Director: Brendon Fox

For Angels, Brendon and I approached it with an eye on using the music to propel us through the play and help maintain momentum.  We wanted something that didn't try to tell it's own story during the transitions.  We ended up using music from an Italian composer and suplimented music in the scenes that lived in a different vocabulary.  This allowed the transitions to work as one whole idea, moving the audience through the play, and allowed those moments with out music to stand out and exist within the story.

Audio Example

PlayMakers Repertory Company

Director: Tom Quaintance 

This show was an amazing challenge as sound design was comprised fo Foley elements performed by actors on stage along with a live musician, who was also our composer.  I found three things striking about doing a show with Foley.  First, normally when you reduce an idea, say of a dock scene, to a soundscape, you end up with things like a ships bell, some water, a seagull and maybe the sound of people talking.  Those are the base things you need to communicate to the audience where we are.  When working in Foley I found that those ideas can be reduced even further, with a single ships bell struck by an actor establishing the scene.  Second, it was an immensely iterative process.  I'd bring in some cellophane and tissue paper to make the sounds of fire, the actors would work with it, yet something wouldn't be quite right.  So I'd go back and find that we needed to throw in some bubble wrap to make those crackles you hear in fire.  Third, it was a true collaborative process, with me bringing lots of fun toys in for the actors and them finding ways of using them I hadn't even thought of.  Overall, I'm very proud of this show and all the work everyone put into it and how much it taught me about iterative design and collaboration.

Director: Joe Haj

The key that got me into this show was an article in Live Design talking about the sound design for "When the Rain Stops Falling" at the Lincoln Center.  I was inspired by Patton's idea of creating a "rain roof" above the audience.  I ran with this idea and used it to further Joe's vision of a very cold and ordered world at court vs the open and warmer version of the forest as the play progresses.  Using a series of 10 loudspeakers placed above and around the audience I created our "cannopy" as we called it.  This made it possible to bring wind and leaves and birds around the audience, expanding the sound scapes as the emotional intensity of the play increased and contracting for the more intimate moments.  Unfortuneatly this is one of those instances where a sound file of wind wouldn't really convey what we accomplished, as it was a very space specifc endevor, hence no sound file for your enjoyment.

Director: Scott Illingsworth

Because the story of this show moved all over the map, sound helped by creating the world location by location and provide clues for the audiences imagination. The example here is of the family accidentally driving off road. It was both fun and challenging to make because cues like this don't just exist in a library somewhere.

Audio Example

Director: Matt Cosper

The director set this play in a 50's sitcom world. After doing research into the styles of The Donna Reed Show, and Doris Day and Rock Hudson movies, we settled on this music. It needed to have elements of the happy, sitcom family, and elements of the Herdmans, who came in and interrupted the happy sitcom. Below is an audio mockup I did for the director, demonstrating a direction we could take with sound.

Audio Example

Director: Donna Bradby

From The Mississippi Delta is the story about one woman's life told through three actresses. These women portray Dr. Holland at various points of her life as well as people who affected her. I wanted to use sound in each scene as a sort of "silhouette". In the same way shadows can be used to tell a story on a screen that heighten another story going on, I wanted the sound to act as a silhouette to the story being told on stage. There were lots of opportunities for this, as it was only three women with minimal props on a bare stage, so sound was able to play a key role. In addition, I kept the sound way upstage, behind the main set piece, so the sound was literally coming from behind the actresses, acting as a sort of aural backdrop.

Audio Example

Director: Preston Lane

The world of this play started in a very organic, disorganized place and through the four acts moves to a non-organic, organized place. In the last act, our protagonist completely rejects everything of her past and family. Finding the music for this piece was difficult, as I needed music that could live in the same world as the rest of the music, but also propel us to this new place, be strong, and feminine, because though Vivie was denying her previous life, she was not denying the fact that she was a woman. I have included a video clip of this transition below.

Video Example

Director: Jay Puttnam

This is the closing sequence for Sleuth. The final game has been played, the police actually showed up and Andrew Wyke's world is crashing down around him. The show was performed in a thrust theater, and as Andrew stumbles to his chair and triggers the laughing sailor, the laughter builds around the space, eventually overlapping and becoming chaotic until the lights bump out with the musical button.

Audio Example

Director: Kristan Brandt

For the opening of The Tempest I was trying to establish a naturalistic, magical world. To do this I started with whispers that moved to music and then into the storm. To further heighten Prospero's magical world, I used some abstracted seagull screaches and paired lion roars with the waves, both of which helped to make the storm larger then life.

Audio Example

Director: Laura Henry

A song is called for to be played off a pipe organ. The director for Trelawny had sheet music from a composer. I took this music, entered each part into Apple Logic's sheet music function, played with different instruments until I got a sound that was close to the research I had done, then cleaned it up with some tempo variances and EQ. Lastly I added the mechanical sound underneath to help with the idea that it was a street organ.

Trelawny of the Wells from Ryan J. Gastelum on Vimeo.