Falling Forward was my graduate thesis project in sound design at the university of Edinburgh, a system for live, procedurally generated foley footstep sounds. The core of the project was a series of shoe inserts with contact microphones cast in silicon. These controllers allowed a Max/MSP patch to track the footfalls of a performer, and using sine waves and white noise bursts generate footstep sounds, all of which was tied into an RFID tracking system used to designate regions of the stage as different textures for different surfaces an actor might be walking on. This project allowed me to explore various areas of experience: microphone prototyping, generative synthesis, all in the context of theatrical performance. This was founded largely in my ongoing interest in how to remove the space between a performer motivating a sound, and the sound being triggered by an operator. Footsteps are a very tangible example of a character’s distinctive nature as well as indicative of the environment. This kind of responsiveness and dynamic control would be impossible to achieve with the traditional model of stage managers calling G-O or flipping a cue light to signal a sound operator to press spacebar and have soundfiles be played back.