Replay now: making the BBC Radio documentary ‘Joining the Dots – 200 Years of Braille Music’

Please note this transcript is automatically generated, so may contain errors.

Sound Without Sight, connect, collaborate and create.

Hello and welcome to the Sound Without Sight podcast. In this episode, we explore the making of the BBC Radio 3 documentary, Joining the Dots, 200 years of Braille Music.

We welcome Kevin Satizabal, the producer of the documentary, and Matthew Wadsworth, its presenter.

Kevin and Matthew share insights into how they got into their roles, the inspiration behind the documentary, its recording and editing process, and the gear they used. They also share some clips and answer questions from our community.

This podcast was recorded live as part of the Sound Without Sight monthly meetup for October 2025. We first hear from Kevin.

I work at BBC Radio 3 as an assistant producer, and every year there is a commissioning round for documentaries for different strands on the network.

So there’s a Sunday feature, which does documentaries on all sorts of musical topics, and it’s 45 minutes long. And so last year, I was actually doing a Braille reading group where people practice reading books.

And somebody mentioned that it’s 200 years of Braille and the invention of Braille. And that kind of got me thinking it would be really nice to do something around these celebrations and about this kind of historic anniversary.

And so I got thinking about the story of Braille music, because I knew the story from a film that was done a while ago, that featured James Hristen, Matthew and myself was done by Michael House, where the story had been covered to some extent.

And I started looking into it and I also found out that the Institute where Louis Braille studied and worked, also trained a lot of very famous organists.

And this kind of was the germ of the idea, because I wanted to tell this story and also inform an audience who might not know what Braille music is, how blind musicians use Braille music and how it’s impacted them.

How this amazing invention by Louis Braille, this revolution in reading and writing music, has impacted musicians over the last 200 years.

Thanks so much. Super, super interesting. And I was wondering if you could give a little overview of the scope of the role of a producer in the context of a radio documentary.

What does that typically involve?

So the producer is really involved in the actual making of the program. An idea might come from the producer themselves, like it did in my case, it might come from somebody else, like a presenter who Matthew was.

But the producer is involved with a lot of what’s called the editorial side.

So researching the documentary, finding guests to interview, going to record the documentary, making sure that things that sound nice, and then editing the documentary, and then everything to do with putting it all together, crafting the narrative,

deciding what sounds go where, and making a really nice sounding production that then gets put on the network. Then there’s also a lot of the stuff like writing the copy for the website description, that introduces the documentary, and then doing any

Such a wide range of role.

So I think there’s probably quite a few people in the audience who would quite like to be a producer at the BBC. Would you mind sharing a bit of insight into your route into that role?

Sure. I mean, I suppose my route to the BBC started long, long ago, when I was a kid, and my love of tapes, tape recorders. I used to record everything.

I used to annoy my family so much because I’d go around with a tape recorder, recording everybody’s conversations. But I’ve always said that as a blind person, this was almost like my version of taking pictures. It’s my way of capturing memories.

I loved recording sound effects, making my own sound effects, recording family gatherings and family parties. I was just always fascinated about the way that audio can really paint a picture.

You don’t have to see what’s in front of you, just those sounds, you know, something frying or the sounds of grass or crickets, really puts you in a location. And so ever since I was a young kid, I was always experimenting with radio.

And then I went to do music. I did a music degree, I finished, and I was still had the radio dream germinating in the background.

And so I started looking at applying for the media industry, doing a few radio courses here and there, going to media industry events, trying to get tips on how to get into the industry. And it was tough, I’m not going to lie.

There were times where people from all sorts of places were a little bit discouraging. They were like, how does a blind person even produce a radio? I don’t know if our systems will be accessible.

And I got a little bit disheartened a few times. There were lots and lots of applications that got rejected. But I just kept, it was just something I loved to do.

I loved editing audio, I loved working on podcasts, and I just kept applying. And the BBC has schemes, so production schemes, journalism schemes that you can apply to. And they offer a certain level of training, and they’re entry-level schemes.

So if you’ve never worked in radio before, you apply to them to get in. And so I heard about these schemes and started applying to them. I applied maybe twice or three times, four times.

And they’re very competitive because it’s thousands of people apply to these schemes. It took about seven months in the final application from beginning to end, because it was about two or three rounds. There was an assessment center.

There was an interview process. There was group kind of assessments you had to do before I got that call.

And it really was amazing to be able to get in to the BBC, because I’ve been listening to so much BBC content ever since I was a kid, listening to podcasts. And it was just nice being there and being able to learn about how radio is made.

That’s awesome that you’re able to get in through that mainstream route as well. Because we had a question, a specific question from Phil Cartwright, asking about the BBC Extend Scheme.

I was wondering if you could speak a little bit about what that is and whether you’ve got the experience with it.

Yeah, so the BBC Extend Scheme essentially are roles in the BBC that are ring-financed specifically for disabled applicants, and they can range for a whole range of jobs throughout the BBC.

And that’s a very specific scheme, but the production scheme that I applied to wasn’t specifically to the Extend Scheme. I think there was something in the application that asked if I had a disability, which I ticked just so that they knew.

And also actually, throughout my application process, because a lot of the application process was them finding out about my passion for radio.

And a lot of, I mentioned my blindness, I mentioned my experiences with music, with VI, my love of radio, how I felt that made me a really good listener, because I had to use audio to navigate the world so much.

And I think that made my application unique, because there’s so many thousands of people you’ve got to try and stand out. And what they’re really looking for, I was told often, was that personality. They want that application to stand out.

They want to know who you are and why you want to work at the BBC. So actually, being visually impaired, I didn’t shy away from that. And I kind of used it front and center of my application very loudly and proudly.

Amazing, as so you should.

And yeah, you’ve done amazing stuff since then. And we’re going to hear some of that sound design a bit later. You’ve got some clips from the documentary.

But I wanted to move on now to Matthew. So maybe if you could tell us a little about your background, how you got into presenting this and your experience generally.

8:42

Matthew’s Presenting Role

Yeah, of course.

Hi, everybody. It’s really nice to be here. And I think Sound Without Sight, it’s a fantastic resource and hub that’s growing.

And well done to Jay and all the team for pushing it forward. So I’m a loop player by profession that started to play music when I was very young, started on the guitar when I was six on the classical guitar.

And then played electric guitar in my teens and then went back to classical guitar, went to specialist music school in Manchester and then on to the Royal Academy of Music.

