I am the Bomb
On the show:
After creating a series of shows getting to grips with generative synths and sample manipulation, I wanted to put more limits in place.
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This started with my housemate and collaborator Alexandros Paneris, who found a free, funkily out of tune piano on facebook. Speaking with the director Lewis Miles, we wanted to ground the design in the auditory hallucinations of the protagonist. Key words from these discussions for me were sounds of touch and distant noises in an apartment complex.
This led to me setting an hour timer, and me and alex doing anything with this piano besides playing it- feeling the mechanisms of the piano, creating sounds along it’s wood panels and lightly depressing the keys. After this, we took turns playing piano inspired by these key words, and the strange atmosphere this long form task had created. This led to the bulk of sound of the show, using these vaguely intimate sounds that would collect meaning from the text onstage, creating subliminal messages and innuendo, as the sounds came across as movements next door, or memories from years before.
Once the groundwork of the design had been created, I also drew from vintage sound effects- vinyls created to depict the UK’s constructed memory of the war and the ‘good old day’s that followed. This allowed the music to follow the spectrum of our character’s dissociation from reality across the piece.
Sound Design with your friends! A how to: do what you need to do to get a sense of the world of the play, then try and translate that into feelings, movements, objects. This might get something like 'wood, velvet sofa, brushing' etc. Now find an object, activity etc that you think will evoke this, like a form of foley design, but for less tangible things than footsteps or murder. Now, with your friend(s) find a way to record this object, set a 30-60 minute timer and discover together what sounds you can get from it with as little verbal communication as possible. Try and start by not using the object as intended, saving that for when the timer is over. With luck, this will give you a palette of sounds that seem of the same world; the start of your design.
Notes from process
