Sound designer Lindsay Jones walks through her process: read the script, meet with the director in plain language, build a sound palette of original songs and sampled sounds, attend rehearsals to see how music lands with actors, then compose and refine. She treats each musical choice as an honest reaction to the performance.
Chapters
You get a script. How do you begin? Well, I get a script, and the first thing I do is read it, of course. And then I usually meet with the director not long after that. And I try not to make a great deal of decisions about what I think it should sound like until after I've interfaced with the director and gotten their thoughts to see what they want to do with the piece. I always encourage directors to just talk to me about the story. Don't worry about trying to communicate with me in music terms or sound terms. You don't have to tell me, I think the show should be in A-flat or whatever. Just tell me what you want to say with this show. Tell me how you want to communicate it. And I can help translate those ideas into music and sound. So that's what I do. I take that, and then from there, the next thing I do is I collect a sound palette, what I think will be sort of the vocabulary of the show. I usually collect lots of original songs, or I'll create, I'll find sounds that sound something like it, or even instruments or anything like that. And I'll just sort of collect it into like a big folder. And I'll say like, OK, this is sort of what our paint box that we're going to be working from. And then the next thing I do is I try to either see a read-through, which is on the first day just sort of talking through the show. Or if I can't, I'll come to a run-through. And then from there, I have this very strange thing, which is I'm able to watch a show and be able to hear the music and visualize how the sound's going to work just by seeing it. And so from that process of seeing the show in front of me, it's a very fast thing in which I immediately go in to start writing things as quickly as possible or collecting whatever needs to be done. I like to just sort of push through it as quickly as possible, take my first sort of immediate response, and really put that into the design. And I think that actually comes from my acting training. You know, when I used to be an actor, the whole idea of acting is you're listening to somebody and responding in the moment honestly. And I feel as a designer that that's similarly what I do too. The actors say something, they perform something a certain way, and I try to give an honest response of what I can do to sort of support the scene that they're in. So it's come comes from a very instinctive place. And then from there, I just sort of put it all together and see if it works.
