Prosopagnosia
By orangedrink on February 22, 2020 12:18 am
Prosopagnosia is a disorder where a person cannot distinguish faces. They can see eyes, a nose, and a mouth, but can't put all the "pieces" together to understand that it represents a particular person. I saw a documentary that featured a man with this disorder; he could not recognize his own children. They interviewed him on the beach and he was unable to pick them out in the crowd. The children had learned to always approach their father and say "Hi Dad" to give him the cue that they were one of his kids.
I started working on this piece and tried to think of a story behind it. (I usually try to come up with the scariest thing I can think of) I came up with a question: How would it feel to wake up one day and not recognize your own reflection in the mirror?
My first thought would be instant shock - imagining that there is someone else in the bathroom. Then confusion: who am I looking at? Then trying to figure out the mystery: am I in someone else's body? Then: Who's face is this? Then, in trying to confirm that this is NOT my face, I feel like it would beg the question: What do I look like? Which would would lead to a terrifying thought: I don't know what I look like. I would be able to see my eyes, my nose, and my mouth, but I wouldn't be able to "see" the whole face. I can't "see" what I'm looking at.
It was quite a bit of serendipity that I came up with this story while working on the piece, because I then realized that the piece reflected the story before I thought of it. The piece has disparate, unrelated sonic elements that do not blend together. You could almost imagine some of them going together, but they won't. At best, they appear side by side, but you never see the whole "face". There are a few layers of noise/hiss/sub/rumble that get added and removed. One of the hopes here is that you notice them more once they are removed. Kind of like not really paying too much attention to your reflection in your mirror - but much more so when it is not there in the way that you expect. Rhythm and repetition are used to establish some expectations, but the timings are all adjusted to create a lot of unease and tension. Also, an attempt was made to have a variety of timbres and frequency ranges to make it feel like “you don’t know where the next thing is coming from”.
All the samples are from Ableton, mostly repitched - and one slowed down audio recording of me at a voice lesson (the almost howling shudder in the last third). Finished on Friday! Feeling better from my cold, my injury is mostly healed, and I'm ready to have maybe at least one day off! Also, kind of found a relevant Derek Jacobi photo, so that's exciting 
Love you all, sorry I haven't responded or listened TIME MANAGEMENT
P.S. - I couldn't find the original documentary, but found a great 2 part series from 60 Minutes. I never knew that famous painter Chuck Close has prosopagnosia aka face blindness. Wow.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ue4sP2_xxHA
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8cXus7SNQY
Audio works licensed by author under:
CC Attribution Noncommercial Share Alike (BY-NC-SA)
