Sound designer and composer Elisheba Ittoop states she has “every five-year-old’s dream job” as she makes noises for a career. She has designed and composed for clients such as the Kennedy Center, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth Theatre Company, Eugene O’Neill Theatre Center, and more. Recent productions include Signature Theatre's And I And Silence, Fordham University/Primary Stages’ United Front, Soho Repertory’s Washeteria, and Cincinnati Playhouse’s Chapatti. Ittoop was a recipient of the Kenan Fellowship at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts and winner of the 2008 USITT/Live Design Rising Star Award.
Ittoop is currently working on Abundance at Triad Stage in May, and We Are Pussy Riot and The Full Catastrophe at the Contemporary American Theatre Festival in June. She will also be speaking at Live Design’s New York Master Classes: Sound, June 5-6 at NYU Tisch School of the Arts and The Gallatin School. Live Design caught up with Ittoop in between tech times.
1. How are you balancing your current workload?
I actually am finding that I am in a relaxed work period. It’s when it’s something like 10 projects in four months where it gets a little tricky. I make sure that I am in constant communication with the director in the pre-production period. I create a digital “mix tape” for the director to listen and respond to. And often times, I find that the director has his own playlist for the aural play-world of the show. So I set up a collaborative playlist on a platform such as Spotify or Dropbox for us to bounce ideas back and forth. These aren’t necessarily cues for the show, especially if I am writing music and soundscapes for it. Rather, this is what the world feels like.
“Talking about music is like dancing about architecture,” Elvis Costello or Laurie Anderson or someone else equally as cool and smart once said. There’s only so much talking about what the world will sound like that I can do. Sooner rather than later, I am uploading idea drafts of what this world sounds like. The big dance number at the end of the show—I send that as soon as possible—but I mostly provide the director with ideas for the sound palette. I want the director to hear what the palette will sound like before we hit tech, what I will be painting in the space with. When we are all in the room and in tech, that is when I build transitions in the moment, with the sound palette that the director has heard before.
So to answer your question, I front-load the work as much as possible and stay in communication with all of my directors. I very much encourage 3am random-thought-about-the-show emails.
Talking With Ittoop
2. Who or what led you to your career in sound design?
I was an actor at NYU and was accidentally placed in a sound design class, and I loved it. I found I could put on headphones and create a world with music and sound. Pretty soon, I was designing a lot of the shows at NYU. At the time, there was no dedicated sound program there, so I applied to the Master’s program at North Carolina School of the Arts, put up my acting hat, and haven’t looked back.
Before college, I was in voice training, specifically focusing on opera. I find that I use that knowledge a lot in my work, be it in making music and cues, or teaching actors how to sing something that I wrote, or even just how to use their voices in interesting ways for a moment in the show.
3. What piece of gear has been the most beneficial to your career, and why?
My Zoom H4n [Handy Recorder]. I am working on a show where we decided in the moment to record an actor for her offstage moment. The director asked when we should schedule a recording session. I replied, “Right now.” I love having the ability to record on the fly. I have used my Zoom to quickly record moments in shows, preshow announcements, and even found myself in a bathroom on a ten-minute break, recording myself singing a five-part harmony for a transition moment that suddenly came up.
4. Do you have any words of advice for students of sound design?
There are a lot of people out there who will ask you to work for free. Use your best judgement. The amount of time you’re going to have to put into the project, the connections that you will or won’t make—your time is valuable.
Make time for yourself. Learn how to cook, if you don’t already. Your bank account will thank you during tech. Have hobbies. Go for long walks when you are frustrated, be it with a cue you are making or the state of the world. Go to museums and concerts, and sit on lawns with friends and have little picnics. Make friends who are not in theatre or entertainment.
Invest in a portable recorder, now!
Our job requires us to go with the flow. If the director suddenly comes up with this cool new transition idea, try and work quickly to match, help, aid, and abet what they are doing.
5. Tell us what you plan to discuss at the New York Master Classes.
I will do more of a content/composition-geared discussion focusing on a production of Midsummer I did a few years ago at a college in North Carolina. For a moment in the show, the actors had to dance around and sing a song that I wrote, but we found that they were having trouble doing everything at once, and the sound was not as full as we wanted. So I will discuss the process of writing the song, recording it, and how I “tricked” the audience into thinking a handful of actors made a pretty big melodic noise.
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