seth warren-crow

selected creative research

sound installations

Terrarium - Ring My Bell Exhibition, Mills College, Oakland, CA

Terrarium was a site specific sound art installation from 2005. I used cycling 74's MAX software to control off-set motors which vibrated large sheets of plastic. The installation was situated in a lush green space in an outdoor courtyard. I envisioned the transparent sheets as an unstable barrier between an artificial natural environment on the inside, and what we normally refer to as the natural one on the outside.

I recently received a $2000 grant to create a more ambitious installation that will create an immersive space of hanging drum set pieces, each internally resonated by mechanical vibration (with motors) and air vibration (with speakers).

Below is a higher quality binaural recording of the installation.

SOUND-OPt - for CO-OPt Research + Projects, Lubbock, TX

SOUND-OPt was a site-specifc sound installation that started with sonic explorations of the architecture of the gallery and objects within it. These interactions were recorded and included playing (with permission) a sculpture made of welded-together shopping carts; reading excerpts from books in the library, using my voice to find the resonant frequencies of various rooms; pinging out transient synth notes like sonar as I walked through the space; vibrating seed pods and fabric prints from previous art exhibitions, and lighting various found objects. The end result was a fully-autonomous, multi-channel soundscape played through speakers, combined with other stand-alone devices, tuned to each room.

Every room was activated by sound and light. Audience members created their own mix of the piece by moving through the various zones of sound.

Below is a binaural recording of a walk through of the whole gallery.

Interdisciplinary Collaborations

Earmark - Museum of Performance + Design, San Francisco, CA

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Co-created with Heather Warren-Crow, Earmark was an experimental audio tour of San Francisco, California's Museum of Performance + Design, which has a collection of 3.5 million items related to theatre, dance, and music. The tour took listeners through the Museum space and around the bustling city block. The project began with an initial research trip to the Museum in January of 2017, continued as further research, planning, and content creation (at a distance) during the Spring semester, and culminated in the launch of the tour in June.
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Earmark was an amalgam of a museum audio guide, a sound walk, and a site-specific live performance accessed through headphones and MP3 players. Our idea was to get the public to engage with the museum's archive mainly through sound. We led participants on a tour of a collection of objects that they couldn't actually see. While they did in fact hear many samples of archived material from the museum's collection as they were guided to various stations within the museum, they looked at blank walls and never actually saw the objects described by the tour guide. Later they were led outside through back allys and across streets. Through the magic of binaural recording and audio editing, they were startled by museum goers who seemed to whisper in their ears, confronted by a man having a heart attack across the street, and eventually drawn into the anxieties of an increasingly unstable tour guide engaged in a dialogue with a synthesized computer voice. In short, not your typical audio tour.

Because it is based entirely in sound, it was a massive (and massively rewarding) sound design project. Earmark is 30 unbroken minutes of carefully recorded and mixed voices, pre-recorded samples, environmental sound, and original composition. All of it needed to be precisely timed in relation to our narrator’s recorded footsteps so that recorded sound would line up with what participants were seeing as they walked inside and outside. I learned a lot about site-specifity and the rich potential of the sound walk format.
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sound design & composition for theatre & dance

Just Like That - Harlem Stage eMoves Festival, NY, NY

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Just Like That, choreographed by New York City-based dancer Parijat Desai, was performed at the Harlem Stage eMoves Festival in 2018. It featured live musicians playing alongside Desai and other dancers emerging, animal-like, from giant piles of newsprint. My score starts as a sort of uncanny forest and evolves into a glitchy bed of electronic beats supporting a series of samples of Indian and United States politicians and pundits speaking about immigration and corruption.
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Eclipsed - Texas Tech University

KCACTF meritorious achievement award for sound design
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The sound design I created for Danai Gurira's Eclipsed required that I research the first Liberian Civil War (1989-1996). As difficult as it was to watch videos of child soldiers firing AK47s at each other and boasting of cannibalism—videos I sampled for environmental sounds specific to that war—I believe (and appreciate) that sound design for theatre calls on me to research challenging topics and connect my work to histories and cultures with which I am not familiar.

I created a large amount of original music for transitions (that needed to sync perfectly with scenic automation), produced a diegetic radio broadcast, designed the sounds made by a character we never see, and constructed immersive audio environments ranging from quiet and natural to chaotic and violent. Per the latter, I added several speakers to the back of the house and the vomitories and mounted a hidden speaker on the outside of a moving set piece and another inside a fire pit. The threatening presence of the (unseen) commanding officer was felt as if in the house, invading the space of the audience. The transition music frequently faded to and from the house speakers back down to a radio or outside of the dwelling on stage.

To keep the sound design connected to both the scenographic and the dramatic world of the play, I created transition music out of sampled recordings of my playing stage props as instruments (wash basins, cooking pots, brooms etc. - see "raw samples" in the playlist below) in combination with midi instruments and audio samples of videos of civil unrest in the streets of Monrovia. Fitzmaurice specialist Sarah Matchett in South Africa performed as the BBC radio broadcaster voice from afar. I made it a priority to have each transition come to a natural conclusion (rather than arbitrarily fade out) precisely in time with the other elements of the scene shifts. I think my design succeeded in evoking the turmoil, grit, and grief of a war-torn country.
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  1. raw sample 1
  2. raw sample 2
  3. Transition (Act 1) sc. 1-2
  4. Transition (Act 1) sc. 2-3
  5. raw sample 3
  6. raw sample 4
  7. Transition (Act 1) sc. 3-4
  8. raw sample 5
  9. Transition (Act 1) sc. 4-5
  10. Transition (Act 1) 5-6
  11. BBC radio broadcast 1
  12. Transition (Act 2) 3-4
  13. Transition (Act 2) 4-5
  14. Curtain & Post Show

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CREDITS

dir: ronald dean nolen
sound design: seth warren-crow
lighting design: jordan shaw
scenic design: matthew schlief
costume design: melissa mertz