And then unexpectedly discovered the lute and decided that I might have a more interesting career if I swapped. It’s not a, well, it is a big deal, but it’s not like starting a different instrument. It’s more a different technique.

I developed a system of Braille lute tablature. This was all back in the 90s. And I’ve been, I suppose, in the profession for about 25 years.

I made my first CD recording in 2003. And I now run the record label that I started with as an artist, Duzelle, Duzelle Classical Recordings.

I, since 2018, when we took over the label, I’ve also been sound engineering, producing, editing most of the discs that we put out. It’s in the classical genre, but anything from kind of Renaissance right through to contemporary.

Solo guitar, lute, string quartets, piano trios, solo piano, orchestras, saxophone quartets. A huge range of instrumentation and different types of musicians, but all acoustically recorded.

In lockdown, my lockdown project was to work on a piece of software that makes source destination editing accessible. I think that was the first time I was poking around on the Internet.

And I was kind of amazed at actually, I thought there must be something out there and there wasn’t. So now there is. So that is available to everyone who wants it.

It’s called Cola Classical, sits on top of Reaper. And I think it sort of gets rid of any barriers to entry to editing as a blind person. So I’ve always been like what Kevin’s described.

I’ve never given up on whatever the challenge is. I think if you want something, you find a way to do it. So that’s a very brief history.

Kevin, I’ve known for years from the music scene and he called me up and he talked about this pitch that he was doing for a documentary about 200 years of Braille music. He said, will I present it? Of course, I said, I would be delighted.

I was very honored to have that trust put in me. It started from there and then I didn’t hear anything and I wondered if it had gone through or what had happened. Then he called me and said, yeah, the pitch has been accepted and it’s on.

Then we really started talking together about how it would shape up what we wanted in the documentary. Thanks to Kevin, it was very much a two-way process.

We talked about which guests we like on there, and which aspects of Braille and Braille Music we thought were important. Those were the building blocks that we laid out. Then I suppose the first big thing we did was to go to Paris.

It was Kevin and myself, we each had a sighted guide, and then there was a chap called Martin, who was a sound person.

Each morning, Kevin would send me these briefs, historical facts and whether we were going to Inja, the Institute for Blind Youth, or the Ballantyne-Arwe Museum, or Louis Braille’s house in Cufray, some of these big briefs.

And then from that, I would formulate questions for the people that we were talking to. And as those conversations took place, then Kevin would come in and say, okay, can you ask about this? Could you find out about that?

So it was a very kind of organic process and really incredibly enjoyable.

I think one of the things that was fascinating for me, as a Braille user and as a blind musician is that although I use Braille music on a daily basis, I never thought very much about Louis Braille.

I didn’t know that he even invented the Braille music system. That was the lack of depth of my knowledge. So it was a huge kind of educational learning process for me on that front, sort of on a personal front.

And then I also, although I’ve obviously done a lot of performing and I’ve been on the radio many times, I hadn’t done a full presentation of this scale. So that was a great kind of learning experience as well. And I’ve definitely got the bug.

I would certainly love to do more.

14:13

Content Development

That’s a great overview.

Thank you so much. I think we will jump into specific parts now.

Kevin, I was wondering if we could spool back slightly and talk a little bit about the process of pitching the idea to the BBC, how that worked and talking to commissioners and how that process functions.

Yeah, sure. So you kind of have to submit a draft idea to the commissioners. And then if it’s shortlisted, you then go and speak to the commissioners about the idea.

And they ask you about where you got the idea from. Have you got any thoughts on people you might talk to? And the thing that the commissioner was really interested in was he really wanted to hear and understand how Braille music works.

Because he was like, actually the historical story is really important. But a lot of our audience will not even understand how blind musicians use Braille music and what that impact is.

And through talking to Matthew, he wanted to talk to Ignasi Canberra who’s a mutual friend, an amazingly gifted blind international pianist.

And in the documentary, you actually hear him talking us through how he learns through the Braille music and how he uses Braille music. And we can just hear a little bit of that here.

The way the Braille score works is that in a completely linear way, you can see a few bars of the right hand followed by a few bars of the left hand.

So here, what I have when I look at the music is, first, I can read the melody that the right hand plays. So in this case, you have…

And it continues, and then using inner chords, you have this other voice that’s also played by the right hand, but that’s written kind of in a separate way.

So you, in your head, have to put those two together because you don’t really read them at the same time. So that’s, when you have both voices, it sounds like this.

So.

So, together.

It’s brilliant the way he just breaks it down for an audience who’s never known Braille music. So that idea actually came from the commissioner, and it was a big thing that we wanted to go through.

And then once the documentary was commissioned, then it was the work of, oh my gosh, now we’ve got to make this thing happen. It’s a 45-minute documentary. The research begins.

And so I knew that in the pitch, I’d already said we wanted to go to Louis Braille’s home. So it was a case of getting in touch with Louis Braille’s home. And actually one of the first challenges was that a lot of people didn’t speak English.

They were all French speakers. So when you called up on the phone and my French isn’t very good. So luckily I had a colleague who spoke French and he helped me write some of the emails.

And then we found somebody in Louis Braille’s home, the guide who shows people around the museum called Stefan. And he said, yeah, you can come to us. And I checked Matthew’s availability and the availability of Martin, our sound engineer.

And then we started planning the visit. And actually, you know, one of the greatest things that, you know, a good tip of journalism is the best way to find the stories, not just by searching online, but by actually talking to people.

And by talking to Stefan, he told me about an amazing lady called Philippa Campsey, who’s featured in the documentary. She’s an academic who’s done lots and lots of research on the history of Braille music.

On Braille music’s time, she’s looked at the story of Charles Barbier, the man who invented this 12-point raised writing system, and how that inspired Louis Braille.

But she also uncovered the fact that Charles Barbier’s system had originally thought that it had been written for the military. But she’s found out by looking at the archives that actually this wasn’t true.

He was already doing writing codes for deaf people, for blind people, and this system was actually intended for blind people.

And so thanks to Stefan putting me on to Philippa, that was a really important part of the documentary, because she features a lot in the documentary and tells us about this side of things.

So yeah, once that was all researched, we then started preparing to go to Paris.

Coming into this interview, I was really intrigued to learn more about the balance of how much you had the documentary specifically mapped out at the point of pitching it and how much it came together during production.

It sounds like quite a lot of it was actually during production.

Yeah, I think you have some sort of idea. So you have to have the main points. I knew it was going to be a historical element.

