How Sound Makes a Stage World Feel Real — An Interview with Sound Designer and Composer Silvan Tang at Hollywood Fringe Festival

LAPost / Los Angeles (June 22, 2026) — At the ongoing Hollywood Fringe Festival 2026, New York–based sound designer, music producer, and audio engineer Silvan Tang presents two bilingual theatrical works, The Liftist and Light, showcasing her interdisciplinary approach to sound, music, and narrative.

The Liftist is staged at the Los Angeles LGBT Center, while Light is performed at the Hudson Theatre. Though markedly different in tone and structure, both works reflect Tang’s ongoing exploration of how sound, music, and technology can collectively construct a narrative world that feels emotionally and psychologically real.

Following the performances, Silvan Tang sat down with LAPost for an exclusive interview, reflecting on her artistic journey and how sound has become a central language connecting characters, space, time, and emotion.

From the Recording Studio to the Theatre: A Cross-Disciplinary Path

For many creators, music production, sound design, audio engineering, and live operation are distinct disciplines. Silvan Tang’s career, however, spans across all of them.

She began her studies at the Los Angeles College of Music, focusing on composing for visual media, before pursuing Music Technology at New York University, where she completed an accelerated undergraduate-to-graduate program. Since then, she has worked across music production, recording engineering, post-production, and theatrical sound design, gradually developing a cross-disciplinary practice that integrates technology, emotion, and storytelling.

She entered the New York theatre scene not as a designer, but as a sound technician and sound operator, responsible for system setup, cue execution, live mixing, and technical support during rehearsals and performances. These early experiences shaped her understanding of how sound functions as part of a larger performance ecosystem involving actors, stage management, lighting, set design, and audience perception.

She later transitioned into creative roles, serving as Assistant Sound & Music Designer for Hollow Cross, and contributing sound design and original music to numerous New York theatre productions, including Don’t Pitch It, Do It., Femme 9 19, Mr. Donkey, Farewell, and Erase, and NYU Gala productions from 2024 to 2026.

Today, she is involved in nearly every stage of the sound-making process—from script analysis and musical composition to QLab programming, speaker configuration, acoustic testing, and live mixing.

“I’ve never considered sound or music to be isolated design elements,” Tang said in the interview.

“For theatre, sound is more like a connective system. It links actors, lighting, set design, space, technology, and audience emotion. When everything works together, the audience believes they are experiencing a world that truly exists.”

(Photo by: Richard Ren/LAPost)

The Liftist: A 34-Year Narrative Told Through Sound

Among this year’s selections at the Hollywood Fringe Festival, The Liftist stands out as a work that fully embodies Tang’s artistic philosophy. She composed and produced the entire original score and sound system for the production.

Spanning from 2004 to 2038, the story moves between the U.S. West Coast and New York City, tracing a family’s multi-decade journey while exploring generational conflict, cultural migration, gender dynamics, and the impact of technological change.

To structure this 34-year narrative arc, Tang built the score around a central musical motif that evolves throughout the work.

From California’s sunlit Synth-Pop and Soul influences to New York’s Funk, Hip-Hop, and Jazz rhythms; from chamber strings to ambient electronic textures and cinematic sound design—the score shifts across genres while remaining anchored to a single evolving thematic identity.

“Cities change, technology changes, and people change. But often, the core questions we face in life remain the same,” she said. “I want audiences to hear how this motif grows alongside time itself.”

Beyond musical transformation, sound design in The Liftist also traces technological evolution—from the grain of analog tape recording, to digital production aesthetics, and finally to the imagined sonic textures of artificial intelligence in the future timeline.

(Photo provided by: Silvan Tang)

Audience Response and Critical Reception

The production has also drawn strong audience and critical responses.

Reviewer Carol M. Becker noted the collaborative strength of the Chinese creative team and specifically highlighted lighting designer Tilda Seo and Silvan Tang’s sound and music design, emphasizing how their work contributed significantly to the production’s distinctive stage atmosphere.

Reviewer Dionysius Vlachos described the production as having “strong acting” and “high production values,” adding that the sound design was “top notch” and one of the standout elements of the show.

