selected work

interdisciplinary collaborations

Polaris: Porsgrunn - Porsgrunn International Theatre Festival

A design element from this performance was featured at the Nova Sin gallery as part of the Object Exhibition at the Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space in 2015.

Heather Warren-Crow and I co-created and performed this devised piece, which was chosen by competition for the Porsgrunn International Theatre Festival in 2014. A sound-oriented performance, the piece was a cross between a John Cage-style theatre piece and a kids’ science fair. It was also an exploration of the ideas of Norwegian astrophysicist Kristian Birkeland (1867-1917), whose explanation of the aurora borealis was ahead of its time. An element of the design of this production was included in the Objects Exhibition of the 2015 Prague Quadrennial of Performance Design and Space.

The sound design for the show featured two tape players playing a Bach suite slightly out of sync, audio samples from the “Golden Record” aboard the Voyager spacecraft, and a composition featuring a metal detector, coins, and a looping pedal. I learned to play a metal detector like an instrument for this performance.

Earmark - Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco, CA

Co-created with Heather Warren-Crow, Earmark was an experimental audio tour of San Francisco, California's Museum of Performance + Design, which has a collection of 3.5 million items related to theatre, dance, and music. The tour took listeners through the Museum space and around the bustling city block. The project began with an initial research trip to the Museum in January of 2017, continued as further research, planning, and content creation (at a distance) during the Spring semester, and culminated in the launch of the tour in June.

Earmark was an amalgam of a museum audio guide, a sound walk, and a site-specific live performance accessed through headphones and MP3 players. Because it is based entirely in sound, it was a massive (and massively rewarding) sound design project. Earmark is 30 unbroken minutes of carefully recorded and mixed voices, pre-recorded samples, environmental sound, and original composition. All of it needed to be precisely timed in relation to our narrator’s recorded footsteps so that recorded sound would line up with what participants were seeing as they walked inside and outside. I learned a lot about site-specifity and the rich potential of the sound walk format.

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24-hour Confession (Pity Party #1) - Glasshouse Art-Life Lab, NYC; Counterpath Gallery, Denver. CO

24-Hour Confession (Pity Party) was a 24-hour performance at Glasshouse Art-Life Lab gallery (Brooklyn, NY) in December of 2013. A 4-hour version of the performance was presented at Counterpath Gallery (Denver, CO). Both variations were sound-oriented performances involving audience participation and featuring live processed voices and improvised electronics.

In Tyler Atwood's review of the Denver performance, he writes, "the repetition that occurs in the course of their four hour performance...is reminiscent of both the distortion that occurs in the 24-hour news cycle, and the distortion that occurs in attempting to place deleterious actions in a context that justifies them."

Exonumia/Fiat $ Party - World Stage Design, Taiwan; Delinquent Gallery, Boomington, IN; LHUCA, Lubbock, TX

Exonumia—sound designed by me, performed by Heather Warren-Crow, and devised by us both—was performed first at World Stage Design in Taipei, Taiwan in 2017 and then at Delinquent Gallery in Bloomington, Indiana in 2018. The Bloomington performance happened in conjunction with the Tuning Speculations VI Conference on sound and theory at Indiana University. An adaptation of the original performance, newly titled Fiat $ Party, was exhibited at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA) in Lubbock, Texas in 2018.

Informed by the soundtracks of prosperity meditation videos on YouTube, which often appropriate Eastern religions (or Westerns’ perceptions of Eastern religions), both performances considered the materiality and spirituality of money in the Information Age. The sound design underscored these themes of Capitalist appropriation and Orientalism. I referenced Indian Classical music for its perceived exotic and trance-like qualities as well as its presence in the videos that originally inspired us. I also researched alternative therapies that use sound to trigger physiological states, specifically, ASMR (autonomous sensory meridian response) and binaural beats therapy. The slow crescendo of many overlapping sine tones towards the end of the piece (designed to “beat,” albeit uncomfortably, against one another) was particularly exciting to hear distributed through the high-end, 8-channel speaker system at the Sound Kitchen performance in Taipei.

You can hear the influence of all of this in the audio clip below from the performance at LHUCA in Lubbock.

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sound design & composition for theatre & dance

Just Like That - Harlem Stage eMoves Festival, NY, NY

Just Like That, choreographed by New York City-based dancer Parijat Desai, was performed at the Harlem Stage eMoves Festival in 2018. It featured live musicians playing alongside Desai and other dancers emerging, animal-like, from giant piles of newsprint. My score starts as a sort of uncanny forest and evolves into a glitchy bed of electronic beats supporting a series of samples of Indian and United States politicians and pundits speaking about immigration and corruption.