We were going to talk about how Braille music worked and maybe look at Braille music today. So I knew I had to hit those points, and then it was starting to talk to people along the way.

You know, Jamie Dresden was a great help in kind of putting me on to the work that’s being done with the Daisy Consortium. And so all of that starts sort of panning out in my head.

And I also knew that I wanted to talk about the challenges of being an orchestral musician and learning Braille music.

And as it happened, Para Orchestra were doing a performance of a piece of music called The Virtue of Circle and Takashi Kikuchi was doing an incredible job of learning contemporary music.

And so all that kind of lined up, we just come back from Paris the week after the rehearsals were starting up and Para Orchestra let me go along with a microphone and record the music and then interview Takashi and his colleague Siobhan.

So yeah, you do a certain amount of planning, but of course when you start to really research this stuff, you discover things along the way that you suddenly want to include and then the documentary starts taking shape.

20:49

On-Location Recording

Brilliant.

Thank you very much. So I think we’ll move on from the research now and start talking a bit more about the content capture. And I think there was quite a few different environments that you recorded in across the course of the documentary.

So there was recording on location in France, there was Matthew, you were doing the script at home, right? Kevin, you just mentioned there, recording Para Orchestra on location, and there was also the interview at BBC Studios as well.

So I wondered whether maybe Kevin, to begin with, you could give a little overview of the gear that was used in each of those environments?

Yeah, sure.

So in Paris, we had a sound engineer, mainly because actually, I’m thinking, I’ve got to produce the documentary, and it was my first documentary, so I think we made the decision that it would be easier if there was a sound engineer with us,

particularly because we were going to be doing a lot of moving around. He found a really neat solution of low frequency radio mics that could be attached, like lapel mics that could be attached to the guests, like Matthew and the people he was

talking to, and it allowed free movement in the museums, which is really important because Matthew was going to be checking out a lot of scores. Interesting side note is that normally, when you record with radio mics, you have to get permission from

the country that you’re recording from because you don’t want the interference from the radio mics to interfere with local frequencies. But we managed to find some very low frequency radio mics that don’t need that permission, so we used them, and

that was a really neat solution and a good bit of kit. It just meant that there were no cables to worry about, and people could move around freely.

That’s awesome stuff. Maybe we’ll dig in now to maybe look at the trip to France in more detail. I want to go to Matthew.

What was your experience like in France? I mean, we’ve got a question specifically around navigating potentially unfamiliar environments and stuff like that, and doing the prep each day. What was that process like for you?

Because I think, am I right in thinking this was your first presenter type role?

Yeah, it was my first presenting role. I’m used to touring as a musician. So the first, I suppose, slightly surprising thing was Kevin called me up and he said, are you bringing a sighted guide?

And I said, no. He said, well, I’m bringing one and legally, they’re only allowed to guide one person. So I said, all right.

And I asked a guitarist colleague of mine if he’d like to come and be a sighted guide, and sort of be a fly on the wall with this documentary. So he did and he had a wonderful time. And that he was a great group of people.

There were five of us. So there was no problem navigating environments. I speak French, which was lucky.

So that helped. And I’m used to kind of Eurostar and being in different places. In terms of the script and the brief, well, it wasn’t a script, it was a brief each morning.

It kind of suited me. I do like pressure and doing things, I suppose under pressure and very quickly. So it was a case of reading this thing and memorizing it as fast as I could.

And then taking that information and using it to have the right kind of conversations and ask the right questions.

Matthew was really good at that considering that it was your first gig. I had some suggested questions as well, that kind of gave you a little steered, but I think you were just really great at just taking the conversation and letting it flow.

You were there in front of the guest, they were showing you things and I think your kind of natural curiosity took over, which I thought was really great because actually, part of that was a little bit deliberate on my part, because it was build as

your journey of discovery. You were learning about all this stuff and I really wanted that curiosity and that natural enthusiasm to come across in your voice in the documentary, which I think you really did.

Actually, because Matthew was a first-time presenter, and sometimes when you’re reading a script, it’s very common that if you haven’t done that kind of thing a lot, it sounds a little bit red and you don’t really want that when you’re listening.

So what we would do is, for example, when we were in Paris, we were outside the Institute, for example, and Matthew had read a little bit about it.

He’d read about the founder, Valentin Aoui, who had founded this Institute because he’d been to a fair and seen these blind children making this cacophonous noise and not being able to play instruments.

And it was kind of like a show where everybody was laughing at them. And Valentin thought that things could be done better. And he founded the Institute National de Genève, the National Institute for Blind Youth.

So we spoke about this story and I said to Matthew, okay, I’m going to interview you. So you’re just going to tell me this story and tell us where we are and where we’re standing. So the documentary opens with that link.

And I kind of edited the structure and just took out some of the pauses but essentially that was it. Matthew did it in one minute and we used it. You know, we did other takes, but that was the take that I took that bit from.

And then also near the end of the trip to Paris, Matthew kind of reflects on his time in Paris and how that felt. And I think it just sounded really nice because it was Matthew’s own personal and he wasn’t reading a script.

And I don’t know how did it feel to you, Matt, because it felt great to me. Like it was really nice listening to that. But I don’t know how it felt to you when I was just like, okay, off you go.

Well, it’s credit to you, Kevin, because you trusted me so much, but also gave the right kind of guidance.

And you allowed my curiosity and my own discovery to come through. You need sort of structure and freedom at the same time in order for that to happen, which is the kind of framework that you set up very cleverly.

It was really interesting when we got back from Paris, recording these things called links, which are the narrative of the story or the spoken word, which holds the documentary together between the clips of interviews with various people in different

locations. So I was able to do those at home. I’ve got a good, very good setup. And if you want to know about gear, I have a Rode NT-2A mic, which are great for speaking into.

And then I have an Anubis audio interface. And then I actually just sent that through into Reaper. But it sounds like radio.

I could do that from home. But Kevin eluded earlier to this thing of a script sounding red. And that was, I think, for me, the biggest learning curve and the biggest challenge was to not sound red or like I was reading.

And I’m used to speaking and that’s all fine. I’m not, I’m a very fluent Braille music reader. I’m less fluent in sort of what you might call everyday Braille reading text because I don’t do it very much.

I use screen reader because it’s faster. And so I was memorizing, Kevin sent me this kind of four-page script and I was memorizing each paragraph and then recording it.

