We won a big ol’ grant!
We be:
Kate Snyder (Art Center of the Bluegrass and Plaid Elephant Books) obtained the grant and is handling the logistics.
Heather Henson (children and YA author) instigated the collaboration.
And I (music/sound design) and all in for the auditory ride!
The National Endowment for the Arts is gonna give us a whop-ton of money to do a collaborative project, which we first developed in the spring of 2022 to present at a public high school and public library (to very engaged and encouraging audiences).
Heather will read from her YA novel Wrecked while I cue sounds and original music to augment the experience. We’ll present this at two public high schools, where she’ll do writing workshops and I’ll do sound design workshops. Students will then create their own soundscape, which will become interactive displays at the local library.
Wrecked is a YA novel inspired by Shakespeare’s The Tempest, where the island is now nowhere-Kentucky, the dangerous magic is meth, and the first-love-triangle is awkwardly relatable. There’s a great writeup here, which includes an excerpt. Please do check it out (and buy local, if you can)!
Back when Heather and I first collaborated, I wrote this track to hype up the high school students and get them into conversation. I sought sounds to capture the vibe of the gritty meth through-line and the quietly rampant emotions in the protagonists’ hearts and heads. Ingredients include:
Hot summer countryside sounds in the Southern US, crows (that pan from ear to ear, in case you have headphones), piano (tweaked and backward), a marching band, trap beats, a driving synth bass, and moody, crunchy guitar.
I got vulnerable and honest about why I love sound. I worked on what I wanted to say to the students for weeks because I wanted every idea to hit hard.
There’s the dog growl that says “don’t come near my yard,” the horn that says “get outta my way,” and the applause that says “great job!” Sound is information. AND it is a physical phenomenon: it literally touches and moves every body.
I asked if anyone had ever plugged their ears in the shower and listened to how the water sounded like rain in their brain (some nods). I asked who was in band (many hands went up). We talked about how certain songs felt like a soundtrack to your life (echoingYES!).
I got to express how much I love overhearing what others listen to in their cars; the bass that consumes you before the car even rolls by, the beat that makes things rattle, the lyrics the driver can’t not sing along to, the way it takes a minute to figure out what you’re hearing (because of attenuation), and how that person in that car picked that song because they wanted to feel that way.
It’s illuminating and contagious and so beautifully, accidentally intimate.
Music gives us a very real (and damn near universal) power to identify what we’re feeling, to sit in that feeling, and to share that feeling with others.
Later, I had the opportunity to do a workshop at the library, providing more opportunity to get into the nitty-gritty of how I made the soundscape to accompany the reading. Ingredients include:
Transforming a chorus of cicadas into a maraca-like rhythm, percolating coffee, motorcycles whizzing by way too close, the hint of a distant helicopter turning into a lonesome rumble of thunder, and a trickling stream with drips and drops that became a melody. For a particularly emotional scene, I slowly built up the sound of the air conditioner in the background, then ground it to a halt with the slamming of the door as the protagonist leaves in a huff.
I have always been obsessed with sound. Ever since I… Grew up in a house of loud music, pretended to fall asleep during a test to because I was overwhelmed but the sounds around me, discovered I could teach myself any instrument by ear, flipped out on my brother for chewing with his mouth open, jammed liked a goofball to “Lizzie Radio” (where I can play any tune in my head on command), transcribed a Nintendo game into a string quartet, and eventually learned to put notes to paper (and boops to computer) to bring to life sound and music I used to only lonesomely dream up.
If any of this sounds familiar, intrigues you, moves you to create, or makes you otherwise want to be buds, then PLEASE DO IT! Join me on this journey! I do my semi-regular sharing of small steps here on Instagram, with the occasional reveal here on Twitter, and, of course, the big info via this newslettah.
Thanks for reading!
Love ya,
Elizabitcrusher
So flippin' cool! Congratulations!
(P.S. I did the pretending-to-fall-asleep-when-overstimulated thing at least once in elementary school, too. It was less stressful than the version where I just started crying.)