ticketing contract and wondering which of the promises in it can be tested.

Nobody here is being taught their job. What we supply is the part of the picture that sits in another department, in a form that survives being repeated to a colleague who was not in the room. That is why the articles end with six numbered points: they are the version that gets carried into a production meeting.

A good deal of the material concerns work done in buildings that were never designed for it, on budgets that do not stretch to the correct answer. We have tried to be useful about that rather than aspirational, because a recommendation nobody can afford is a way of declining to help.

One thread runs through all of it

Technology on a stage earns its place exactly to the extent that it does not take from the performer what the performer does better. That sentence sounds like a slogan and is meant as a test, applied case by case, with different answers each time.

It clears a great deal easily. Nothing is lost by giving a flying operator a cue light instead of shouting. Nothing is lost by keeping the archive on a format somebody will be able to open. A hall that swallows consonants is not improved by leaving it alone out of principle, and an audience that cannot hear the words is not having an authentic experience.

It bites where the tool takes over a judgement. A cue linked because it was convenient to programme fires while an actor is still crossing. A click track moves the tempo decision to an edit suite weeks earlier. A generated draft of an interpretation is not a cheaper version of an interpretation; it is a different and lesser object. In each case the tool works perfectly and something the audience came for has quietly gone.

Where to start

The six sections below run from the physics of a room through to the page that sells the seat. If you are fighting a specific building, sound and light are the practical places to begin. If you are deciding whether to record, capture answers what that costs and what it keeps. If you are responsible for an audience rather than a stage, the house section is written for you and is the one most often read too late.