Theater Sound Design & Composition
My sound design practice is rooted in close listening to the natural world and shared stories. This is manifested through field recording, synthesis and digital generation, sonic manipulation/augmentation, and collage curation. My designs are often grounded with tonal or musical elements, which dance with the story, highlighting the motion on stage and the space we are sharing. With care, I hope to make sounds that resonate emotionally and have an embodied, lasting effect.
Cartography
Created by Kaneza Schaal & Chris Myers
Inflatable rafts on the Mediterranean. Dark holds of cargo trucks. Family photos wrapped carefully in a backpack that crosses border checkpoints. Inspired by the creative work with young refugees around the world, Cartography fuses map-making, dance, film, and sound sensor technology to explore the tragedy and wonder of lives in motion. From the effects of climate change to war and poverty, this powerful story examines the forces that send youth into unsure waters of their future—and invites audiences to consider their own maps and journeys.
The sounds I designed for this show were centered around dynamic impact moments which propelled the movement of the show. It also includes a modular sound score based on performers' personal stories of migration paired with the experiences and memories of children fleeing their homes.
NY Premiere: The New Victory Theater
Everybody Is Gone
by The New Wild
Everybody Is Gone is an innovative live event that provides audiences with a unique perspective on the ongoing crisis in the Uyghur Homeland. Uniting elements of journalism, live performance, and museum exhibition, the immersive event offers audiences the opportunity to deeply and personally understand the impact of the state-backed surveillance and oppression that affect millions.
For this show, I took real-world sonic elements - some intentionally hidden, others overbearing - and distorted them to emphasize the imposed oppressive situation audiences were placed in.
She Walks The Air
Devised with Chaesong Kim
This work explores a challenging act of decolonization through collective movement. My main instrument in the piece was a dripping water station with a pair of embedded hydrophones. I was able to play the water to activate sonic expansions as well as accompany the other performers as they moved in and out of the basin.
Pawel & Ebola
Written & Directed by Marianna Ellenberg
Pawel & Ebola follows a dysfunctional brother and sister duo—the fictional offspring of infamous French neurologist and hysteria clinician Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot—whose world is disrupted by the arrival of a bizarre cult named “The Method”
I collaborated with my mentor, Paula Matthusen, to score the play and create a sound-world for this narrative that was dark and musically descriptive. I manipulated the actors’ voices through various Ableton patches, and at moments turned their spoken words into dense and evolving music which served to transport the characters to different settings.
NY Premiere: The Kitchen
When We Went Electronic
Written by Caitlin Saylor Stephens
Directed by Meghan Finn
It’s 2011 and two American Apparel models are searching for their missing memory after a tragically fun nite. The sound design and musical arrangement focused around a variety of complex glitching electronic sounds. Some sparks carried into the music as percussive elements, elevating the highly electronic score, dense with multi-layered synthesizers and highly effected guitars. It all came together to form an audiovisual trip that felt both tight and trashy.
NY Premiere: The Tank
Genesis 22
Devised by Grace Herman-Holland
In a house on Governors Island, I collaborated with six directors to compose a score for six unique interpretations of the biblical tale of Abraham's sacrifice of Isaac. All six pieces were performed simultaneously with the score binding them together. This show was highly immersive, so I utilized the great reverberance found in the house to affect the sound and carry it. Key themes were childhood, kinship, fear, and trance. The composition for this piece was fully electronic, written and performed with the Roland GAIA synthesizer.
NY Premiere: Governors Island
Vandals
Created by The How
Vandals adapts a public trial of a war hero/criminal into a founding myth for democracy. It explores the personal histories of the cast to unearth the question, What do you need to change about the past in order to live in the present? This piece draws stories from the performers' lives, The Horatians, an interview with Peter Eisenman, and texts from the American reconstruction. The sounds in this piece were used to evoke these disparate sources while also vandalizing itself as a part of its existence. I tore apart classics and smashed the monumental aura of confident, nationalistic, and coded music. This led toward some new compositions building out from the melodies of Stephen Foster.
NY Premiere: The Tank