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 — a sensory reflection of the family's festering secrets. This metaphor guided every decision, from the pre-show environment to the final moments of the play. 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: maggots writhing, worms in a compost bin, and slimy textures. These were EQ’d and manipulated to create a visceral, 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 intermittently, each time growing in length, mirroring the unearthing of long-buried truths. At specific moments, I layered this worm motif with the drone sound, extending their duration to amplify the psychological weight of a line or exchange. These short bursts create a feeling of time stretching and reality cracking open.

To reflect Dodge’s mental deterioration, I used TV static as a sonic cue for his trances or dissociative states. This sound evokes a sense of internal noise, confusion, and disconnection — moments where time, memory, and reality seem to blur. Rain was used not only for atmospheric depth but to reinforce the play’s world. The thunder cracks were introduced sparingly to underscore particularly serious or revealing moments in the dialogue. In the final scene, as Shelly exits, the worm sound returns, but this time, layered with one version pitched lower than the original. This small but critical shift creates the feeling that we are no longer at the surface of the family’s issues. We’ve gone deeper, echoing the play’s final descent into its tragic legacy. Overall, this sound design seeks to function less as accompaniment and more as an unseen presence — one that represents decay and the inevitable return of what has been buried.