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O.O.F. (Opposite of Fear) - Center for Performance Research (CPR) & La Mama, NYC; Atlas Performing Arts Center, Washington, DC

O.O.F. (Opposite of Fear), which has several incarnations, is another project by dancer-choreographer Parijat Desai. For the piece, I acted as a composer, audio editor, and sound design consultant, advising her on possibilities for pre-recorded music. Unfortunately, I do not currently have a good sample of the audio.

Only Stars are Perfect - Coco Dance Festival - Trinidad and Tobago

Only Stars are Perfect, choreographed by Texas Tech professor Nicole Wesley (now at Texas State University), was performed at the Coco Dance Festival in Trinidad and Tobago in 2015. The score for this piece (see excerpt below) began as a live improvisation performed with an undergraduate sound designer while accompanying Wesley's dance technique class. The student and I riffed on the chord structure of an Otis Redding song I had in my head that day. Wesley liked what happened in class so much that she choreographed a whole piece around it. This piece was also performed at the Patti Strickel Harrison Theatre in San Marcos, Texas.
Student interest in dance, and my interest in what accompanying dance can teach a theatrical sound designer, has motivated me to integrate dance accompaniment into the sound design curriculum here at Texas Tech.

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Eclipsed - Texas Tech University

KCACTF meritorious achievement award for sound design

The sound design I created for Danai Gurira's Eclipsed required that I research the first Liberian Civil War (1989-1996). As difficult as it was to watch videos of child soldiers firing AK47s at each other and boasting of cannibalism—videos I sampled for environmental sounds specific to that war—I believe (and appreciate) that sound design for theatre calls on me to research challenging topics and connect my work to histories and cultures with which I am not familiar.

I created a large amount of original music for transitions (that needed to sync perfectly with scenic automation), produced a diegetic radio broadcast, designed the sounds made by a character we never see, and constructed immersive audio environments ranging from quiet and natural to chaotic and violent. Per the latter, I added several speakers to the back of the house and the vomitories and mounted a hidden speaker on the outside of a moving set piece and another inside a fire pit. The threatening presence of the (unseen) commanding officer was felt as if in the house, invading the space of the audience. The transition music frequently faded to and from the house speakers back down to a radio or outside of the dwelling on stage.

To keep the sound design connected to both the scenographic and the dramatic world of the play, I created transition music out of sampled recordings of my playing stage props as instruments (wash basins, cooking pots, brooms etc. - see "raw samples" in the playlist below) in combination with midi instruments and audio samples of videos of civil unrest in the streets of Monrovia. Fitzmaurice specialist Sarah Matchett in South Africa performed as the BBC radio broadcaster voice from afar. I made it a priority to have each transition come to a natural conclusion (rather than arbitrarily fade out) precisely in time with the other elements of the scene shifts. I think my design succeeded in evoking the turmoil, grit, and grief of a war-torn country.

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raw sample 1
raw sample 2
Transition (Act 1) sc. 1-2
Transition (Act 1) sc. 2-3
raw sample 3
raw sample 4
Transition (Act 1) sc. 3-4
raw sample 5
Transition (Act 1) sc. 4-5
Transition (Act 1) 5-6
BBC radio broadcast 1
Transition (Act 2) 3-4
Transition (Act 2) 4-5
Curtain & Post Show

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CREDITS

dir: ronald dean nolen
sound design: seth warren-crow
lighting design: jordan shaw
scenic design: matthew schlief
costume design: melissa mertz

scene transition notes

cue sheet

Our Country's Good - Texas Tech University

KCACTF meritorious achievement award for sound design

Timberlake Wertenbaker's Our Country’s Good takes the story of the first penal colony England sent to Australia as a way to explore issues of colonialism, class, race, and authority using a play-within-a-play structure. Texas Tech's production was a collaboration with professors in our School of Music, who composed and recorded an overture. My design extensively remixed their composition, effectively creating a theme and variation (this will be clear if you listen first to the original overture and then to the transition music). I pulled short melodies from the overture and re-purposed them by looping and rearranging phrases, adding chords and percussion parts for accompaniment, and sometimes putting lead lines over new chords. The resulting minimalist études became the scene transitions. The rest of the design consisted of lush environmental cues based on my research on fauna native to that part of Australia. Although I did not want to use digeridoo, the director wanted it, so I found ways to use the instrument thoughtfully but sparingly. In the end, I think my design provided the proper energy to keep the narrative moving while capturing both the complicated optimism of the convicts trying to put on a theatrical production and the darker undertones implied by that project in the script.