And I spent hours doing it and then he came back to me, he was like, can you just do it again? It just needs to sound more natural like you’re telling a story. So, and I listened back to it and then I knew exactly, I kind of knew what he meant.

And actually, we did it together. He just, we did the interview format, he’d asked me things and then I would speak, I basically memorized the script, but I could speak it freely. And we just did lots of takes and then Kevin edited it.

So that’s how it worked.

So with the mix of the interview format, but then also, there are times when you have to say absolutely specific things. So we’d do like a line or half a line.

And then it was a case of then stitching together the best takes, so it sounded pretty natural. And I mean, credit to you. One of the great things that Matthew was brilliant at was picking up the intonation.

So if you have, you know, you’re saying half a word and then you carry on from that. And then you carry on from that and you still have to kind of pick up that intonation and that was really, really great at that.

And that really helped with the edit process and making it sound really natural.

Yeah, it probably helps that I’ve done, well, I do record other people a lot, but I’ve done a lot of recording myself as a musician. So, you know, you just get used to doing a take that you can kind of do it the same way. I’m glad it worked.

And seeing as we’re talking about Matthew’s delivery, let’s have a quick listen to near the beginning of the documentary where he’s putting those skills into work.

I’ve always known that Braille was invented by Louis Braille, but I didn’t know he was a musician.

He played the organ, the cello, and the piano. 2025 marked 200 years since Braille was invented. In Paris, I’ll learn more about Louis Braille the man and Louis Braille the musician.

I’ll speak to pianist Ignasi Canberra about how he uses Braille music to prepare pieces for the concert platform. And we’ll learn how technology is being used to produce more Braille music than ever before.

And actually, that beautiful loop playing, you hear that a lot through the documentary, because it just kind of creates a really nice sound world to the documentary.

I think it’s just such a lovely bed, and it’s a real showcase of Matthew putting his skills as a loop player, but also as a presenter into action.

So throughout the documentary, we’ve got lots of nice loop playing that Matt very generously allowed me to use in the documentary.

Awesome stuff, and Kevin, there’s also, I think you’ve got a clip of Matt speaking naturally on the metro, is that right?

Yes, that’s right. Let’s have a listen to it. Now, we were on the Paris Metro.

I said to Matt, just describe where we’re going. We knew we were going to leave Braille’s home, and again, this was a one-take wonder.

We’re on the Paris Metro. We’re going to a village called Couvray, which is about 25 miles outside of Paris. And we’re visiting what was Louis Braille’s house.

It was the home where he grew up. It was the home where he had his accident when he was three years old, lost his sight.

It’s now a museum, and it’s the place where, the village where he actually went to school until he was 10 years old before he came to Paris to the Institute.

There you go. Good job, Matt.

Brilliant stuff. So you spoke a little bit about the radio mics. What else was in the chain when you were recording stuff on location, Kevin?

What were you recording to?

I think we were recording to a Zoom recorder. And these Martin, who recorded the sound files, I recorded in a format called PoliWave because he was using two or three different mic tracks. So recording into multiple channels.

And the great thing about recording in PoliWave is that you get one WA file with these different mic tracks embedded in the file as different channels.

And it meant that when I then put it into my sound editor Reaper, I could open up those six or four or five individual mic tracks, and they were automatically lined up. So it made the editing process a lot easier.

Amazing.

33:16

Post-Production Workflow

Cool stuff. We’ll get on to the editing in just a minute. Firstly, just a little bit, we’re great to hear about the recording the Power Orchestra and the piece of music and how you did that.

Yeah.

That was pretty simple. I had again a Zoom recorder. I’ve actually had the Zoom H6E, which is a new Zoom recorder which came out last year.

And it has speech and it also has 32-bit float recording, which means that the levels are automatically set. And that was quite useful because I was recording right in the middle of an orchestra.

And then also going in and recording interviews with Takashi and Siobhan. So I had the stereo mic for the orchestra, and then I had individual mono mics for Siobhan and Takashi.

Amazing stuff.

So say we’ve got to the end of the recording process now, you’ve got so much content, you know, stuff that you’ve recorded on location in France, on location with the power orchestra, you’ve got the interview that was recorded at BBC Studios, and all

of Matt’s links he’s been recording at home. Where do you start with editing?

Yeah, somebody asked me the other day how much material we had. I think we had about six hours of material, because if you think of all the stuff we were doing in France, looking at all the exhibits and stuff.

And so the first thing I did, I think, was listening to the interviews. A lot of people do it in different ways. Some people transcribe the interviews.

I just like listening to the interviews as I go through. I’d start marking the bits that got me really excited. I was like, okay, what makes a really nice, lovely clip that sounds good.

How were you marking them, Kevin?

Was that inside Reaper at this point?

In Reaper, yes. You can set markers that you just drop into the file as you’re listening. And then I could just go back to the project and just look through the different markers.

And then I’d know what bits to listen to. So yeah, I’d set those markers. I’d find those clips and go, okay, what bits start sounding really good?

And gradually I started building up all of these different clips from the different interviewees. And then it was a case of, okay, what links these clips together? We’ve got the Paris Metro.

Oh, actually, I’m missing a little bit of information about Louis Braille as a three-year-old. Because during the recording, the way Stefan explained it just didn’t quite work in terms of a listening point of view.

I can’t exactly remember why, but sometimes you listen to the way somebody says something and listening back, it just doesn’t quite work. But then I was like, oh, but, you know, Philippa kind of speaks about it.

So then, you know, we fade down the Paris Metro stuff because Matthew’s just been talking about Louis Braille. And then we add in that information about his life. And then that kind of gives a little bit of change of texture.

And also one of the really important things is when we were on location, we’re thinking about the sounds that we were recording.

So, you know, I remember Martin, our sound engineer, it was like when we were moving from room to room, sometimes the temptation is to start talking and he’d be like, no, no, no, just stay quiet because we’ve got some really, really good sounds here

of footsteps or moving around. And actually, when we got to Inja, you know, in the kind of melee of arriving and all of this stuff, you know, we kind of went in and I was like, oh, actually, what I really want to hear is us arriving like being shown

into the space. And Alexander Bardford, who was the organ teacher, was really great at just picking up the mic and just talking us into the space. And here’s a clip of her doing that.

So now we’re going to walk through the main door, which is the very center of the Institute. And it’s right under the big concert hall. Now when we enter, we are at the Hall of Honor.

