The Effect

By: Lucy Prebble

University of California Irvine - Robert Cohen Theatre
April 2022
Sound Design & Original Composition: Costandina J. Daros

The Design

In this production of The Effect, the design team wanted to bring the trial to life for the audience by emphasizing the idea of coldness and surveillance while also selling the idea that these participants were truly falling in love. Staged in the round in an intimate blackbox theatre, it was a heavy movement piece in which the different physicality of the actors worked to separate the world of the experiment from the act of falling in love. The sound design helped to separate these worlds by providing a strong rhythmic structure for the world of the experiment and relaxing into a more organic atmosphere when they were falling in love.

The sound design also helped to immerse the audience into the story as it implemented a spatialized system that moved the audio all around the audience, making it feel like they too were part of the experiment.

Photo Credit: Paul Kennedy

The Music

As a play with movement, the music was incredibly important to the tone and structure of the piece. In using very structured, electronic sequences, I emphasized the dosage rituals of the experiment and then shifted to softer, organic pieces as the participants fell in love. The player below features the first Dosage within the play, where the characters begin the experiment with an intake exam followed by their first dose of medication.

Photo Credit: Paul Kennedy

In contrast to the strongly metered experiment music, I created music that started in that fast, rhythmic world and slowly slowed down into nebulous feelings for the moments where the participants began to fall in love. The segment below is the moment at the end of Act I where the participants are accepting their feelings and begin a lovers dance. The music was composed in a way that each touch of the actors was connected with a sound cue so that the score was adapting to fit the action on stage.

Photo Credit: Chloe King

To see more examples from this show, feel free to visit my sound cloud here

The Technology

This show was heavy in technology between creation and implementation of the sound design. In the creation phase, I used several DAWs in order to compose and organize the audio for easy implementation in QLab. These DAWs were Ableton, Logic Pro, and Audacity.

In the implementation phase, I used QLab 4 and Meyer Matrix 3 for playback which enabled me to use Meyer’s Spacemap System to move audio throughout the theatre, immersing the audience into the space. With Matrix 3, I also implemented a Variable Room Acoustic System (VRAs) to be able to change the space with a variety of reverb reflections without the actors being miked. This helped establish our location changes with a static set and further immerse the audience in the world.

Lastly, since the movement sequences were very much tied to music, we had intense OSC programming to connect the lighting and sound consoles so that the effects would always be in time with each other.