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Overature by Christopher Smith & Roger Landes
Transition 1
Transition 3
Transition 4 (long)
Transition 5
Aboriginal Underscore Sample
Transition 6
Ship Atmos
Transition 7
Transition 8
Transiton 10 (canon)
Transition 12
Transiton 14 (eerie)

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CREDITS

dir: linda donahue
original music (overture): christopher smith
sound design: seth warren-crow
lighting design: matthew schlief
scenic design: jason foreman
costume design: imma curl

Passion Play - Texas Tech University

Sarah Ruhl's Passion Play is a design challenge. Long and sprawling, it strikes varied and often conflicting tones: spiritual, slapstick, devastating, romantic, political, whimsical, ironic, heartfelt. This is the kind of play I love to tackle. Through original music and other designed elements, I followed the play's divergent pathways and also tied everything together to make one cohesive world. The tactics I employed include combining the timbres of medieval music with waterphones, electronic sounds, and frame drums (Fish Puppet Tracks); using corny royalty-free music to suggest cheap advertisements, emphasizing the commercial quality of the prologues (Part 3 Prologue Underscore); working with our music director to score an arrangement of some of Carlo Gesualdo's incredible choral music both for the cast to sing and for audio cues (Conducting the Wind); and using my own voice to morph the chord of a train whistle into a cadence at the end of Part 2 (Tragic End of Part 2). I also did a lot of tempo matching and vamping work on recordings of train sounds that I used to connect the play's various time periods. Although most of what is sampled here reflects the wonderfully murky, dark, and fantastical underbelly of the play, other aspects of my design highlighted the production's sense of humor. For example, I used an arrangement of "Happy Birthday" done as a brass fanfare (Queens B-Day Fanfare) when Queen Elizabeth interrupts a 1970's birthday party in South Dakota.

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Part 1 Prologue Underscore
Fish Puppets 1 (Major)
Fish Puppets 2 (Minor) TrainMorph (w/ rehearsal dialogue)
Red Sky
Fish Puppets 3 (Elizabethan)
Queens B-Day Fanfare
War & Violet's Bird Dance
Part 3 Prolugue Underscore (w/ rehearsal dialogue)
Strange Watery Dream
Tragic End of Part 2
Conducting The Wind

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CREDITS

dir: lauren miller
sound design: seth warren-crow
lighting design: matthew schlief
scenic design: cassandra trautman
costume design: hannah fallstrom

Hamlet - West Texas A&M, Canyon, TX

This selection is from a production of Hamlet directed by Stephen Crandall at West Texas A&M University (Canyon, TX) in October of 2015. The design team's approach was to combine contemporary references with more traditional Elizabethan elements. The composition of mine below, used as post-show music, summarized the aesthetic of the performance; it integrates Renaissance and Baroque instrumentation with a punk rock attitude in keeping with their brooding and surly Hamlet in jeans. Although the bulk of the design I created featured pre-recorded music from an album of experimental music played on Baroque instruments, my own composition influenced choices made by the director and other designers. As part of my residency at West Texas A&M, I taught a sound design master class.

CREDITS

dir: stephen crandall
sound design: seth warren-crow
scenic design: jasmine shannon
lighting design: tana roberson
costume designer: anne medlock

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The Women of Troy - Texas Tech University

Euripedes's The Women of Troy was a mainstage Texas Tech production from March of 2013. I created all original music and sound design for the production, which, according to the director's vision, focused on issues of male aggression, female subjugation, and sexual violence in relation to war. I decided to use a lot of underscoring for the choral ode sequences, the pronouncements of the Oracle (heard intermittently throughout the “Choral Odes & Oracle” tracks A-E), and for many of the long monologues (i.e. the funeral underscore as Hecuba buries her child).

The show opened with a chaotic battle scene composed of a stylized mixture of fight choreography and tableaux. For Poseidon’s monologue and conjuring of a storm, I placed speakers throughout the theater, activating the furthest reaches of the space with sound. The audience heard soldiers marching by, buildings crumbling and burning, and thunder rumbling behind the set, above their heads, and behind walls. When Poseidon conjures the storm, low organ tones erupted from a sub woofer in the orchestra pit (where murdered soldiers later fell). For the “Choral Odes & Oracles” tracks, I recorded myself playing percussion.