And this is the centerpiece of the Institute. The Institute has a form of a letter H. It’s symmetrical to the left and to the right.

And historically, one side was dedicated to boys and the other side to girls. Now we still keep this separation, but for very young students and for the older ones. And in this Hall of Honor, we have a representation of Louis Braille.

We actually have three heads of Louis Braille and this whole one of them is available to touch and has an inscription in Braille. And from this hall, we can get directly to the classrooms.

And again, that just kind of really sets the scene and paints a picture of the space and you hear those creaky doors. And yeah, that was a really important part of the recording process.

Awesome. We had a specific question actually from Melissa Cox. And she’s asking specifically about sound design and capture.

I think listening to that, we all heard the kind of change in acoustics when moving into different space, which was really cool. Did you consider recording binaurally? Would that have been an option?

Or do you think there’s any positives or negatives to doing that?

Yeah, I mean, I do like binaural recording. I think it’s really amazing. I think if I was going to do something that really was more sound design heavy, I would probably consider using binaural microphones.

But I think for this, because it was so focused on the speech and the kind of storytelling from the interviewees, I didn’t consider binaural. But I just thought that the natural kind of sound effects from the environment would be enough.

Absolutely. No, it really does paint a great picture. So a question from James Rizdin, who is asking, well, he’s interested to know more about the different tools that both Kevin and Matthew used for editing.

You’ve spoken a little bit about Reaper. Did you want to speak about any other tools, either of you?

I do it all in Reaper or in this add-on that I use called Colour Classical, which is the source destination stuff, which is where you have, if I briefly describe what source destination editing is, you have, if you imagine, horizontal lanes on the

screen. The top lane is what’s called the destination track, and that’s where you build your edit.

Then you have on each screen, you can have up to nine lanes, so you can put all your takes in the lanes, and you can align them not only horizontally but vertically.

So if you’ve got six takes of the same thing, you can very easily go from one to the other. And compare them and obviously set your in and out markers, and then copy and paste into the destination. And it’s very quick for multi-track editing.

So that’s how I do it.

I’m actually less good with mainstream Reaper, because I don’t use it that much, but I’m interested in what Kevin might describe about particularly fading sounds together or fading up and down from the street noise so that the speech can be heard.

So perhaps you could tell us a bit about that, Kevin.

Well, the honest truth is that you have, with the resources of the BBC, a very talented mixer who luckily used Reaper and was able to really fine-tune a lot to make sure that the fades are done well.

You can do fades with Reaper quite well, and actually there’s probably people that can do it very well. But I haven’t learnt that to a certain degree. I can do rudimentary fades in and fades out, but they’re quite rough and ready.

So what I did do, however, was put all of the sounds, add in the music, so that when I sent the Reaper project to the sound mixer, everything was as I wanted it, so he would be able to hear the fades.

I mean, particularly the issue I had was that sometimes with music, you want to do very gentle fades in and very gentle fades out, almost imperceptibly, almost sometimes that the music disappears under the speech, so it doesn’t sound too abrupt.

I think you can do that with Reaper, particularly by hooking up a physical control surface and actually physically being able to put the fades in by moving faders up and down.

You can do it with automation as well.

Yeah, you can do it with automation as well. Yeah. But that was just a skill I didn’t know that well.

Also, the benefit of having somebody who could mix it and stuff was that he could add EQ and all sorts of plugins to just make the audio sound really nice and rich.

Yeah, I think that’s a really good qualification. I guess your role was piecing together a story based on all the content, but maybe the final bit of finessing, BBC could take over at that point.

I guess, is there any particular insight into that process of piecing together for a programme that would be good to share any more detail on?

And to the Reaper, I think it was really important for me to learn very quickly, is how to organise my project and to make sure that I didn’t have too many mic tracks.

So for example, one thing that was very important was just having a completely separate track for Matthew’s script, because if I ever needed to edit anything, or even just take out a line where, you know, sometimes I tend to over script it or we

didn’t need something, it was just really easy to just take out a little bit of the script or add something in. So having kind of separating things as much as possible, but also just being very organised.

So having a folder of tracks, which is like a big group of tracks, all of those being like the effects tracks, and that’s where all the kind of noises of the street noise and stuff all went into those tracks, and then having separate speech tracks,

and then kind of labelling them properly. I think project organisation is really important.

Absolutely. And you might have just answered this actually. But Tilly was asking, were there any challenges that you faced when pulling together the feature from all the separate pieces of content?

And if so, how did you overcome those challenges?

A lot of, well, particularly because I didn’t, I was learning kind of on the job, and sometimes you mess up an edit or something, and the undo button was a very handy feature.

Actually, I think at first, when I first did it, I wasn’t quite sure how it all worked, and I opened up too many tracks in one project, and then I had to kind of recompile it all and rearrange my project a little bit better.

So it was all a bit of a learning curve for me, and sometimes redoing a couple of bits and pieces. And because it was my first time doing this documentary as well, it was my first gig as it were, it was quite a learning process.

I should talk to my wife, I spent quite a long time on it. And she was always like, oh, you’re always spending lots of time editing. But it was a really enjoyable experience.

I think that that is the best way to learn on the job, because then you learn the skills that you need, and you can’t learn them all at once, but you learn the ones that you need and you go from there.

Because otherwise it’s so daunting. And I’ve spent, like you, I mean, just hundreds of hours learning these programs. But once you’ve got the skill, and sometimes it’s hard to push through, but once it’s there, you’ve got it.

Absolutely.

Aside from the documentary, were there any other difficulties you faced in terms of scheduling interviews or bureaucracy where maybe they didn’t want you in certain places that you had to overcome as well?

No, actually, I think everyone was really, really excited.

Everyone was really, really helpful. People were very generous. I think the people in France were like, oh, thank you so much for featuring this story and talking about it.

So in that sense, it’s been okay, actually.

I mean, I have, you know, you experience that in a more, more generally when I’m working on daily programs where you might be booking guests and they’re not available, so you have to have sort of backup plans.

But I, because this is kind of a fairly long project, I was always thinking of Plan Bs. I was like, okay, what if this doesn’t work? What can we include?

What if something doesn’t sound quite right? Maybe I can extend something a little bit there or draw something back. I was trying to plan ahead as much as I could.

I think the important thing with these kind of documentaries is pacing yourself. I’m very glad that I put in quite a lot of self-imposed deadlines because I miss those by a country mile.

