How I Did It
Original Samples
The guitar parts are real guitar :-)
The "vocal group" is created from Dr. Foster speaking, and then combining it with a synthesizer sound via a vocoder plugin.
Process
The task of making music with this source material presented a very intriguing challenge in several ways:
It's a very heavy topic, and typically music is my escape hatch from reality more than a therapy couch. So undertaking these remixes needed a little prodding.
And obviously the original context of an interview doesn't necessarily have a clean story arc and an interview most certainly isn't (even attempting to be) rhythmical speech like poetry or rapping.
So I first selected a subset of snippets from the uploaded interview to create a story arc while attempting to keep the general messaging of Dr. Foster intact.
Then I tried to create a sense of rhythm in the speech pattern. Dr. Foster has as certain natural rhythm to his speech, which actually worked out in some cases, and in other cases I helped it out a bit by slicing the spoken word audio into slices of varying sizes - ending up with just over 100 audio snippets, each of which I manually aligned with the beat. Some sections were allowed to remain just a little off to maintain the illusion of natural speech.
The resulting 100+ slices were then arranged over 5 separate tracks with varying effects and EQ treatments.
The placement of the spoken word in the overall mix is a purposeful compromise, intended to allow for 2 different modes of listening: In background listening mode, the spoken word is intended to blend in with the overall piece as almost another percussive element. In consciously concentrated listening mode, hopefully the listener can decipher the words and thus understand Dr. Foster's messaging.
Other Notes
I've avoided the term dementia, because it's so much disliked by those individuals impacted by memory loss, who I've interacted with. It's just too close to a term that in everyday language is anything but respectful. And who knows - maybe that term even contributes to the avoidance of earlier diagnosis?
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