Definitely on the cutting edge, sound designer for theatre and video games, William N. Lowe will be presented with the 2024 USITT Rising Star Award, sponsored by LDI/Live Design. This award is given annually to a young professional at the beginning of their career in recognition of excellence and artistic achievement for scenic, lighting, sound, or projection design, or a convergence of these disciplines. Lowe will be honored during the 2024 USITT Conference & Stage Expo, in Seattle, WA, March 20-23, 2024.
A graduate of Carnegie Mellon University's School of Drama, Lowe is based in New York City. He is a designer/mixer for Clean Cuts Interactive where he has just completed Asgard's Wrath 2 with Sanzaru Games, and is the product manager at AVAE for entertainment audio playback, and show control software: Canvas. At CCI he has worked on Lego 2K Drive, WWE2K22, and NBA 2K22 along with film, TV, audio book, and podcast projects. He worked previously at the John F. Kennedy Center, Mainstreet Musicals, Chautauqua Theater Company, Quantum Theater, Philadelphia Fringe, and Capital Fringe.
Live Design: What made you decide to be a sound designer?
William N. Lowe: The audio bug bit me pretty early on. When I was in middle school I started learning turntablism and vinyl DJ'ing, and that was my in to audio. I started theater in high school and ended up doing a little bit of everything. When I got to Carnegie Mellon and it was time to specialize, I looked at sound design and never saw the limit of my learning. Within and beyond theater, there are so many facets and skill sets contained in audio, and I will never learn them all. This is equal parts exciting/motivating and anxiety-inducing in the best way. You can't see sound, you can't touch it, you can only feel it; and I guess hear it. I love it. We also have to be so many things as sound designers: artists, musicians, composers, engineers, programmers, acousticians, lawyers, physicists, psychologists, ethnomusicologists, and even ornithologists sometimes. Jumping between all of these keeps me motivated, excited, and energized, but it is the ability to exist and practice a craft in this liminal space that brings all of these areas together was the first place that really felt like home.
LD: Do you have a mentor or designers whose work you admire?
WNL: There are a lot of people, who I both know personally and don’t, who have provided me with so much for my career. My first mentor was for DJ'ing, DJ As-One, and then Mark Gostomski was my high school theater mentor. Almeda Benyon has been an invaluable mentor to me helping me put my best foot forward to Carnegie Mellon and we crossed paths again in the world of Audio Books (the world is too small). Everyone in the sound department at CMU were incredible guides, supporters, and educators. I think I have learned the most about life and balance from Joe Pino though, and that is such a hard thing to teach, I come back to what I have learned from him constantly. My longest and closest mentor has been Christopher Baine. The relationship he and I have grown I am so incredibly grateful for. He is able to support and uplift the work I am doing seamlessly with guiding me on the right path without me even noticing. He pushes me and trusts me, and what we create together is really cool. Finally, I love where I work because everybody is so happy to act as a mentor at a moment’s notice. Everybody on the Asgard’s Wrath 2 audio team past and present has been a mentor for me and helped me figure out this insane journey.
Nobody whose work I especially admire on a large scale, but a lot of people I look at for trusted information and guidance. Noah Sitrin and Aaron Brown think about and archive audio information in such an incredible way. Nathan Moody is such a creative force, and the joy and intrigue Nikolaj de Haan approaches sound design is so inspiring.
LD: What are your long-term career goals?
WNL: I am incredibly excited by my current path. Looking long-term, on the video game front I want to make the push away from technical sound design and towards becoming a great asset sound designer. I also want to conduct research on the unique spatial audio issues in VR and see how we can use that to improve the wider world of spatial audio past its issues — like the single listener problem — and make it more than just a buzzword. Longer term I want to teach. I love sharing what I know and seeing others learn and grow. I started in high school when I would coach little league baseball, and ever since I have made teaching a large part of my craft.
LD: What is the most interesting project you have worked on and why?
WNL: The most interesting project I have worked on is Canvas, a new audio playback and show control software for live entertainment that I product manage. It has been so interesting to me as somebody who has used and learned every software inside and out for as long as I can remember. This journey has included endless rabbit holes down learning C++ and Linux, very very deep conversations about all of the possibilities of how one might want to use a mixer, and what does it mean for something to be a good user experience. My goal with Canvas has always been to make a software that works around the user. This goal has resulted in a feature rich piece of software that comes with its own challenges. As we complete each challenge, a cycle emerges, as each solution reveals or creates a new challenge to wrap our heads around and overcome. It's incredibly exciting. It has also been interesting talking to sound designers across the country about the issues they face and what their dream workflow would be. It is then a challenge to synthesize useful, not overwhelming, features to make the software better. Recently it has actually been discussing panning a lot. I have been working with VR and my company building out Dolby Atmos mixing suites, and Christopher Baine working at the MSG Sphere. While neither of us can discuss specifics because of those pesky NDAs, conceptually how we approach and think about spatial audio in such different extremes of the industry has been incredibly enlightening. How do we want to approach spatial audio in a way that actually makes sense? Can we do something about the concept of the single listener? What will this look like in the future and what can we do about that? Chris and I think similarly on most, if not all, of these, but the ways we get to our conclusions are almost always opposite and we learn so much through it. I am so excited to see what the next question we have to answer is.