But it meant that actually by the end, we were on time for delivery. But partly that was because I was taking longer than expected to edit things. Sometimes when you work on a project like this, I’ve been reading about it for so many months.

There are bits of the interview that I really want to keep, but actually you have to go, no, it’s too long, you’ve included too much.

I had to listen back to things and take things out that I’d left in before and go, oh, that pause wasn’t quite right before. I gave myself the time to step away from the documentary, come back to the documentary, re-listen to things again.

That’s just the way I edit. Again, part of that could be an experience, or it could be just living very closely with the project.

But I think for me, it was just a case of spending time away from it, reliving it, and going back and making changes as and when I was going through the documentary but dealing with those challenges.

But overall, I can’t fault everybody’s enthusiasm and support for the project. It’s been amazing.

Thank you very much.

What about finessing the documentary? Did you get much feedback from the BBC? How big changes did you need to make?

Not huge changes.

I think it was things like, make sure that there’s more loop music from Matthew because it creates a really nice sound world.

Some of my links, they thought I should just redo them.

Yeah. So some of them, it was just redo the links because we want them to sound a little bit more natural, a little bit more energy, a bit of the rise and fall in the natural meter of speech. So we did those.

And then those were the main things actually, which surprised me actually, to be honest, because I was expecting more feedback, but luckily they seem to like it. They like the draft when I sent it to them.

Brilliant.

48:25

Documentary Promotion

Well, I’ll do one more question on the documentary production side of things. And then we’ll speak a little bit about Braille music and the topic of the documentary itself. What was the process of promoting the documentary?

How does that work at the BBC? How do you make sure people know about it and tune in?

So before the documentary goes out, you kind of put it on a system, an internal BBC system where people can listen to a preview of the documentary and that kind of probably will line up any press if they want to cover the story.

And that’s actually how, for example, The World Tonight on Radio 4 heard about it. And they got in touch with me.

And initially they asked for a cut down of the documentary, which would mean like doing a smaller edit, perhaps, and then sending it across to them, something like a shorter edit, sorry.

But then In Tune, the drive time show on Radio 3, also wanted to cover the program. And they invited Matthew to come into the studio to play his lute, talk about the documentary.

And they also invited me to talk alongside Matthew, which is good fun and very strange being on the other side of the In Tune glass because I’m usually in the producer’s booth, working with the team there.

And then because Matthew was already in the building, he went across to the world tonight, didn’t you, Matt? Yeah. What was that process like?

Well, great.

Great evening, actually. And they, I listened to it on the way home, on the train, and they really played and extended, a good 10 minutes of talking and interviewing.

And I think it made a pleasant change to some of the other stuff they have to have on there.

Yeah. I think they were fascinated by your loop, particularly the journalists who had never, a lot of them had never seen one. And they were like, oh, this is an amazing instrument.

So that was really nice. Also, BBC Music magazine kind of feature upcoming programs that are appearing on the BBC. So I got asked to write a little bit of copy or blurb about the documentary a few weeks beforehand.

And so they promoted it. And then obviously also worked with the social team on a video. And when Matthew came into Intune, they interviewed him with his loot.

And I haven’t checked the latest figures, but that will be used on really well. I think I checked like a week or so ago and it had 2000 likes and 600 odd shares. So people are really liked, have resonated with the story, which is really nice.

So yeah, you have to think about the kind of the multimedia aspect of it. And actually when we were in Paris, we were taking my support worker, I asked him to take a lot of pictures.

So that showed kind of Matthew looking at Braille scores, for example, or take your videos of Matthew looking at the scores and so on, so that they could look at what we were seeing, because we were seeing some incredible stuff.

We were in Paris, you know. Matthew got to check out some original raised stave notation that people read before Braille music came along, and other really amazing artifacts like Louis Braille’s Slate, I think we got to see as well.

So there was some really, really cool artifacts. That didn’t quite make it to the documentary, but yeah, there was just so much stuff that we were showing, which is really great.

Yeah.

52:02

Braille Music Future

It’s such a story and over such an amount of time as well. It was super impressive to get it all into 45 minutes. So just back to the topic of the documentary.

So it ends up, the last, is it quarter of it, is talking more about where Braille Music is at these days and potentially in the future. Focusing a lot on the technological developments that are opening up access to Braille Music to a lot more people.

Wondering firstly, if you could speak a little bit about pulling together that interview in BBC Studios and how you feel like the world has changed for Braille Music.

I mean, it’s changed enormously, hasn’t it? Over the last 200 years, I think we talked a little bit about that in the documentary and those kind of a nice compilation of the different sounds.

We had the slate and stylus that we recorded in Paris, and then I mixed up with a Braille machine that came along, and then a Braille note taker.

I had quite a lot of fun recording those here in my house and adding those sounds to the documentary, so that people could hear what they sounded like.

Then in terms of talking to Sarah Morley-Wilkins from Daisy Consortium, talking to yourself, Jay, and talking to James Rizden, we set it up as a discussion, just because I thought it would be really nice to get the three of you talking about Braille

Music, about technology, about how James’ experience as a musician, for example, relates to that, and having Matthew interview everybody. Matthew, how did that feel for you? Because that was very much like presenter, interview discussion.

I thought you just led up brilliantly.

No, thank you. I really enjoyed it.

I think partly because, again, it’s something I’m passionate about, and well, I like talking to people, and again, it’s all just if you ask the right questions, you get really good answers, and Jane, James, and Sarah, they all had a lot to say on the

I can’t remember.

Had you prepped a lot of those questions, or did you just let the conversation flow?

No, I didn’t.

No, because I know obviously you read the briefs, you knew the broad topics we wanted to cover, right? Like you wanted to talk about the digital publishing, but in terms of the actual questions, did you go in with notes?

No, no, I had no notes.

So you just went in, let that conversation flow?

Yes.

I mean, I think we chatted for about 45 minutes.

I mean, that was the biggest challenge was then cutting all of that down to, I think it was eight minutes in the documentary, because there were so many great points, I wanted to try and include as much as possible. So that took me a while.

I kept re-editing bits and taking things out and adding things back in and all sorts. But I think we got there in the end.

Yeah, it was great. It was great. We got a specific question from Kate Rizdin.

Obviously, towards the end of the documentary, we’re at the point where we’re talking about digital transcription tools and how Braille music is becoming much more accessible and available through digital files and music XML, these kinds of things.

There was quite a lot of focus on that. I guess we did also talk about the importance of professional transcribers as well for high quality, guaranteed high quality output.

