Bethany Barrett

Musician, composer, sound designer

Hello and welcome to my portfolio! Here you will find various recordings and soundtracks that I have produced over the last few years. I hope you find something you enjoy. I am always available for new commissions and client work. Please email me at to start a conversation. Thanks!

🦄 Bethany

Hybrid: An Interspecies Opera

2022

Hybrid: An Interspecies Opera, by artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg, explores xenotransplantation: genetically modifying pigs to grow human organs. This piece presented a unique challenge as I had to compose for four vocalists, using somewhat abstruse texts taken from interviews with scientists, which had been turned into lyrics.

With only a month to produce this piece, I scouted four singers, arranged and recorded their performances, and performed the instrumental backing, making special use of the Sequential Take 5 and Korg Opsix, all in time for the debut at MIT. I also produced full musical scores, so that in the future, the piece can be performed live with vocalists from each new location.

Homeday

2022

I scored this short film about a small company that organizes a soccer team to bring its employees closer together. The piece is upbeat and follows them through a practice and a match.

Fireworks

2021

Soundtrack for a short film depicting a love story about missed connections. Shot on the Xiaomi 11T Pro 5G, the film was commissioned by Xiaomi to show off the cinematic potential of their new smart phone camera. The acoustic guitar theme establishes a classic movie house vibe, while the electronic tracks follow the lovers to their climax.

Neues von Zuhause

2021

I scored the feature-length documentary Neues von Zuhause (News from Home), directed by Dominik Galizia. The film documents the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic from the viewpoint of a solitary individual, who narrated his experience as it happened through WhatsApp voice messages. Music pervades the film, at times heightening the sense of unease and isolation, while also highlighting moments of hope and humor that break through. Features rich Moog leads, pads from the Roland Alpha Juno, and haunting modular wavetable drones.

»click the stars« (Kunst im Unterground)

2021

As part of Kunst im Unterground 2020/2021, I soundtracked an audio essay that accompanied an art intervention on the BVG. The artist, Philine Puffer, took online Google reviews of Berlin U-Bahn stations and displayed them on Berliner Fenster, the passenger television program on the Berlin subway. In an audio essay, she observes how these reviews comment on the contemporary urban environment, where neutral, functional spaces like train stations become sites for online social critique; pieces of the BVG “Theme Song” were used throughout her piece.

SocialSim

2020

Hito Steyerl’s 2020 installation SocialSim used one of my dungeon synth compositions, Glacial Catacomb, as the music inside an art gallery‘s “secret VIP room” full of self-evolving artworks. For the film’s credits, I arranged a rendition of Ennio Morricone's Rabbia e Tarantella (1974), performed using guitars, drums, and synths. This piece debuted at the K21 museum in Düsseldorf and was later shown at the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

Drill

2019

Drill was a film shot by Hito Steyerl at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City. The piece centered around gun violence in America, both its history with the founding of the NRA at the Armory in 1871, and the present-day condition where mass shootings happen nearly every week. These data sonifications act as timelines of gun violence, where each beat marks the passing of a month, and each note represents a tragic incident. Through this process, a dark melody naturally emerges.

I scored the film using data sonifications of mass shooting data, performed using the Deepmind 12 and JX-8P synthesizers. These were later arranged and performed by the Yale University Precision Marching Band in the Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall.

This is the Future / Power Plants

2019

Hito Steyerl's This is the Future / Power Plants used my drones to illustrate a garden of flowers with the power to cure social media addiction, hate speech and austerity propaganda. The film was presented in 2019 at the Venice Biennale.

Figaros Wölfe

2017

I composed the soundtrack to Dominik Galizia's film Figaros Wölfe (Figaro's Wolves), a feature-length psychological drama about a woman overcoming her past trauma through the help of a friend. The synth-driven score features some of my favorite instruments, including the Roland JX-8P and the Moog SubPhatty. Parts of the score were later used in Dominik's cult hit film Heikos Welt (2021).