Sound Designs

Tom Fool Sound Design

First Performance in English of Revered German Play

Below are some samples of the sound I created for the play Tom Fool, presented by Hoy Polloy. I had a lot of fun producing these little snippets to go in between the action of this austere, yet beautiful play. The scene changes were incredibly short and there was a lot of them, so this sound needed to fill a fairly important role in the play. The play is ultra realistic, and deals with grave issues of individuality and capitalism. In this way, my sounds were jarring as they are heavily processed, and dream like. We felt that this served the play well as a lot of the meaning in this play comes from understanding the protagonists head space, and this sound was sort of like his head space. To create it I took factory and other labour orientated samples and processed them in various ways.

Below are the sounds, and a still from the performance.

Right click to save, click to play

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Sound Design for 'The Cats Paw'

Presented by Hoy Polloy

Below are some samples of the sound design I created for Hoy Polloy. I worked on this project in conjuntion with a fellow sound designer Jim who produced the sound effects, and additional atmospheric sound.

'The Cats Paw' is a play about illegal sex workers in Melbourne. Who they are, how they got where they are, and what culture surrounds them. I had been wanting to use the excellent project by Johnathon Harris 'We Feel Fine' for some time and this project seemed like an excellent oppertunity. Using the queries available such as gender, location and emotion I created a custom Java Class that would periodically search for terms specific to the play. Emotional states such as hopeful, lost and desperate were searched for specific to the female gender and the resulting blog posts were used as a seed for the compositions. I created the general feel of the sounds in Ableton Live, whilst the specific contents of each generative sound scape was unique to the databse query.

I really the enjoy the possibilities of using real data in creative works. I feel that using real data specific to the metaphors of a work, the design benefits from a tangible tether to the real world, adding a number of layers to an aucostic work.

Below are the sound samples from the play, which underscored the action of the play.

Below that are some promotional still from the production.

Design Samples

Click on the links to play, or Right click to save.

Press Shot

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