On a show I worked on as sound designer in 2024, I Joan by Charlie Josephine (with a full student cast restaging), I sampled ‘365’ by Charli XCX, as well as other camp/fun queer pop songs for transition music and underscore. You can have a listen to an excerpt of how I did this above.

As a sound designer, I think that sampling pre-existing or popular music can be really useful. It can create a sense of recognisability to the audience to use a piece of music which they might have already heard elsewhere.

Often, a director or collaborator will have specific song choices in mind. As a sound designer, sometimes part of how you approach a script and collaboration with a director is about how you will work with this pre-existing material. For example, sampling parts of a pre-existing song but redesigning it or remixing it in a creative way is a creative sound design choice that can enhance your designs.

Also, you can stretch a sample a long way – with audio effects, pitch shifting, slicing, looping and filtering.

A lot of this possibility is contained within Ableton’s Simpler, a very powerful sound design tool.

Similarly, Logic’s Sample Alchemy can stretch a sound very far, and is powerful for creating a wide range of sounds.

Glitch is remix

“Queer people, people of color, and female-identifying people have an enduring and historical relationship to the notion of “remix.” To remix is to rearrange, to add to, an original recording. The spirit of remixing is about finding ways to innovate with what’s been given, creating something new from something already there.” _ Glitch Feminism_ Legacy Russell_

Through the chapter of Legacy Russell’s book ‘Glitch Feminism’ called ‘Glitch is Remix’, we can understand the remix as an emancipatory tool. “If we see culture, society, and, by extension, gender as material to remix, we can acknowledge these things as “original recordings” that were not created to liberate us. Still, they are materials that can be reclaimed, rearranged, repurposed, and rebirthed toward an emancipatory enterprise,
creating new “records” through radical action. Remixing is an act of self- determination; it is a technology of survival.”

Russell is talking about a political remixing, but this is something I find showing up in my sound practice as a trans woman, as a glitch feminist. I want to take these ideas and apply them to my sonic practice, remixing the world into new emancipatory possibilities.