Editing Sound design (section)

===Recorded sound===
Possibly the first use of recorded sound in the theatre was a phonograph playing a baby's cry in a London theatre in 1890.<ref>{{cite book | last = Booth | first = Michael R. | year = 1991 | title = Theatre In The Victorian | publisher = Cambridge University Press | isbn = 0-521-34837-4 }}</ref> Sixteen years later, [[Herbert Beerbohm Tree]] used recordings in his London production of [[Stephen Phillips]]’ tragedy NERO. The event is marked in the Theatre Magazine (1906) with two photographs; one showing a musician blowing a bugle into a large horn attached to a disc recorder, the other with an actor recording the agonizing shrieks and groans of the tortured martyrs. The article states: “these sounds are all realistically reproduced by the gramophone”. As cited by [[Bertolt Brecht]], there was a play about [[Rasputin]] written in (1927) by [[Aleksey Nikolayevich Tolstoy|Alexej Tolstoi]] and directed by [[Erwin Piscator]] that included a recording of [[Lenin]]'s voice. Whilst the term "sound designer" was not yet in use, some stage managers specialised as "effects men", creating and performing offstage sound effects using a mix of vocal mimicry, mechanical and electrical contraptions and gramophone records. A great deal of care and attention was paid to the construction and performance of these effects, both naturalistic and abstract.<ref>{{cite book | last = Napier | first = Frank | year = 1936 | title = Noises Off | publisher = Frederick Muller }}</ref> Over the twentieth century recorded sound effects began to replace live sound effects, though often it was the [[Stage management|stage manager]]'s duty to find the [[sound effect]]s, and an [[electrician]] played the recordings during performances.

Between 1980 and 1988, Charlie Richmond, USITT's first Sound Design Commissioner, oversaw efforts of their [[Sound Design Commission]] to define the duties, responsibilities, standards and procedures expected of a theatre sound designer in [[North America]]. He summarized his conclusions in a document <ref>{{Cite web | archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20070308153444/http://www.richmondsounddesign.com/txt/sound-design.txt | format=TXT | title=Sound Design - Definitions | archive-date=2007-03-08 | url=http://www.richmondsounddesign.com/txt/sound-design.txt}}</ref> which, although somewhat dated, provides a succinct record of what was then expected. It was subsequently provided to the ADC and [[David Goodman Croly|David Goodman]] at the Florida USA local when they both planned to represent sound designers in the 1990s.