When asked what they do for work, creative couple Jessie Char and Maxwell Neely-Cohen should probably just say “yes.” True professional multihyphenates, Char’s gig history includes stints as a UI/UX designer, conference organizer, concert cellist, and Apple Genius; Neely-Cohen is a novelist, ballet dancer, and coeditor of the experimental literary journal The HTML Review. Together, they’ve built everything from a real-life version of Cher Horowitz’s Clueless closet to the sound design of a play with over 200 original sound cues.

I asked them for a tour of the tech in their Williamsburg, Brooklyn, loft, where they regularly host literary salons, violin performances, and film industry mixers. We chatted about their shared reverence for old hardware, live coding, how they find comedy in sound, and why they’ll never install a smart light switch.

Max Neely-Cohen: It was at a Zoom reading group at the very beginning of the pandemic. We were reading Expanded Cinema [by Gene Youngblood] with a group of mostly designers and artists.

Jessie Char: The book was about the early history of computer art and animation.

And then what? Someone slid into the other’s DMs?

MNC: First we stayed long on the Zoom call—

JC: Until everybody peeled off and then it was just us. So, we hung out on Zoom for a few hours, and then I slid into his DMs on Instagram right after.

MNC: I mean, she beat me by seconds.

JC: But there is another cute thing, which is the Color Chat app.

MNC: It’s this really cool art project where you could only communicate with each other by sending color swatches. You would select from this big rainbow wheel, and then it would send it and it would name the color. And I would send a lot of unintentionally flirty colors. I swear to God, I sent one that was “lipstick red” and then another that was just “passionate fire.” But it was also accurate. So, we would kind of joke about it, but it was also extremely real flirting.

And then Jessie, who was living in San Francisco, moved to New York?

JC: The first time I visited Max was November of 2020, and I was supposed to stay for a couple of weeks, but there was another covid wave, so I didn’t want to fly. And basically, I just stayed forever.

What were you both up to creatively at the time?

JC: I was in the middle of losing my career. I used to produce a design conference that took place at the same time as Apple’s developer conference, WWDC. It was the kind of little sister conference of WWDC. And [when covid hit], obviously conferences stopped happening. So I was kind of floating through life trying to figure out what to do next. [I was] still doing design contract work, but I had kind of lost my big thing. I was still freelancing, but it wasn’t anything fun. I actually can’t remember the first creative thing that I did when I came to New York.

MNC: It’s this still-emerging practice where you can perform music, visual art, all sorts of things, through writing code and executing it onstage. If you really think about it, all music involves manipulating machines that the audience mostly doesn’t know and understand. Like, I don’t know how a saxophone works. So this is a similar thing, where you’re basically up there with these custom-made languages that make everything faster, performing music with the code you’re writing.

How did you both learn to code?

JC: In the GeoCities days, pre-Neopets HTML, is what we’re talking about. As an adult, even though I was living in the Bay Area and working in tech, I never actually coded for work or fun really. It was just this thing that I knew how to do from when I was a kid.

MNC: I didn’t ever code for any other reason than that I wanted to make a weird thing, and then it evolved to learning how to do weird projection art, and I just needed to learn different things for very specific projects.

JC: And I was making Spice Girls fan pages [as a kid].

MNC: Live code was kind of my first foray back into learning a new coding language. Kind of remembering that I have this framework for how to program things.

JC: And I really wanted to impress Max. So I learned a programming language to impress him—

MNC: She learned it within days.

How did you transition from live coding to working as sound designers in theater?

MNC: Yeah, because of all the strikes. We didn’t know what would happen with the directors guild at that point. A lot of our friends, who were mostly working in TV and film but were trained in theater, started getting jazzed about theater projects because [the writers strike didn’t affect theater]. So our dear friend Maia [Novi] came to us and said, “I have a play. I want you all to sound design it.”

JC: She was like, “You’re both good at computers and music.” And we had no idea [what sound design was]. We were like, “Yeah, we’ll get some bug sound effects and play them on a laptop.” We had no idea how the process worked, what the software was, but we kind of figured it all out on the job and really fooled everybody into believing in our competence. Since that first run of Invasive Species, where we had no idea what we were doing, we’ve basically been working in theater nonstop for the past two years.

So how did you approach the sound for Invasive Species? What did that process actually look like?

JC: I think that Max and I have the tendency to take things to their absolute furthest ends when we have the means to do it. So instead of it just being the sound effect of a bug flying around, it turned into basically a fully scored play where we wrote an underscore for the whole thing.

