Hawaii-born Jason Taglianetti started “playing with sound” when he was 10. He made his first recordings — using cassette tapes and a boombox — when he was 12.
Taglianetti went to Washington in 1996 to study audio production at the Art Institute of Seattle and came home ready for a career as a theatrical sound designer. He engineered his first show at Army Community Theatre in 1998 and moved to Manoa Valley Theatre a year later.
Taglianetti, 43, has been Hawaii Public Radio’s multimedia production manager since 2006. He hosts a weekly HPR radio program, “Applause in a Small Room,” but is still active in theater.
His most recent show, Ken Ludwig’s “Baskerville,” opened Thursday at Manoa Valley Theatre.
JOHN BERGER: What do you enjoy most about sound design?
JASON TAGLIANETTI: Designing the sound cues. If the playwright’s instructions are, “We hear the sound of wolves howling far away,” it’s up to me to decide how far away that is and what they sound like and how many there are.
“Baskerville” has a lot of sound cues — more than 400 — and it’s always an interesting proposition to play with the sound effects.
JB: Is there a show that stands out for you?
JT: “Cage of Fireflies” at Kumu Kahua took place in a neighborhood around McKinley High School. The playwright had requested traffic (noise) for the whole show and he was very specific about the times of day. The sound changes radically during the day, so I went out and did a lot of recording.
But my favorite thing about it was that every night during the show, while this wash of sound played, we might hear a car drive by outside the theater and that became a part of the show.
Every night the sound was different despite being heavily designed.
JB: What else do you enjoy doing?
JT: Photography with a pinhole camera, and playing drums. With a pinhole camera, there’s one moving part, and that’s the photographer, so it’s a matter of pointing the camera in the right direction and judging the light, and then the pictures look so interesting and so different.
I just started playing drums about five months ago. I’m in a group — Jeff Said No — and after our drummer left I made a joke one day that it would be easier to learn drums than find a drummer.
Someone said I should do it, so I switched from bass to drums. I love it.
