At the beginning of the process for Trap, the directors and I had a discussion about how we wanted me to approach the horror aspects of this show in the sound design of the production. Did we want to go all in with jumpscares, or allow it to slowly build before the audience can fully realize what is happening? 

In the end, we decided we would placate them at the beginning, but things would be feeling a little off and slightly unsettling. The music from the radio that is so familiar to them keeps glitching before the show starts, something weird happens in the middle of the preshow speech. Throughout the show the unsettling feeling continues to build, and at times the audience even felt like they were being watched. There's this weird chirp they keep hearing, the script initially describing it like someone imitating a car alarm but then later sounds almost like there's someone stuck in a bad dream and trying to wake up. To create the sound, I gave a handful of the cast members the car alarm description and had them create what that would sound like to them, then chose the one that fit my vision the best.

An additional aspect that really elevated my sound design and made it more eerie and unsettling was the speaker placement. With the show being in a thrust formation, I thought that it would be fun to place speakers behind each section of the audience, allowing the sound to move throughout the space during the show.