Some of my favorite sonic elements include recordings of the lowest notes of an organ made at a nearby church, multiple timbres coaxed from a single organ pipe, my use of mallets on a drum set covered with metal objects, an ebow on an antique zither, and two software synths—an ebow guitar (made to sound flute-like) and a bowed Balinese gamelan.

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Opening Battle
After The Fall/Cassandra's Rape
Poseidon: Calm Before The Storm
Poseidon: Conjures The Storm
Choral Odes & Oracles A
Choral Odes & Oracles B
Choral Odes & Oracles C
Choral Odes & Oracles D
Choral Odes & Oracles E
Funeral Underscore (excerpt)
Cassandra's Torch

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CREDITS

dir. benjamin slate
sound design: seth warren-crow
lighting design: andrea bilkey
scenic design: travis clark
costume design: melissa mertz

Next to Normal - Texas Tech University

Next to Normal is a moderately sized rock musical about a contemporary family coping with mental disorders and grief. Although I could have easily assigned a student to design this show, I decided to do it myself; I had never designed a musical in our small lab theater and wanted to improve my mentorship of student designers working in that space. While at first it seemed that dealing with a small cast (7 wireless mics), small band (6 members), and a small space was going to make the design simpler, in the end those were exactly the conditions that made it challenging.

The band was positioned very close the audience but behind a paper wall (see picture to the right), hidden but with minimal sound isolation. Much of my work concerned sound absorption and control: I added a shield for the drummer, convinced him to play primarily with rods instead of sticks, draped the entire “band cave” with old curtain and foam, fully mic-ed and mixed the band through the house, and asked our Technical Director to build a foam-lined box to enclose the electric guitar amp. I gave the band two different in-ear monitor mixes to choose from. My final design (see the “audio riser” and “speaker plot” buttons) positioned most of the band in the mix House Right (where they physically were) and behind the vocals, which were centered for clarity. I was especially proud of my preshow music (see the “pre-show music” Q-Lab screen shot), which combined 90’s music appropriate to the period of the show with other tracks that were referenced in the script.

PRE-SHOW MUSIC LIST

CREDITS

dir: katie hahn
mus. dir: adam howard
scenic design: matthew schlief
lighting design: jacob charlebois
costume design: hannah fallstrom
sound design: seth Warren-crow

speaker plot

audio riser

Passing - Texas Tech University

While Passing by Dipika Guha traces the contours of a couple’s relationship at a colonial outpost and back in their home country, it is also a poetic and darkly comic story that grapples with issues of class and race, trauma, the long-term effects of colonialism, and our desires to re-write or erase history. Early in the process the director mentioned that he had been thinking about the song “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” by The Ink Spots in relation to the play. I had also been thinking about drawing upon the music of this group. Not surprisingly, The Ink Spots became the through-line of my design. Even though their music was once enormously popular in England and seemed to represent well a nostalgia for pasts that never really existed, lyrically and sonically, their music often combines overt romanticism with threatening and possessive undertones (much like the iconic “love song” by The Police, “Every Breath You Take”, which I considered covering in the style of The Ink Spots). This was just what we needed to set the tone for a show that had possession – of a wife, a native girl, a landscape, a culture – as a central concern. I spent a great deal of time finding the songs with the lyrics that seemed to comment directly on things said or done in the script. There were many options and these songs largely provided the backdrop for the scenic transitions. I even found both a 1940s and a 1970s version of “I Don’t Want To Set The World On Fire” that traced the main character’s journey from young colonists to older Londoners swept up in the process of reparation. Equally as important were the several dimly lit interludes in the play in which the two male protagonists were hunting, laughing, and whispering, but never speaking intelligibly. I created an anxious and chaotic texture of scuffling creatures and drones that I believe appropriately helped mark out a tense yet secret space that made their male bonding look like the mating ritual of an endangered species. Please refer to the sound sample below for a collage that weaves together examples of both the pre-recorded and environmental elements of my design.

