Sound Design
Lawson White uses sound design as a form of composition—working with texture, space, recorded sound, electronics, acoustic instruments, voice, environmental sound, and silence to create a world around the music.
His sound-design practice has developed across albums, evening-length theatrical productions, contemporary dance, multimedia performance, and site-responsive work. In each setting, the central question is the same: how can sound help establish a place, carry a narrative, transform an image, or change the way an audience experiences time?
This work is part of his larger practice as a composer, performer, producer, and interdisciplinary artist. He is especially interested in projects where the distinctions among music, sound design, recording, installation, and performance become productively blurred.
Selected work is below. For commissions, performances, and collaborations: lawson@lawsonwhite.com
Performance, Dance & Site-Responsive Work
Press & Documentation: Park Avenue Armory · Shen Wei Dance Arts · Washington Post review · DanceTabs review · Hyperallergic review
Co-composer & Sound Designer
World premiere: Park Avenue Armory, New York · 2011
Created during Shen Wei Dance Arts’ year-long residency at Park Avenue Armory, Undivided Divided was a site-specific world premiere that transformed the Wade Thompson Drill Hall into an environment the audience entered and navigated. Dancers occupied a grid of platforms, plexiglass enclosures, paint, projections, and sculptural materials while listeners moved among them.
Lawson co-composed the original score with Sō Percussion — the ensemble with which he performed from 2003 to 2008 — and served as Sound Designer for the work, creating an 8.4-channel surround mix specifically for Park Avenue Armory.
Music and sound operated as part of the architecture rather than as accompaniment from a fixed stage—altering the audience’s perception of distance, intimacy, texture, time, and bodily presence. The work was later presented at venues including the American Dance Festival, the Kennedy Center, and Yerba Buena Center for the Arts.
Quotes:
“With the music cresting and colors blooming around you … you’re in an emotional spin, too.”
— Sarah Kaufman, The Washington Post
“Beautiful, enormously striking visually”
— Mary Ellen Hunt, San Francisco Chronicle
“...the music, a frequently haunting original score by So Percussion, alternates with Lawson White’s concrete soundscape.”
— Aimée Ts’ao, DanceTabs
Shen Wei Dance Arts — Undivided Divided
Press & Documentation: The New York Times · Time Out New York · Bachtrack review · BAM production video and credits · Sō Percussion theatrical-project archive
Sound designer
BAM Next Wave Festival · New York premiere, 2012
Directed by Ain Gordon, Where (we) Live was an evening-length investigation of home, community, collaboration, and the personal ecosystems people construct around themselves.
The production combined original music, songs by Grey McMurray, video by Martin Schmidt, contributions from choreographer Emily Johnson, chance procedures, invited guests, speech, and theatrical action. Lawson’s role was to create a sonic framework in which these different media and individual voices could coexist while retaining their own character.
Sound design credited in the BAM Next Wave Festival program and BAM’s production video.
Quotes:
“Artists like So Percussion and Grey McMurray are at the cutting edge of new music composition and performance, and Where (we) Live continues their push even further into uncharted territory.” — All Music Guide
Sō Percussion — Where (we) Live
Press & Documentation: The New York Times · The Village Voice · New York Magazine review · Sō Percussion theatrical-project archive · Sō Percussion retrospectiveComposer · Sound designer
BAM Next Wave Festival · New York premiere, 2009
Imaginary City was an evening-length meditation on urban life and the sounds, architecture, movement, light, color, and accumulated memory of cities.
Directed by Rinde Eckert, the production developed from research conducted in six commissioning cities. Original music, recorded material, found sound, objects, video by Jenise Treuting, theatrical staging, and live performance were assembled into an invented city—one made not from streets and buildings, but from impressions, collisions, repetitions, and fragments of experience.
Lawson’s sound design helped join the recorded and live elements into a continuous theatrical environment, treating the city itself as a kind of instrument: a field of human voices, machines, signals, rhythms, memories, and accidental music.
Sō Percussion — Imaginary City
Press & Documentation: The Boston Globe — “The Rhythm of the Rails” · Sō Percussion project timeline · Sō Percussion theatrical-project archive
Sound designer
Vermont Performance Lab · Brattleboro and Bellows Falls, Vermont · 2008
Music for Trains was developed during a month-long residency in southern Vermont and unfolded across train stations, railway journeys, recorded audio, live concerts, video, sculpture, and materials gathered from the surrounding community.