I guess Kate is asking a quite wide question here around, is there still a future for professional Braille music transcribers? And do you feel like we’re placing enough value on this?

There’s a few things there. It is important as a professional musician, if you want to sort of be on the same level playing field and compete with everybody else, you need access to Braille music very quickly and you need to learn it quickly.

You might be doing something tomorrow, someone sends you a music score file or a music XML file, and you just need to send it to that printer or Braille display or whatever you’re doing, and learn it.

So in those situations, the technology that we’ve got is absolutely fantastic. For me, it has got rid of all the barriers that were, all the frustrations that were there before.

I think there is definitely still a need to have things done sort of properly and to the right standards. So automation can maybe do 90 percent. And that’s great for learning something fast.

But yeah, if you want something that’s the same, that has the same care put into it as a, you know, a baron writer edition, then you need expertise and you need the kind of human input for that.

So it’s not that the role of a professional transcriber is diminishing, it is just different.

Yeah, and important as James, Jay and Sarah point out the documentary and particularly with those examples, James talks about contemporary music and the need for somebody to kind of explain their work and you know, because there can be so many

different ways to represent notation. So I think as Sarah said, those automated tools can do 90 percent of stuff, but if you want 100 percent accuracy, you’re always going to need a braille transcriber.

So if you want 100 percent access, I suppose the point everybody was making that you can’t shortcut it however good the technology gets. But as Masita said, it’s there. It’s an amazing tool.

It’s giving us access to so much braille music, which is brilliant.

Yeah. Thank you very much. I listened to the documentary because I happened to hear you on The World Tonight and thought, oh my gosh, Matthew, hello.

So that worked.

It got you listening.

It absolutely did. And I was really gratified to hear mention of braille and braille music and to raise its profile.

I teach, I think I’m up to 13 or 14 braille music students now, mostly online, all of whom need braille music literacy skills to support instrumental, vocal studies, music theater studies, and things like GCSE, A-level, B-tech, music theory.

And I’m finding that as they’re all mainly in mainstream school, braille music literacy skills aren’t regularly taught by the braille teachers, one or two do. But often it’s taught by the code, but not in particularly contextual way.

So not always relating the code to an actual piece of music or sitting with the instrument and actually turning the dots into sound. So that’s where my role is largely focused.

And you know, I spend a lot of my time, you know, teaching people, okay, so you’ve got a dotted crotchet and a quaver and two crotchets, how are you going to decode that rhythm? They know what it says on the page, what’s it going to sound like?

And how are you going to read this piece of music and then memorize it and quite often now play it as an orchestral musician? So I’m doing a lot of that. And it’s astonishing to me how little profile Braille Music Code has.

Maybe that’s because I’m so close to the chalk face and always have been, but you know, some of the students are only getting Braille Music Literacy skills if they choose GCSE Music or after they’ve chosen GCSE Music and we have an awful rush on to

upskill them sufficiently that they can actually attempt the questions on the exam paper. And I think in asking that question, my thoughts were with them in their early stages where they’re not experienced enough to cope with any anomalies or

oddities that automated production can and does throw up. And they need textbooks, theory books and repertoire books and exam materials that is accurately produced, that’s consistent. The layout is as consistent as it can be.

Just to get to the point where they can cope with one or two things that might not be perfectly translated because the XML file wasn’t properly created or wasn’t absolutely conforming to the Daisy guidelines.

And I mean, I’m spending a massive project at the minute to form a symphony orchestra, and I’ve got five students coming to their symphony from scratch weekend, which means that there will be six blind Braille reading musicians in the same room

sitting in a mainstream symphony orchestra, playing as much of the pieces that we’re working on that weekend, as they can, with orchestral professionals and mainstream amateurs and members of National Open Youth Orchestra. I think that’s a first.

But I’m producing the parts, and I can tell you that what comes across my Braille display from just setting up a template and hitting translate is, yeah, readable, but readable by me as a professional having read Braille music for 40 years, but

pretty tough on a young person who’s sitting in an orchestra for the very first time and has never had to work out how they’re going to tackle this. Maybe for some, his Braille reading skills are pretty much in their early stages.

I do think that the role of professional transcribers is vital, and I do hear you that the speed of being able to obtain stuff is, I mean, it’s just a life changer, and I use it myself and play ensemble and stuff. It is a life changer.

But the reason that software is so good is because the international and national standards for the Braille Music Code have been looked at and upheld by organizations and professional transcribers for decades.

And if you don’t have that body of deep knowledge and experience, and we don’t train up new transcribers in the future, nationally and internationally, that will deteriorate over time.

And the archive of really beautifully produced material, of core repertoire, that’s the musical equivalent of your Shakespeare plays and your classic novels, will, I think, deteriorate, and that is my significant worry over all of this.

And obtaining really good copy in some cases is absolutely necessary.

And of course, if you’ve got a copy of a cornerstone piece of music, for example, a copy of Messiah or one of the Mozart Requiem or something, you don’t want necessarily to ask somebody else to get in touch with the publisher and produce it

themselves all over again. It’s just reinventing the wheel. So that was my concern in asking the question. And I think we need both.

I think the digital stuff is just like another massive tool, but shouldn’t obliterate the one we had before that.

Yeah, it enhances the work of conscribers, and they also enhance the digital. They co-exist.

They must co-exist. And I think an understanding of that on the part of organizations who support transcription facilities is absolutely vital.

Yeah, I think obviously in the UK, particularly, there’s been a lot of talk about transcription over the last few months. But obviously in the documentary, it lasts for a long time. It will stay on the sounds for a long time.

So I wanted to have a kind of general point about the importance of transcription without getting too technical about what exactly is happening where.

But I think that was one of the main reasons why I tried to keep it as generous possible and the work that, for example, Daisy Consortium is doing is felt like that because these automated tools can be used by anybody globally.

But also braille transcription also occurs around the world, of course. So I was trying to keep it important, relevant, but also as general as possible.

I think that leads on to another question, which was, now that we’ve got this great documentary, how can we build on it to stimulate interest among parents, among teachers, among young musicians about braille music generally?

What can we do as a community at Sound Without Sight, or everyone that’s here today? It’s great to be able to signpost the documentary. Is there anything that we can do to really use it to push on from?

Could there be a sequel at some point, Kevin?

Who knows? Possibly, possibly. I think a lot was covered in a very surface level way.

