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Sound Designer
Sound Designer 
 
Paul Groothuis
Paul Groothuis
 

What is a Sound Designer?

Just as a lighting designer creates an appropriate mood and atmosphere for a performance, so too a sound designer takes decisions in consultation with the director about how sound - anything from the distant barking of dogs, the metallic echo that suggests a large empty warehouse, to the roar of waves on a shingle beach - can help move the story forward and support the design’s creation of the changing mood of the play. In His Dark Materials the challenge for the sound designer is especially exciting because it is full of supernatural creatures: what, for example, do Cliffghasts sound like? And it also moves between parallel universes that are similar to one another, but also subtly different. What are the sounds of Lyra’s Oxford? What does it sound like when the machinery designed to separate humans from their daemons is switched on? These are the kinds of questions Paul had to find answers to.
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