Rather than placing a finished work inside a venue, the project allowed the location to determine its form. Stations, trains, travel, industrial machinery, local history, passing landscapes, and the unstable acoustics of public space became part of the listening experience. Recorded audio was also provided for passengers to hear while traveling by train.
Lawson’s sound design worked across these changing conditions, connecting recorded and live materials while allowing the sounds already present in each location to remain part of the piece.
Sō Percussion — Music for Trains
Albums & Recorded Works
Press & Documentation: Official album and credits · New Amsterdam Records · Pitchfork review · The Washington Post · The Washington Post · WNYC New Sounds · New York Magazine feature archive · Opera News review archive · Complete official press archive · AllMusic — Lawson White credits · The Agit Reader Review
Co-producer and sound designer
New Amsterdam Records · 2015
Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Unremembered is a thirteen-part song cycle for voices, chamber orchestra, and electronics, inspired by the poems and illustrations of Nathaniel Bellows. Its world moves between childhood memory and American Gothic: rural landscapes, abandoned structures, mysterious visitors, ghosts, beauty, fear, and the instability of remembering.
Lawson co-produced the album with Snider and created its sound design with Snider and Michael Hammond. His additional credits include engineering, pre-mixing, and recording editing. The project required the language of a chamber-orchestra recording to coexist with layered voices, processed sound, electronic textures, and carefully constructed transitions—allowing the studio itself to become part of the composition.
The recording was selected by The Washington Post as one of its top classical recordings of 2015 and by WNYC’s New Sounds for its year-end Top 10. It was also reviewed or featured by Pitchfork, New York Magazine, WQXR/Q2 Music, Opera News, and Gramophone.
Quotes:
“An intricately magical landscape.”
“Both terrifying and tender.”
— Tom Huizenga, The Washington Post
“this recording…is—thanks to keen production from Snider and percussionist/studio wiz Lawson White…a work of art in its own right”
— Daniel Stephen Johnson, WQXR
“The production... and the sound design... lets every piece of this album shine and makes it sound undeniably contemporary”
— Richard Sanford, The Agit Reader
Sarah Kirkland Snider — Unremembered
Tony Trischka — Shall We Hope
Press & Documentation: Bluegrass Today review · Banjo Newsletter · Folk Alley · RNZ New Horizons · The Bluegrass Situation · AllMusic album credits · AllMusic — Lawson White credits · Listen on Apple Music
Sound design, engineering, mixing, and mastering
Shefa Records · 2021
Banjo innovator Tony Trischka’s Shall We Hope is a dramatized song cycle set during the American Civil War. Songs, narration, instrumental music, historical detail, and fictional characters are joined by environmental sound and dramatic sonic events to create an experience closer to an audio drama or theater of the imagination than a conventional bluegrass album.
Lawson designed the record’s effects and environmental sound while also serving as engineer, mixer, and mastering engineer. His credits additionally include vocal harmony and featured performance.
The sound design places the listener inside the record’s dramatic world: distant conflict, battlefield violence, machinery, river travel, and transitional atmospheres become part of the storytelling rather than effects placed around it. Reviewing the opening sequence, Bluegrass Today singled out the sounds of bullets and explosions as “wonderfully designed by Lawson White.”
In an extended interview about making the album, Trischka described Lawson as “the best engineer I’ve ever worked with” and discussed the close collaboration through which the record’s music, narration, performances, and dramatic sound were assembled.
Quotes:
“Wonderfully designed by Lawson White.”
— Tabitha Benedict, Bluegrass Today
Sound as a Compositional Medium
Across these projects, sound design has meant more than selecting effects or solving technical problems. It has involved:
Building dramatic and emotional environments
Transforming acoustic recordings through electronic processes
Integrating live musicians with recorded sound
Working with narrative, movement, image, and architecture
Composing transitions and changes of perspective
Creating relationships among foreground, background, distance, and silence
Allowing a location or physical space to become part of a work
Current Work
Lawson’s current practice brings this experience into new music for performance, recordings, dance, visual art, film, museums, galleries, and unconventional spaces. He works with voice, pedal steel, percussion, acoustic instruments, analog and digital synthesizers, field recordings, sampling, processing, and spatial sound.
Lawson welcomes conversations about original commissions, interdisciplinary productions, recording projects, artist residencies, dance and moving-image collaborations, installations, and site-responsive performance.
For commissions and collaborations: lawson@lawsonwhite.com