Andrew Roth fell in love with sound more than four decades ago, when he was eight years old. His doctor dad would drive him from their North-of-Market neighborhood to Tower Records, buying him cassette recordings of old radio programs like Fibber McGee and Molly, and Beatles LPs. The discovery of a reel-to-reel tape recorder two years later led to his first experiments with creating his own sonic worlds for friends and family within the darkness of blanket fort auditoriums, inspired by Star Wars and the Sausalito-based Antenna Theater shows his parents told him about.
Today, at age 51, Roth still plays with sound, albeit with state-of-the-art equipment housed in the studio he built inside the garage of his Connecticut Street home. He’s lived in Potrero Hill since shortly after graduating from Oberlin College in 1995, when an internship at Earwax Productions, an audio production company co-founded by longtime Hill resident Barney Jones, turned into a job, providing enough money to enable him to pay rent. He’s proud to carry on the house’s creative history. It previously was the location of post-production facility Video Arts. Before that the “Potrero Hill Mob” – Bill and Jodie Dawson, Lenny Anderson, Micky Ostler and Rose Marie Sicoli – launched what would become The Potrero View.
The tech surge emanating from Silicon Valley kept Roth busy with Earwax through the late-1990s. He created one of the first audio commercials to appear on the internet, for Sony’s Magic Link, and designed the sound for Pixar’s Toy Story CD Rom. The bursting of the dotcom bubble in the early-2000s shrunk his workload at Earwax to a trickle. Although opportunities emerged at other large companies, the summer he’d spent as a teenage clerk at the Disney Store on Fisherman’s Wharf convinced him he’d rather be his own boss.
In 2003, he formed “Roth Audio Design.” He takes on a variety of projects, some less involved than others, such as editing dialogue for the online MasterClass series, work he describes as “kind of like blacksmithing” because the mechanical aspect is more prominent than the artistic. Others, like the installation he created for Hyde Park Barracks in Sydney, Australia, can take more than a year to complete. For these, Roth becomes an “audio archeologist,” creating immersive environments built from sounds that’re as historically accurate as possible, often recording antiques from the era, such as the horse-drawn streetcar he found in San Jose for a program on turn-of-the-century San Francisco.
The Hyde Park project included an audio program for the “hammock room,” where patrons are transported 200 years back in time to experience what it was like to be a prisoner newly arrived from England. Roth finds these types of schemes especially satisfying because, unlike film and television work, he gets to see his audience respond in real time to what he’s done.
“Except when it gets too convincing,” he confessed, explaining that an earthquake re-creation he installed at the Conservatory of Flowers in Golden Gate Park sent some patrons fleeing in fear that the building really was collapsing around them. “They told me not to produce something like that again.”
He hasn’t, but the earthquake sounds found their way into a presentation he gave at Marin Country Day School for his daughter Samara’s class; the younger audience enjoyed it immensely.
While much of his work is supposed to be invisible – well-edited dialogue shouldn’t call attention to itself – some is intended to be more obvious, such as the sound design he did for the recently-closed Urban Putt, San Francisco’s first indoor miniature golf facility, which reopened in San Jose, and the two CDs he’s produced featuring natural noises from Costa Rica and Japan, both available in digital format on iTunes. The sounds in these collections often end up in the mixes of programs he’s not working on because other designers license them from him.
Attending a party recently a guest told Roth that he’d had what seems like an interesting career.
“And that surprised me,” he added, “because I’ve never thought of it that way. But after 20 years in business for myself, I guess it really is.”
Chaitanya Tondepu 
Stephanie Lam