MNC: Just music that plays underneath the play. It isn’t just one-hit sound effects, like a door slamming or whatever. It’s music that the actors would kind of choreograph themselves to and work with, and [it requires] sophisticated queuing setups, which is kind of a form of programming in QLab.

How long did it take you to write?

You wrote the whole score of a show in two weeks? Is that normal?

JC: Theater is normally pretty fast, but we didn’t know any better. And I think, realistically, a typical sound designer probably does about 1/20th of what we ended up putting out because we just didn’t know what the world expected of this. We just went really, really hard.

How are you assembling the sound that gets included? Are you making music? Are you sampling?

MNC: Yeah, all of it. We were mostly making music through every way available to us. This is a little different from Jessie, but my most successful things as a theatrical sound designer have been the things I’ve made as jokes that then end up in the show.

Does it feel funny in the show or does it feel like it’s a joke that only you get?

MNC: No, it’s not that it’s a joke in the show. It’s just that, in whatever rehearsal and then tech process, I’m like, “Wouldn’t it be funny if I made this?” And at that moment, I don’t know if it’s actually going to be good, right?

JC: But there is a lot of comedy in the sound. I think that we do have a sense for how to infuse a very specific type of comedy into the sound design. It’s not like it’s a rubber chicken and spring boingy sounds; it’s not cartoonish in any way. But I think that the sound design is able to capture a lot more of the writing and storytelling.

So you’re doing a lot of theater work together. Are you collaborating in other ways?

JC: I want to say yes, but I have to think of what collaborations are. Aside from our entire lives together.

Let’s talk about your individual creative interests. Max, you have two highly specific titles on your resume: a fellow at the Harvard Law School Library Innovation Lab and a consulting dramaturge at the New York Choreographic Institute at the New York City Ballet. You should probably start by telling me what a dramaturge is.

MNC: It’s a great question. A dramaturge in dance, opera, or theater is a person who helps develop the themes and narrative qualities of the piece, kind of across departments. Particularly in dance or opera, there isn’t the same relationship between director and writer. There are all these departments making all this art, and it can be really helpful to have someone who’s almost taking on the mantle of: What is the audience going to see? What are they going to take from this, and how does that affect the story and its structure?

Tell me about your approach to technology in your home.

JC: We are really specific about it, aren’t we?

MNC: Yeah. We hate any smart home things. We banned them.

What do you dislike about smart home tech?

JC: I think that with the rise of the internet and Wi-Fi, a lot of companies that make software rely on the fact that they can just keep releasing updates. And I don’t want to have to do a software update on my light switches or my refrigerator. I just really like things that are guaranteed to work and are fixable because I know how to do hardware repairs — I have certifications for it — and I like knowing that if something isn’t working properly, I can personally address the issue. But so many smart home devices are proprietary; they are inaccessible, and that worries me a little bit.

MNC: Yeah, we were not going to buy toilets that we could not fix ourselves.

JC: Because toilets are technology!

MNC: Likewise, the speakers we have, we wanted to make sure that we could always open them up and solder the wires back together. Which is not true of a Bose soundbar.

JC: I just see technology as a really wonderful tool. I don’t see it as an assistant, and I think that’s the kind of distinction that I like making. Anything that I can use as a tool, I absolutely love, and anything that’s trying to help me in some way isn’t as useful to me.

Tell me about your TV garden and your synthesizer library.

MNC: It was an evolution that began in the last apartment we lived in, which started before we met when I wanted to put all the instruments I owned on one rack. So, the first version was actually a beat-up dish drying rack from a supermarket that got discarded. The setup we have now is driven by this principle of being able to flip one switch and everything turns on. We can use it for professional stuff, but an eight-year-old kid can also start making sound with it right away.

MNC: It’s a place for play. And the TVs were a way for us to have this little visual synthesizer in a fun way. Given the space under the stairs, we didn’t want it to just be a bunch of televisions on the floor, so we designed it as an homage to Nam June Paik’s “TV Garden.”

Does your home itself play a role in your creative work? Is it the primary place you’re both working from?

JC: Yes, and our space is intentionally designed with a lot of flexibility. Most of our furniture, if possible, is on wheels so that we can roll things around to different places, trade desks if we need to, and just set our space up for whatever crazy scheme we have going on. I mean, sometimes that’s a TV on wheels so I can watch Love Island while I’m chopping vegetables. There’s really no part of our home that wasn’t designed with the considerations around our work.