THEATRE
LORCA IN A GREEN DRESS (The Lillie Theatre at City Theatre, with Carnegie Mellon University)
I designed the sound effects, sound system, and composed the music for Lorca in a Green Dress. The production relied heavily on sound design and underscoring. I used OSC to fire lighting and media cues in sync with sound. In the play, the main character, Lorca with Blood, has a series of memories recreated by the ensemble. I did the underscoring for these moments and used a palette of magical yet somewhat ominous-sounding instruments. One of the songs in the play, Blanca y Pura Luz, was written by myself with the director, recorded with the performers, and produced by me. A movement piece took place while the song played. Several songs, with lyrics from Lorca’s poems, are written into the script. For these songs, myself and the director found arrangements of songs with these lyrics that we felt fit the play, and I prepared materials for the performers to learn the music. This meant separating vocals and instrumentals into separate tracks and creating click tracks. I also prepared sheet music for the song I transcribed and arranged, Verde Que Te Quiero Verde, as well as the original song, Blanca y Pura Luz. One of our characters, the Flamenco Dancer, was represented by media. For this, we recorded a real flamenco dancer in front of a green screen. To get high quality audio, I set up a recording space to record the flamenco dancer’s footsteps and palmas to the pre-recorded footage. Then, I synchronized my recordings with the footage and sent it back to the media designer. Every media cue that included the flamenco dancer was fired by sound with OSC.
Dial M for Murder (Pittsburgh Public Theater)
I was the assistant sound designer to Stewart Blackwood for Dial M for Murder at the Pittsburgh Public Theater from July to September of 2024. The show was primarily composition-based, so I assisted mostly with music. My duties included providing feedback during the music development process, orchestrating musical cues, and attending and taking notes during meetings with the director. I also created an Ableton Live playback session to tweak cues during rehearsal, pulled sound effects and found music for bows, organized and updated paperwork, and created the preliminary QLab file.
I was the sound designer, composer, and engineer for Sender. For this production, it was very important that the audience felt like they were really in Chicago. I achieved this by using many different sounds of the city: people shouting, dogs barking, sirens going off, airplanes, garbage trucks, crickets, birds, and traffic noises. The play takes place on the 4th of July. Rather than using one long track of fireworks, I took individual firework explosions and planted them at specific places in the script. Sender takes place over 3 days, and has several transitions going from morning to night and from night to morning. For these transitions, I created a main theme using guitars, a banjo, and a synthesizer. This theme becomes more elaborate, but darker, as the play continues. “Messages” occurs at the end of the play, where Lynx’s anonymity is destroyed when he impulsively posts on social media. An onslaught of notifications roar in as time passes to the following day, where Lynx has to deal with the damage of what he has done.
