(How bizarre is it that Chrome's built-in spellcheck flags "diagetic" but not "meatspace?")Īnd thus, here is how I got an actual period piece of telecommunications to go through its paces once again under software control. And that is the problem of getting software in the virtual world to do something out here in meatspace. One word used around the Arduino community is "Physical Computing." Or, as Tom Igoe puts it, Making Things Talk. In any case, making a phone ring is an instructive problem.
Result being, you are more likely today to play a sound effect off of digital media and through speakers, and less likely to make use of the storehouse of theater tradition with its crash boxes, starter pistols, thunder runs and, yes, phone ringers. But that might just be the companies I've tended to work for. I am tempted to say it might be less realistic, less diagetic, but fuller and more complex. Theater sound design is changing as well. And I mean ring - not a ringtone, but the good old electric clapper that was part of our lives for almost eighty years. There are few plays yet in which appear an iPad or a tweet - but many in which a telephone has to ring. Which means that although we've moved on in our own lives to men without hats, jackets without vests, carriages without horses, lighting without gas, freezers without ice delivery, in fully half the repertoire older ways and older technology are part of the action. There are new plays being written every day, but so many of the plays in our repertoire are older (if not actual old chestnuts.) Between the aging subscriber base and the desire for familiar pleasures, you can be sure that in most theaters you work at, you will be doing "Charlie's Aunt" at some point.