Lee Kinney On Creating A World Through Sound
In October 2021, Tina Satter’s “Is This A Room” opened on Broadway. The true-life drama, culled exclusively from the verbatim transcript of an FBI interrogation in real-time, won critical acclaim from critics. Jesse Green from the New York Times called it “one of the thrillingest thrillers ever to hit Broadway.” He continues, “Satter views the document through an expressionistic lens…[making] words into windows on a world of interior terror.” The key element of keeping the words at the forefront was the job of sound designer Lee Kinney whose “superb” work led him to multiple awards and nominations, including the Outer Critics Circle Award, Lucille Lortel Award and the Drama Desk Award.
Kinney was raised in New Brunswick, Canada, a small town with a “lot of enthusiasm for the performing arts” but not “a lot of live theater.” He initially went to college for directing but changed his focus to sound design and music when he moved to New York almost ten years ago. Since then, his resume is long with Off-Broadway and regional credits spanning from Theatre for a New Audience’s “Gnit” to Long Wharf Theatre’s “An Iliad.” Depending on the project, Kinney will create sound design, a musical score or both. Either way, Kinney says that both should be made holistically together because he “thinks about sound musically.”
When not working in the theater, Kinney also creates music under the name Neon Lights. During quarantine, that became a “labor of love” consisting of 30-to-40 minute “sonic collages” using audio of news clips mixed with original music. "I found it really fun to musicalize the experience of being in the world on a day-to-day basis,” he explained, “especially where you’re constantly getting bombarded with all this information.”
To learn more about his award-winning work for “Is This A Room” and his process for creating sound, I spoke to Kinney over Zoom. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
How did “Is This A Room” come to you?
Lee Kinney [LK]: “Is This A Room” is this really incredible piece that Tina Satter conceived. I began work on it at the Vineyard Theater after it had been created at The Kitchen downtown. Tina was looking for someone to help bring it to larger spaces and with a little more attention to the nuances of how the music and sound intersect. The big challenge we faced initially was that, because this play is so hyper-naturalistic, there’s a ton of overlapping text with all these vocal tics where people are coughing or mumbling or sneezing over one another. The first thing that Tina and I spoke about was how to precisely carve out space so that you can clearly feel what’s going on from moment to moment, even as you’re overwhelmed by all this text. We started discussing some spatialization techniques. How do you make an amplified voice feel like it’s coming from a very precise location in space in the same way that your ears naturally hear? We could then start applying that same logic to all the scoring [by Sanae Yamada]. Where specifically in space do these sounds originate? You get all these sounds coming from different locations and the entire sonic performance starts to feel three-dimensional and enveloping.
What is your process like?
LK: I like to read a play on my own and then talk to the director. I find a lot of the language that comes out of that conversation really inspiring and informative because directors often speak about the play using language that includes a sense of the sonic environment and how the different elements intersect. “OK, you use the word prismatic about this piece. Is the music gonna be prismatic? How can the way the music is delivered to the space then also be prismatic?” I find it super helpful to have some guiding pillars from the outset to remind myself of what we’re aiming for before getting overwhelmed by all the details.
[Creating the sound is] a multi-pronged process. I really love using sounds that are made by synthesizer or electronics. You have a scene set on a street with rain coming down and you have all these connotations about what that might sound like. I find it exciting to create sounds with other tools than recording that environment. I sit down at a synthesizer and say, what can we do to make it feel like water hitting concrete? OK, what can we layer in that’s like wind passing through leaves? I also get field recordings where you go out into the world with the same approach. You go out and look for things in the world that sound interesting and then use that material to collage together something that, once assembled, feels like this very rich environment. You lose track of what the separate elements are. I really like trying to set up situations where the environment that we’re trying to create - the emotional or physical environment - is clear, but that there’s math left for people to do. You get to fill in some of the blanks. Even if you can’t really speak about it, you experience it. You start to just experience the whole piece as its collages together — the same way you do when you’re out in the world. You don’t experience every single individual sound. Oh, I’m hearing that conversation a block away and I’m hearing that neon light over the bodega. There’s something collective about the entire experience. I get excited about sound design that tries to collage together an environment in the same way that happens naturally.
How does writing music fit in?
LK: [Sound design and music] certainly goes hand in hand. A lot of the music that I write, I like to collage with recorded voice. Sometimes that means text from the play. Other times it’s just textural recordings of a voice that maybe isn’t intended for you to hear exactly what is being said. But there’s humanness in the texture of the human voice within something harmonic or instrumental. I love the intersection of those two things. That comes from what I’m influenced by musically. I really love this musical group called The Books that are known for sampling sounds and the human voice. I think that’s an exciting point of entry for approaching live performance, which is so much about sitting and listening to humans speak. To have that be a primary element in the score that’s supporting the performance feels really natural, organic and rich.
What Is next for you?
LK: I have a couple of projects that I’m really excited about. We’re right in the middle of working on this beautiful, epic play by Joshua Harmon, directed by David Cromer, at Manhattan Theater Club called “Prayer for the French Republic.” It is this expansive look at a Jewish family over several generations. It is a very rich environmental piece that has been very abstracted in the way that we’re presenting it. It’s about a family that sells pianos, so there’s this sense of musicality built into it. In the spring, we are taking Jeremy O. Harris’ “Daddy” to the Almeida in London. I originally wrote the music and did the sound for it in 2019. It’s an incredible piece of writing. Jeremy, I think, is the voice leading the industry right now. He has an incredibly musical mind and thinks very musically about the way he writes, so we’ve had an exciting collaboration. He has a sense and a taste for using music in a way that cinema has used effectively to support without laying it on too heavily.
What advice do you have for young people who want to work in music or sound design?
LK: I think now is one of the most exciting times for one’s ability to learn on their own and to make [art] on their own. The tech is available at prices that are not prohibitive. The instruction is available from many different sources. My advice is to just go. Begin doing whatever you’re inspired to do and don’t wait to be accepted into a school or to have a degree or an internship. Reach out to people that you admire and ask them a question or try to recreate the thing that inspired you. There has historically in this industry been too much leaning on pipelines and going through each of the steps before you feel like you’re suited to do the job. I think we’re desperately needing younger and newer voices that are not restricted by the types of thinking that that pipeline creates. I’m excited for more people to just get into the industry and start making and ignoring the rules of what has shaped theater for the last 40 or 50 years.
You can find out more about Lee Kinney’s work at www.leeakinney.com.