LD:. And the most difficult?
WNL: The most difficult project I have worked on was Asgard’s Wrath 2, a AAA . I am going to start with this, VR is not the future of gaming. It is a necessary technology and stepping stone to get to what is next. I hadn't played a VR game before this project and had maybe touched a VR headset fewer than five times, so when I started on Wrath I had some preconceived notions on what it was going to be. I was so wrong. From the IGN 10/10 to the reaction as a whole, it is because this is an incredibly special and impressive game. While this was not my first gaming project, I had not been doing this for a year when I started on it, and neither theatre nor WWE2K22 prepared me for this. The most difficult parts of it have been the constantly changing environments, the length of the project, and the detail required. Every six months or so, it was a totally new workflow. Going from theatre projects to something that I was on for (only) two and a half years of, it was a struggle to manage. Deadlines were infrequent and I really needed to manage myself, so having a structure and pipelines around me to give me rails to ride on were helpful. When those rails would get rebuilt every six months (always for incredibly good reason and for the better), I would need to rebuild and recalibrate my process. Always a difficult thing to do, especially when everything else is new and coming at you fast at the same time. In addition to all of that, NOTHING gets past video game players, so every single detail needs to be a dotted i and crossed t because SOMEBODY will find it. It is also not a live medium so people can listen to any sound over and over again, so when developing assets, beyond the need for variations of each sound you make, those assets need to be incredibly detailed. It’s very difficult and complex sound design that has required tools, techniques, and approaches I have had to learn on the fly.
LD: How to you keep up on new technology and what are the hot new things you like?
WNL: Jeez, I just always have and it's really just second nature. I mean, the easiest answer is undiagnosed ADHD, but in recent days it is mainly focused around Slack and Discord communities I am in. Since they have more of a "water cooler" vibe to them, people post more experimental projects which expose really interesting, new ideas. A lot of the time they work, really really well. Most recently I am loving the work being done at Sonorous Objects for making high quality, incredibly affordable microphones for SFX and field recording. They are assembled here in New York City and are incredibly passionate and innovative with their products. They are working on re-sourcing their cardioid options currently and then moving on to releasing a figure-8 microphone which will open some incredible, very affordable options for field recording. I use their ultrasonic SO.4 microphones all the time for some truly awesome recordings.
LD: What advice would you give to the students following in your footsteps?
For theatre, it is actually incredibly simple and boring, make sure your show sounds good. There is so much amazing technology, as well as new techniques to try out, and we will spend all of our time making it work. We will forget to give the parts of the show that really need our attention, the time it deserves. I was given advice during college that each project you do, should only include one new thing, and anything more than that will result in you sacrificing quality. Did I ever follow this? Probably not. BUT, I was so incredibly quick to always cut some new tech if it didn't work for a plan B if it was going to take tech time away from either moving forward or getting the show to sound good. Spending all your time on dynamic delays? Stop. The audience will not notice it, especially if your EQs aren't done, which I know they aren't.
General career-wise, if you are feeling bored or comfortable, look for what is next. In audio there is always more to learn. Embrace that. Make that jump into actually understanding that new thing. Ask for help from people who do know that thing. I know I will never be done learning, I love that, but even when I am confident and skilled at whatever I am doing right now, I am working in the background on figuring out the next. That being said, recently, I have been embracing doing things in chunks and accepting incremental steps. I have an enormous mountain to climb with game audio, and for so long I thought I was just going to crack it, grind through it, and figure it out. It is so incredibly deep and difficult, I'm not going to feel done with learning it for a long time, but I can take that next step, I can feel great about getting over this hill which is part of the larger mountain. I know I will get there, but it will take time, it will take listening to the community, and it will take interacting with the community, because I can't do it alone, nor overnight.
Finally, stop trying to control it, it's sound. You can't touch it. You can't move it. You can't. It is its own thing and you need to respect that, understand that, and use your toolbox to negotiate with it. Most of the time there is an answer as to why it is doing that really annoying thing it is doing right now, but only some of the time is there actually something we can do about it. So, how can we negotiate with it. And a lot of the time, that negotiation needs to start with acknowledging you developed a flaw that sound took advantage of. A chink in the armor of your great sound. You got this! It will sound good, and you will make it sound good.