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TRANSCRIPT

The piece of music we're listening to in the background is called The Trial. It's featured in the soundtrack from the fiction podcast Marsfall. Today we'll break it down and get into why and how it was made. You're listening to How I Make Music, where audio drama composers get to tell their own stories. In this show, we break apart the music of a fictional podcast and take a trip into how it was made. My name is Sam Boase-Miller. I'm a composer, producer and voice actor from the US and this is How I Make Music. Welcome back to How I Make Music, The Trial by me Sam Boase-Miller. Thanks for listening in.

1:06 ABOUT

Marsfall is a sci-fi/fantasy story about the first colonists to settle on Mars. We follow them starting in the year 2047. So maybe 2047 is actually the year that we’ll get people on Mars. Mini helicopter that's flying around from the Perseverance lander. And yeah, it's pretty incredible the strides that we're making. Life imitating art!The scene takes place in the trial for ANDI, our colony AI. It's his trial for closing the door on a particular colonist who was about to create havoc for the rest of the colony. That philosophical debate, the trolley debate: should you pull the lever and try to avoid most people knowing that you'll kill one person? Or should you just let the trolley kill all five people to save the one. So this was the trial that we're all of our main characters kind of come together for the first time. And in this scene, we hear interjections from several of our characters.

2:52 CELLO

I started playing cello in school. Sort of like a string music petting zoo. My good friend at the time was playing viola. And so I thought, I really want to play viola. So I expressed this to the director of the orchestra and she was like, “no, you don't want to play viola. Your hands are big. You should play the cello.” So I was already at nine years old being told what to do! Like what musical instrument I should be taking up. It's actually the closest instrument (other than the trombone) to the range of the human voice. Both really, really low and it also gets into that high coloratura kind of soprano end of things

4:38 P-FUNK & INFLUENCES

I'm a big George Clinton fan. And part of what I love about Parliament Funkadelic is that they’re very imaginative harmonically and melodically and rhythmically. Yeah, I just I love that era. funk music from the 70s. Right around, you know, ‘75, ‘76. The orb is an electronic music group, I really got into their ethereal and ambient music where you're just like taking on a whole journey. The place where you end up is certainly very different from where you started.

6:03 ERIC SARAS

My co creator and music editor, he's director extraordinaire, Eric Saras. He's also one of our writers of the show, he and I first connected through music, we both went on an orchestra tour to China together. And as you can imagine traveling to another country and touring and performing music brings people close together pretty quickly. And so I met him and we realized that we were very similar in our outlook on music, and that just got a lot of things kind of kicked off creatively. We wanted music to be featured really heavily. He kind of realized that there was more or less these like kind of pillars or buckets that the majority of our music was falling into. And we called them a numbering system essentially like one through six being silence to total music taking over and being the focal point of the scene. So going through that and knowing that ahead of time helps me really plan. Okay, my workload, is this seen a one or is it a s

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