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PORTRAITS WITH/OUT CANCER
Audiovisual portraits
sample excerpt…
An initial sketch toward my vision to co-create musical works with people affected by cancer—patients, family, caregivers—where their voices and stories become the central material.
Compositional process…
I began listening to an interview I recorded with a cancer survivor.
When an utterance or phrase stood out, I traced the melodic contours of the person’s speech—the inflections, hesitations, cadences—and then built harmonic structures to support these melodic gestures that matched the person’s recorded speech. I then composed new melodic lines that swirled together with and around the voice melodic gestures, hoping to make a halo that doesn’t obscure, but amplifies what’s already present.
The melodies were traced entirely by ear, one note at a time, reflecting a longstanding interest in the relationship between speech and music.
Inspirations…
In parallel work, I’ve collaborated on machine learning tools that convert spoken voice into melody—tools now being explored in vocal biomarker research. Comparable approaches are being developed by others for early cancer detection (e.g. throat).
Speech-music machine learning projects:
Where those technologies seek diagnostic precision, this project is grounded in a different kind of intimacy: an emotional fidelity. A musical gesture of care—attending to the voice not only as signal, but as presence.
I draw a visual metaphor in the paintings of friend and collaborator Werllayne Nunes. Nunes renders his subjects with hyperrealist fidelity—then envelops them with distinctive radiant backgrounds. Precision becomes a point of departure: not to confine the subject, but to invoke their aura.
All this brings to mind Hermeto Pascoal’s concept of som da aura—the sound aura, or the energy around sound.
I think of this piece as operating similarly: starting with a kind of sonic realism, where staying close to the voice allows something else to emerge—warmth, memory, layers. The speaker’s voice is repeated, but remains untouched in terms of pitch or tempo, it is held by harmonies that listen closely and respond.
This is a sketch—but it points toward the larger hope of the project: to make music that dignifies lived experience, not by smoothing it out, but by surrounding it with care.