Sound Design:

"little vanishing acts" (2008)

For this play, which was an amalgamation of Wholly Joan's and Una Carona by Eric Ehn (Directed by Frances Worster) I served as sound designer, composer, and live performer. The sound pallet was a combination of electroacoustic compositions and live performance on gamelan instruments and guitar, for which I adopted the interactive style of playing traditional to Wayang, Indonesian shadow theatre. In Kepatihan notation, Gamelan pitches are notated with numbers, and so for the two principle characters, Joan of Arc and Rose of Lima, I developed melodic leitmotifs based on their dates of birth and death. It was a happy coincidence that these numbers provided excellent melodic phrases with well-defined contours.


"You Never Can Tell" (2008)

My first gig as a sound designer was for The United Players of Vancouver's production of George Bernard Shaw's You Never Can Tell, directed by Bernard Cuffling. I was faced with the challenge of being brought onto the production late and rather than stick some sounds on a CD I programmed a piece of software with Max/MSP to run the sound. I employed soundscape theory and used immersive continual ambience whenever possible instead of 'sound effects'.

Look: The Software Interface

Watch: A video demo of the program running

Reviews: "Now, before we return to the acting, we should compliment some of the other members of the production team... ...[James O'Callaghan] whose sound design was so subtle that you completely forgot it was manufactured. In fact, at one point I found myself wishing those seagulls outside would be quiet, before I realized that they were in the background, only because [O'Callaghan] had put them there." -Riveting Riffs
(In this review, strangely, the sound design was mis-credited to someone whose information had been sent out in a press release before I got the gig. But I appreciate the kind words nonetheless.)