Buried Child (1978) by Sam Shepherd is an American Gothic Comedic play that focuses on a family struggling with their past. The play centers around a dysfunctional rural American family living on a decaying farm. The aging, alcoholic father, Dodge, and his wife, Halie, are deeply entrenched in secrets and emotional distance. Their two sons, Tilden and Bradley, are estranged and dealing with their own personal traumas.

For Sam Shepard’s Buried Child, my sound design was built around the central metaphor of being buried alive. I made a deliberate choice to omit traditional music from the pre-show and intermission. Instead, I used a sparse bed of ambient sound effects, including howling wind, low-frequency drones, and intermittent rain to establish a mood of unease and isolation. These sounds removed any emotional cues that music might have imposed and instead immersed the audience in the liminal atmosphere that defines the world of the play.

At the core of the sound design is a recurring worm crawling motif, constructed from layered recordings sourced from FreeSound.org and recordings I made using slime. These were EQ’d and manipulated to create an unsettling presence that reoccurs throughout the show. The motif surfaces in moments when dialogue hints at the family's dark, unspoken history, acting as a literal and symbolic reminder of what lies just beneath the surface. As tension builds, the worm sound returns, each time growing in length, mirroring the unearthing of buried truths. Overall, this sound design seeks to function less as accompaniment and more as an unseen presence — one that represents the return and decay of what has been buried.