CREDITS

dir. Jesse jou
sound design: seth warren-crow
lighting design: andrea bilkey
scenic design: kelly murphey
costume design: mallory purchase

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Everything Is Under Pressure - LHUCA

Everything is Under Pressure, choreographed by Ali Duffy, was performed in 2014 at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts (LHUCA) in Lubbock. I made an original score featuring a virtual ebow instrument (with the "note-off" parameter set deliberately high), arpeggiated prepared piano, cajon, and strings. This was a collaboration between myself, Duffy, and the visual artist William Cannings. Canning's inflated metal sculptures hung from the grid above the dancers and were a point of inspiration for much of the music and movement. Below is a stereo mix of the original 5.1 surround version.

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Mother Courage and Her Children - Texas Tech University

KCACTF meritorious achievement award for sound design

Texas Tech's production of Bertolt Brecht's Mother Courage and Her Children was a collaboration with Christopher Smith and Roger Landes of the School of Music, who composed the music and directed the live band on stage. Since the format was similar to a musical, I had to find the right balance of sound reinforcement for the audience in the back of the house (the band was positioned at the Stage Right lip of the stage) while allowing the front section of the audience to hear the band acoustically. With a Brechtian interest in exposing the means of production, I decided to focus the other sound design elements on Foley effects performed by stage hands in full view of the audience. I placed a microphone at the Foley station for actors to announce the title of each scene and a loud, industrial bell on the wall of the proscenium that actors would press to signal the start of the next scene transition (see bottom right image). These aspects of the sound design worked in tandem with the spectacle of effort performed by the large crew in painters' jumpsuits who moved enormous, stark white walls on casters for each scene shift.

CREDITS

dir: bill gelber
composer: christopher smith & roger landes
scenic design: travis clark
lighting design: john connor
costume design: leigh anne crandall
sound design: seth Warren-crow

Dummy Text - American Dance Festival Musician's Concert

This is the studio version of the live performance I did as part of the American Dance Festival Musician's Concert at Baldwin Auditorium in Durham, NC in 2014. The spoken text comes from Lorem Ipsum filler—Latinate dummy text used on unfinished websites—as well as Jaspreet Singh Boparai's comic attempt at an English translation of the original's near nonsense. The voices are synthesized speech from text-to-speech apps. My composition was an attempt to translate incoherent text into speech, speech into rhythm, rhythm into the language of tabla drums, and then to put those rhythms in dialogue with a drum set.

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Dance-Tech 2019 - Texas Tech University

All of our productions for the 2018-19 season at Texas Tech were in non-traditional, off-site spaces, and all of them aimed for site-specificity. According to popular opinion, the choreography and design of 2019's annual faculty/guest artist show DanceTech directly emerged from the urban landscape of downtown Lubbock, most closely attaining the site-specificity that was the goal of the season. As sound designer and production manager of this show, I found myself doing everything from suggesting the use of automobiles for lighting instruments to designing a sound system to support six different pieces in six locations in the downtown arts district and filing paperwork with the city of Lubbock in order to block traffic. Only one of the six pieces was staged inside of a gallery space; the other five were performed in somewhat gritty outdoor areas next to warehouses and abandoned industrial buildings.

The choreographers by and large had already chosen the music they wanted to work with early on in the process. Consequently, my role as designer on this production was focused on building the playback system (including Meyer UPA-1Ps housed in an open air but covered metals foundry building) and creating content for transitions, necessary to help direct audiences from one area to the next while maintaining an aesthetic through-line connecting all of the pieces. Simplicity proved to be the best approach for the transitions of this show. Since we were adjacent to a very active train line, and since one of the pieces incorporated a purchased train horn, I started each transition with the sound of a prerecorded train. The subsequent transition music integrated samples of small motifs from each of preceding pieces and mixed them with wind-like sound and other synthetic textures (see audio samples below).

I significantly re-worked the music chosen by choreographer Tanya Calomeneri for her quirky dance-theatre, Samuel Beckett-Commedia dell'arte hybrid (see “Plastic Oh No Band”). My murkier adaptation of the track, less obtrusive than the original and with the higher frequencies filtered out, allowed the sounds of the actual environment (highways in the distance, planes overhead) to merge and interact with the artificial ones emanating from speakers. This show reminded me of the many ways that sound design can support site-specificity.

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Robin Cox, original music (excerpt)
Transition 1
Transition 2 (Johnny Greenwood)
Transition 3
Plastic Oh No Band
Transition 5

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CREDITS

artistic director: kyla olson
sound design: seth warren-crow
lighting design: taylor alfred
head costume designer: mallory purcha

speaker plot

audio riser

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