Liz’s primary pursuit is creating community through music and sound, from digitally live-scoring unpredictable scenes to extracting live audio from the audience to become the music. She plays a number of instruments and creates audio scoring that is designed to respond to spontaneity and play.
Following are examples of her role in various projects:
Llontop
As co-composer and co-sound designer with the inimitable Paul Pinto, the duo composed the music and sound design for the hundreds of audio files in the interactive installation, and composed the score for the live Quechua song-poems of Irma Alvarez-Ccoscco. In performance, Liz loops vocals and jumps between the violin and the percussion/piano track.
Body of Land
Liz records local community members voicing the plants in rather rustic conditions (seen below), cleans the audio, creates a soundscape, and composes music she performs live, lyrics by Eamonn Farrell.
Flight
Liz composes music and designs sound for this live episodic international event in an abbreviated timeline. In a fortnight, Liz cleans audio recorded by the international artists, assembles the VO into the script, and creates “lush, filmic scoring” and sound design for each episode.
The Future
Liz created 70 sound beds that are cued to reflect the responses and personality of each audience member. In performance, after the ensemble telepathically asks the audience questions, Liz and collaborator Tiappa Kilmovitsky record their responses and turn them into the music.
LIEBE LOVE AMOUR!
Liz live-scores this hilarious show, dashing from the laptop to the piano and into tap dancing sequences, while voice-dubbing all kinds of characters in story and song. Composer William Antoniou recorded incredible musicians in Greece, and Liz broke down all of the music into playable loops to create an adaptive score. With a different show each night, each performance is a unique, seamless musical experience.
Turing
For this concert Liz programmed digital singing software to perform with the conductor, musicians, and company. Here she is singing the prologue:
Turing Concert, National Sawdust, NYC Music by William Antoniou, Synthesized Singing by Liz Davito
Braid
From songs written a cappella, Liz wrote the accompaniment. She then recorded and programmed guitar, ukulele, and baglama cues; in performance, she follows the performer, who pretends to play, and cues each “strum” of the instruments.
I Land
Upon entry, Liz records sounds from the audience, from playing instruments to capturing their breath and heartbeats. She then adds live ukulele, piano, accordion, guitar, and singing to create the soundscape for this piece.