Production Overview
This production of MacBeth was a new adaptation written and directed by Melia Bensussen, focusing on the internal hauntings of the characters. The design team strove to represent the burdens that MacBeth and the other characters accumulate for themselves through their misdeeds and acts of violence; my sound design worked to give a sense of physicality and weight to those bloodstains that could not be washed away. To accomplish this, I developed a series of Pads for the factions depicted in our adaptation and used then as atonal underscoring to comment on the character’s internal experiences. Running under ninety minutes and with a cast of eight, we condensed a great deal of action and combined several characters, notably replacing the Fates with a single actress portraying Hecate, who fueled MacBeth’s ambition with tempting whispers. This forced us to be intentional and judicious with placement of different textures to help clarify the plot and establish a through line for the play.

Design Concept
To generate the Pads, recordings of microsounds were processed in a program called SPEAR, which translates a source file into an editable spectrogram composed of partial sine waves. This allows for the manipulation of spectral content in an incredibly expressive manner that is not possible with a traditional waveform. Different parts of the spectrum can be erased entirely, sections can be simply transposed between frequency ranges, or scaled to fill a larger or smaller range. Since the audio is represented as instructions to generate individual sine waves, the time domain is also easy to work in, modulating playback speed completely independent of pitch data. This process converts the recordings into unrecognizable loopable textures, able to subtly cause a sense of unease.