Tang noted that sound is not simply about aesthetic beauty, but about constructing belief in the world on stage.

Mapping Cities Through Sound: From Airplanes to Subways

One of the most distinctive elements of The Liftist is Tang’s use of real-world urban soundscapes as narrative material.

In The Next Stop: LA to NY, airplane engines, cabin announcements, airport ambience, New York subway announcements, and PATH train signals form a continuous sonic journey.

This route mirrors both the characters’ migration path and the lived experiences of many immigrant families moving between cities and cultures.

“Sometimes a subway announcement brings you back to a place more powerfully than dialogue ever could,” she said.

For Tang, environmental sound is not background texture but a form of narrative memory.

Music in her work also functions as sound design. In The Liftist, subtle sonic cues operate as storytelling devices: a bell motif gradually transforms into a seasonal Christmas variation, while fragments of a wedding march appear hidden within thematic material long before the narrative explicitly reaches those moments.

She refers to this technique as “sonic clues”—a way of embedding narrative information into sound before audiences consciously recognize it.

Critical Notes Within the Work

Reviewer Carol M. Becker highlighted the strength of the overall design team, while noting the sound design as a key contributor to the production’s immersive quality.

Reviewer Dionysius Vlachos similarly praised the production’s technical and artistic execution, emphasizing that the sound design was “top notch” and essential to the show’s impact.

When a Toilet Becomes a Metaphor for Time

Despite its subtitle The Toilet Seat, The Liftist uses the motif of the toilet not as a comedic prop, but as a temporal marker.

Tang designed distinct sonic identities for toilets across different eras.

Older household toilets feature abrupt, mechanical, and obstructed sounds; modern systems evolve into smoother and quieter mechanical flows; while future iterations transform into AI-like electronic feedback systems.

Even bird sounds are re-engineered and repurposed as sonic metaphors within bathroom scenes, balancing realism with absurdist humor.

“Many audiences interpret these as comedic moments,” she said. “But to me, they are traces of how time leaves its imprint on everyday life.”

Light: Sound Design as Emotional Architecture

If The Liftist represents Tang’s large-scale compositional and sonic world-building, Light highlights her role as a collaborative sound designer and live technical coordinator.

Her collaboration with the creative team began at the 2025 United Solo Festival in New York. A year later, the production was invited to Hollywood Fringe Festival, and she was again brought on to handle music composition, sound design, and live audio execution.

Unlike the fully constructed sonic system of The Liftist, Light developed as an ongoing collaborative process.

Directors, actors, and designers continuously contributed ideas about music, emotion, and spatial dynamics, while Tang translated these fragments into a unified sonic environment.

This version of the production also introduces live piano and harmonica performance, requiring a hybrid system that balances pre-recorded sound with live instrumentation.

“Sound design is not about finding individual effects,” she said. “It is about organizing emotion.”

“What the audience perceives is not isolated sound, but the emotional flow of the entire space.”

Audience Response

Reviewer Aditya Putcha noted moving scenes in which Snow speaks about her father, and specifically highlighted the “good choices of music” that strengthened the emotional resonance of the production.

Technology as a Tool, Not a Destination

As artificial intelligence and digital tools continue to reshape creative industries, debates around technology’s role in art have become increasingly central.

Tang’s research has long engaged with this question.

During her graduate studies at New York University, she focused on how MIDI systems versus real acoustic recordings affect human emotional perception, examining how digital tools reshape ideas of authenticity and emotional expression.

For her, technology is never the goal, but a tool for storytelling.

Looking ahead, she plans to further explore intersections between theatre sound design, music production, spatial audio, sound installation, and immersive performance.

From film scoring to music production, from recording studios to theatre stages, from New York to Los Angeles, Silvan Tang’s work continues to circle around one central question:

How does sound help people understand the world?

“People may not remember exactly what they heard,” she said at the end of the interview. “But they will remember what they felt. And if they leave the theatre still believing in the world they experienced on stage, then sound has already done its job.”

(By: Richard Ren/LAPost)