My first time composing for theatre, Metamorphosis proved to be one of my most fulfilling comissions. Produced by Beyond The Horizon Theatre Company, The play toured nationally and was well recieved. Adam Lloyd-James starred in and directed alongside Matlida Dickinson, both of whom I corresponded with when discussing the project and what they wanted from me.
Breath Soundscape
The main bulk of my work was to compose a soundscape for the fight between Gregor and his father. Adam wanted this scene’s sound design to be comprised of breath-like sounds, with some deafening kicks to signify the blows in the fight, ending in a cacophonous mess of noise. After recording my own breathing, I warped and modulated the sound with Valhalla’s FreqEcho, a fantastic frequency delay plugin, alongside some hard clipped kicks, placed where instructed.
Main Theme
The main theme was predominantly used to fill time during the interval and the pre set. Using Ableton’s Operator, I made a simple drone and applied a fair amount of reverb, then used a frequency shifter and reversed the reverb tail, giving the melody the sweeping rise.
Glitches
To help fill time during some rather substantial scene changes, I was asked to provide 5 glitchy, atonal, noise based clips of sound, approximately 5-10 seconds in legnth. The main techniques I used to create the sounds was a mix of warping white noise, as well as abusing Ableton’s built in WAV analysers. Another technique used was filtering quickly between presets in a VST instrument whilst recording a note progression, which creates strange sounding anomalies.