"The multitudes of all sects and denominations that attended his sermons were enormous, and it was matter of speculation to me, who was one of the number, to observe the extraordinary influence of his oratory on his hearers, and how much they admir'd and respected him, notwithstanding his common abuse of them, by assuring them they were naturally half beasts and half devils."
For the 8th Disquiet Junto project, the rules were very restrictive; use a sentence or clause from the 11th chapter of Ben Franklin's autobiography, do what you like with it, but use no other sounds and make sure it's reasonably intelligible at some point.
Well, I'd been listening to the Conet Project (search for it on
archive.org if you don't know it, and look on Wikipedia for 'Numbers stations' if you never want to sleep again), playing a little bit of Amnesia: The Dark Descent (and reading about its forthcoming sequel, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs), as well as looking into the universe of the Fallout games.
The common thread through all these things is the feature of antique and/or distorted, strange recordings or radio transmissions, and so the idea occured to make something with that kind of feel to it. It's hardly musical as such and has more in common with dark ambient works, as with some of the output of a group I've been listening to again lately, Christian Death. The goal was reasonably easy to achieve by the layering of various different effects and different parts of the selected clause, in places slowing it down, and in others chopping it up randomly. I'm reasonably pleased with the result, though like a couple of my Junto entries before, it's more in the experimental/noise category than being more conventionally musical.
The underlying vocal sample is from this public-domain recording of The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, from LibriVox:
www.archive.org/details/franklin_autobio_gg_librivox