Please enjoy a selection of sounds I have made in my career thus far! This experience is best with headphones.
PART ONE: Inanna on the Meathook
Digital Arts and New Media MFA student (and now graduate) Rory Willats recruited me to design the aural component of one of his showcases. He created an exhibit featuring a large TV screen hanging from a pendulum, which would portray a digitized stick figure version of the viewer, captured via Xbox Kinect. The audience member would walk up to a VR headset, and ideally put it on.. When they did, they would see themselves from the point of view of the digital body on the television, and hear the frantic echoes of communication represented by Morse code and a haunting snippet of Eternal Flame by Susanna Hoffs of The Bangles. The ambience I was going for was mechanical, massive, and foreboding.
PART TWO: Bone Deep; the Skeleton Play
Bone Deep; the Skeleton Play was a devised play with heavy musical elements developed during the 2022-23 Barnstorm season at UC Santa Cruz. I was the sound designer and producer, and sat down with director Sloane Morton to record a series of songs he had written for house music and archival purposes. The song that featured within the play itself was “Down to the Bone”.
The play took place in the underworld, an undead library and the depths below. The library sounded like this:
There was also a monologue called Milk. This was its underscore. I composed this using a cowbell and kalimba.
PART THREE: Amduat: The 12 Hours of Ra
First, please listen to a song I recorded and sang for a play I sound designed in college: Amduat: The 12 Hours of Ra. The director, Laura Boutros, asked me to write something using a stereotypical Arabic scale to represent a temptress, a spirit of the Nile, Al Naddaha. I noodled around in the key and improvised for a while, then stitched it together into this. I exported it into four tracks, each of which was played in one of the four corners of the black box theater space. The below is an approximation of what that sounded like in stereo.
Next, please enjoy the ambience I crafted for that play. We wanted to evoke a tomb, and a museum out of time. This was four audio tracks adjusted separately in QLab, changing slightly throughout the play. Two of the tracks were ambient sounds I recorded in a particularly echoey staircase on the UC Santa Cruz campus.
The final thing I will present from Amduat was the Plagues of Egypt underscore, composed into a semi-musical collage of animal noises. I worked with Charlie, the show’s composer, to create this.
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