Moose Tracks

Many years in the future, in their Institute for Earthen Archeology, an advanced alien civilization explores technological artifacts left behind by an extinct human civilization. Together they attempt to reconstruct the world of this lost race by decoding the heartfelt and catchy tunes found on a mysterious golden record!

Moose Tracks was presented as part of Harvard Universities’ Spring 2025 season at the Farkas Hall Theatre

I don’t often add University and student work to my website, but as an artist and sound maker, Moose Tracks represented something kind of unique and special. For starters, it was a student-devised musical, which, when I first was told about the project, sounded a bit hellish. But I think what I discovered working with students and my friend and director Brisa Areli was that there is a ton that can happen inside of a form like musical theatre if you have the gall and gumption to devise it yourself and kind of blow the whole thing apart.

In many ways, that’s what we found with Moose Tracks. The sound at least was nothing like I’d ever worked on before. Yes it was a musical, there were songs and dances and the like. But the whole thing was set in a bed of space-age, sci-fi nostalgia that we really relied on sound design to impelement. At many moments, the music the students wrote bled right into this ethereal soundscape. I played the whole thing on Ableton Live (with some Qlab cueing support as well) because I felt that to give the sound the breath it needed Qlab would be too limited. I knew on Ableton I could easily and quickly create reverse delays, reverb sends, and surround spatialize that would never sound quite right on Qlab and give me the in-the-moment customization the show required. Below I’ve cut a few samples of some of some moments of this ethereal landscape:
1. Golden Girl’s Entrance

“Golden Girl” was a tune one of the students wrote that ended up being a bedrock of both the storytelling and soundscape. We ended up recording the melody and various harmonies of the song which I wove into the sci-fi static and space-fantasy soundscape to get these dreamy but musical moments for the character’s (yes, Golden Girl was also a character) significant moments. The printer-sound moment at the end was a cue restoring the world to where it was before this inciting entrance.

2. Moose Ballet -> Golden Girl Ending

This is a cut of a few cues in the show starting with an extended dance sequence in the middle of the piece and tracking through the end of the show where we hear the Golden Girl theme in full.

3. Identity and “Posession” Sequence

This was a strange one for me, but one of the students had written a rap for the show and needed a beat. It’s not exactly what I think I’m best at, but I had a lot of fun putting this beat together for the student. I got to use a lot of the sci-fi pallet I was already working with for the show but just dry up some of the sounds to make them a bit crisper for the lyrics to layer onto. This clip also includes the “posession” sequence sound FX which bookend the song.

Brisa Areli MuñozDirector
Nehemiah LuckettMusic Director
Drew Sensue-WeinsteinSound Designer
Featuring songs written by students in Stew Stewart’s Fall 2024 class “Singer + Song = Story”

*Production photo by A Priori Photography