Sound Design and Composition

The composition for the show focused on creating a playful and funny theme music to add to the overall comedy tone, and also using this music piece to serve as the opening music for the play-within-the-play "Nothing's On". For the theme music, I was mainly inspired by a French pop music genre called Yé-yé.

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Yé-yé music emerged in the early 1960s, it is characterized by its catchy melodies, and upbeat rhythms. The songs often featured jangly guitars and prominent keyboard parts, it's also heavily influenced by British and American rock and roll and pop music, incorporating similar rhythms and styles but with a French twist. It was part of a broader European trend of incorporating American and British musical styles into local pop music. Based on these characteristics of Yé-yé and the background of presenting British comedy on the American university stage, I created lively and jumping music pieces with using synthesizers that combines comedy elements with vintage taste for the theme music of this play.

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The sound effects design part mainly focuses on creating further comedy effects through using various generic and iconic sound effects and make them mistakenly be cued by the production crew inside the play. The audience will see funny scenes as the actor breaking the fake glass on stage first, but the sound effect of glass breaking appeared five seconds later, and when the actor answering the phone on stage but the ringing sound effect continued without stopping. And in ACT II and III，when the performance of Nothing's On enters a state of chaos, the audience would also hear various SFX such as actors falling down the stairs from behind the stage, and in the theatrical world the "audience" on the other side laughing wildly, etc., which not only increases the level of comedy but also brings the audience a sense of immersion. In the our runs, these sound designs made the audience laugh non-stop, achieved really great comedy effect.