The Tempest
By William Shakespeare
Sound Design
Directed by Darragh Kennan
July 2021
Set Design by Kitty Kavanaugh, Costumes by Elizabeth Klob
Magic and Haunting Melodies…
Designing Shakespeare can be a daunting task. Almost anything can be done! Directors and designers alike are given the freedom to put their own stamp on a production. For The Tempest, produced as part of Vashon Repertory Theatre’s inaugural season, director Darragh Kennan gave me free rein to devise whatever sound and music world I wished. I started by meeting the Sprites, a cast of young actors who embodied and conjured the magic of Prospero’s island along with their leader, Ariel. When I found out that they all could sing, I knew that I wanted all the music of the island to come from them and their voices.
Over the next few weeks in early July 2021, I led the performers playing the Sprites and Ariel in sonic meditations. These exercises are very simple but generate unique and often dissonant harmonies that can be cultivated into final recordings. We would gather in a circle around a microphone and upon clapping our hands in unison begin humming a note. The only goal is to sustain the note for your whole breath while being an active listener. When you’ve completed a breath, you begin humming a different note influenced by one you listened to while humming the last note. In this way, we would slowly come into tune together. The results produced many variations of haunting, romantic, silly, and rhythmic melodies that I curated in Ableton Live 11 to produce all the music in this production.
Below, I have linked some examples of this music, as well as a 2-minute excerpt from the opening scene of The Tempest, the Shipwreck.
These last two pieces use a software instrument I created in Ableton to be able to “play” the Sprites voices using a digital keyboard. The underscore is created from the sonic meditations, while the melodies are played by me from samples of each performer’s voice.