In September 2010 I composed and designed the sound for First Impressions at the Theatre Royal, Margate, a play about cultural snobbery, class and William Turner by Tim Stimpson.

It was a challenging piece to design as the play's action switched between the nineteenth and twenty-first centrury (sometimes every other line) and the director, Mel Cook wanted each of these switches to be triggered by a sound cue. I also wanted to capture the sense of faded glory that Margate seems to have - a fashionable seaside resort in Turner's day, it now has some of the highest rates of unemployment in the south of England, and it seems like every second shop is boarded up.

With that in mind, I set about designing a fairground organ sound using various modelling synths in Ableton Live, and wrote a suitably fairgroundy-sounding ditty for the main theme, which I then ran through lots of reverb and spliced with some found sounds that I'd recorded in the town. Here it is:

First Impressions - Main theme by stevepretty

To make the switch to contemporary Margate, I created a percussion part using some of the found sounds that I recorded in the arcade, added some sub bass and some glitchy electronic effects. Here's the result:

Firt Impressions - Modern Theme by stevepretty

Here are a couple of the short transition sounds:

First Impressions - Scene Change by stevepretty

First Impressions - Scene Change 2 by stevepretty

And here's a silly arrangement of I Do Like to Be Beside the Seaside that I did for the bows:

I Do Like To Be Beside the Seaside by stevepretty

This is a piece of composition/sound design that I originally designed for the interactive theatre game Echo (dir. Mel Cook) in March 2009.

Echo was inspired by the Echo and Narcissus myth, and was commissioned by SPID theatre as a piece of interactive community theatre. It featured live musicians, actors, video projection and an interactive set as well as the sound collages and compositions that I designed for the show.

After interviewing members of the community living in and around the Trellick Tower in west London, I produced a series of narrative audio clues to guide players around the Meanwhile Gardens, a community space underneath the tower. The 'goal' of the game was to get to the final location, where we had produced an audio-visual installation which was triggered by a touch pad, which in turn triggered a camera and projector, projecting people's faces onto the side of the Trellick Tower, whilst a sound collage made from fragments of the interviews played through hidden speakers.

The piece was such a success that we re-ran it in September 2009 (which also featured me 'duetting' on trumpet with a fire juggler!), and again in modified form for the Latitude Festival in July 2010.

Here are some of the bits of sound design that I did for the show.

This one used a Tibetan singing bowl and shakuhachi flute along with some organ that I played.

Echo - Lionel by stevepretty

This one used lots of found sounds, and was played through a big PA in the skateboard park within Meanwhile Gardens:

Echo - Mace by stevepretty

I co-devised Segue with Laura Kriefman of the Guerilla Dance Project, which we performed at the V&A. Segue is, for want of a better description, an interactive music-dance-theatre game. I co-devised it with Laura Kriefman with assistance from Mel Cook, and it was originally designed for Hide & Seek’s ‘V&A Late’ session in March 2010. For more information about Segue itself, see my composition and sound design page.

The V&A debut was brilliantly manic fun. There’s nothing quite like getting some serious musicians, dressing them up in silly hats and getting them to play fragments of music whilst surrounded by an exhibition of clothing from 1890s India. The game was a great success and went down even better than we’d hoped. Hide & Seek are also lovely to work with – I’d recommend going to anything that they run as it will, at the very least, be massive fun, and probably interesting and informative too.

(download)

Click here to download:

segue-at-the-v-a-vgpFoDxlHInqurBchjmz.zip (62.1 MB)

Appeared in The Beautiful People at the Finborough Theatre in London. Performed in the role of Harold Webster in this rarely-performed William Saroyan piece, and was also MD and sound designer for the show. Worked with a hugely-experienced cast and was a rare opportunity to flex my american accent chops, which tend to get pretty rusty if left to their own devises.