Lauren, the director of our company asked me to source some British music for the opening of our performance. The reason behind this is because the beginning of the play is set at an English airport and it was vital to the Young Woman’s story that the audience knew this. To create this ambience I wanted to make the auditorium of the Lincoln Performing Arts Centre seem patriotic to England; however I did not want to use an obvious piece of music such as the English Anthem: “God Save the Queen” as I thought this would have been too easy for the audience to grasp and my intention was to get them thinking before the play had begun. During my research I came across an instrumental version of Land of Hope and Glory and instantly envisioned it playing either at the beginning of the play or during the preset when the audience are entering the space. When I showed this to Lauren and the rest of the girls, they were pleased with my choice of music however they wanted me to incorporate some airport ambience to create the mise en scène of the airport.

To incorporate airport sound effects, I mainly used YouTube to source the sounds, downloaded them using a converter to my laptop and then used the programme Audacity to mix the sounds to create the ambience of an airport. With the aid from Audacity I could easily adjust the levels of each individual sound clips and could add all sorts of technical effects to the sound. For example I added a fade out of Land of Hope and Glory so that the sound of the airplane landing sounded louder and intensified the atmosphere of the opening of the performance before the actors appeared on stage.