There’s definitely a lot more to unpack with all of this stuff. The beauty of this documentary is that it’s not going anywhere. It will stick around on sound, so feel free to keep promoting it.

Amazing.

But we’ve covered a lot of the questions that we had submitted. Before we go to any raised hands or questions in the chat, I’m going to tie the interview together just by handing over to Tilly.

I was just wondering, Kevin, what advice would you give maybe to someone who wants to get into radio and eventually go on this documentary journey? What advice would you give to them after going through this whole process?

I guess Matt as well, what advice would you give to someone who’s just been phoned up and asked to present a documentary after everything that you’ve learnt along the way as well?

The first thing for me is believe in your idea because actually this nearly didn’t happen. Because I’d come across the idea and thought, oh, somebody must have done this idea already.

I was talking to one of my colleagues and I just went, oh yeah, I was going to submit an idea. But I think it’s already been done. I told her and she was like, well, it’s not been done on the net.

It’s not been done on Radio 3. This musical element certainly hasn’t been done to this degree, so you should definitely do it. My first tip is believe in your idea.

Just keep pursuing that dream. Find those passions, those passion projects, see what you can discover. Because I think for me, you’re going to spend a lot of time with this material.

It definitely certainly helps to be doing something that you’re really passionate about and really enjoy. And for me, kind of linked my love of music, it linked my love of sound.

So it was definitely a very personal project and a bit of a labor of love, I suppose.

Well, I think, you know, I was just very lucky that as so often happens in the profession, it’s who you know and who’s doing what and who knows you. So I was lucky that Kevin had me in mind specifically.

So of course I said yes, but it was partly because I was passionate about it and I wanted to learn and I felt that I had something to bring to the table.

So, you know, if someone put me up and asked me to do a documentary on steel girders, I don’t know if I’d feel the same way. I probably would.

I’m curious about most things, but you know, you need to know that you’ve got something that will contribute.

Because that was the thing that you said before, there were people you wanted to talk to as well, and your ideas really fed into the structure of the documentary as well. And who we spoke to, which is great. Were you ever nervous?

Because I was like, you just took it all in your stride.

No, no, it didn’t make me nervous. It was, I enjoyed every moment of it in Paris and working with you. And then, yeah, as I said, I suppose the bit that was most challenging was the links.

Because I was on my own at home, it wasn’t like I was going to be talking to someone. So I think now I know how to do it, but that was the first time I really had to confront that.

And that thing that I just did there where I was going, hmm, I love this story because Matthew was doing that when we were interviewing somebody.

Like you kind of tend to go, hmm, to kind of give an indication to the person you’re interviewing that you’re listening. But that’s really annoying to edit and also to listen to. You kind of want to hear the other person.

I was like, Oh, Matthew, you’re doing, hmm, every song from when people are making a point. Just don’t do that, please, because it will help with the edit. And Matthew just didn’t do it again.

I mean, he was just such an amazing quick learner, which really helps kind of the process and your ability to just absorb things is really great. But yeah, I think in terms of to wrap it up in terms of advice is follow those passion projects.

Keep persisting, keep coming back with lots of different ideas. This wasn’t the first documentary I pitched. Actually, I pitched a couple of other things the year before and the year before that didn’t get through.

But I just have to keep going back and keep trying again and again.

And if there are people in here who want to keep up to date with both of your latest work and what you guys are up to, do you have like website or social media that people can follow you on?

I post a little bit on social media, but I don’t have a website, but I do post a little bit on social media.

Well, I’m kind of rubbish on social media, but I have things on YouTube. Obviously, my music’s on the streaming platforms.

I have a website, matthewwadsworth.com, and my label, also duzel.co.uk, d-e-u-x, like the French deux, for two, hyphen edoubleles.co.uk.

All right. Thank you very much.

We’ve got about 10 minutes left. So I’m just going to pick out a few questions from the chat.

Firstly, just to highlight a point which I don’t think we maybe didn’t put across as triumphantly as perhaps we could, which is that, well, the fact that Reaper is now at the BBC, and that’s inherently, assuming you have the right add-ons and stuff,

is super accessible, which takes away so many of the barriers that would have existed historically to doing your roles. So yeah, just to celebrate that really.

That’s really great because actually it really helps because I was able to put all of the documentary together and just send the project, and somebody was able to just mix it, which made the process of something that was heavily craft-edited like

this, a lot easier because otherwise I would have had to have sent across. I honestly I don’t know how we would have done it. It would have been really, really painful sending individual files and getting somebody to line them up.

Reaper is a brilliant tool. It’s worth learning and it’s fully accessible as well on PC and on Mac.

Kevin, do you use it with OSARA and SWS?

Yes, which are extensions and add-ons that have been written by the community that make Reaper accessible. Do you use it with those?

Brilliant. Just before this, I’ve updated the information we’ve got on Sound Without Sight about Reaper, if anyone wants to check it out.

On the homepage now, there is Reaper, a compilation of resources, the article is called, and it just points you to useful starting points to try it out. We’ve got a question in the chat from Adele.

This is something that you and I spoke about, Kevin, actually, which was the practicalities of interviewing people in France and intelligibility of speech and that kind of thing, and how that can influence, perhaps, the edit.

That certainly influenced the edit, because some people that we interviewed, if you’ve heard the documentary, you will do, had quite strong accents. So I had to pick bits that I thought would be most intelligible.

Some people felt much more comfortable speaking in French, so we found somebody who translated their words in the documentary.

So I used a mix of kind of fading down the words in French, and then having the translation over the top, and then at one point, when it’s a much more lengthy interview, at the beginning, I kind of indicated that somebody was speaking French, and

then our translator kind of took over, and then we just heard her voice voicing the person’s answers. So yeah, we used a mix of translation, and also because actually part of a documentary like this is that, there’s so much stuff to cover that the

interviews can’t necessarily be too long. So that kind of helps in being much more picky with the clips I chose.

Brilliant. Thank you very much. I was just wondering, Kevin, if you had any more clips that you’d like to share.

There’s one more, and this is a really nice little clip of Matthew checking out a Braille score from 1819 that was in Dewey Braille’s home.

You’ve just handed me a book from 1819.

The first thing that’s striking is that the pages are enormous. They’re almost double the height of A4, wider as well than A4. It’s thick paper, and it’s got raised print letters.

They’re beautifully embossed.

For satirical people, it’s beautiful, but I cannot read anything with the finger.

No, it’s, and it feels, it actually, it feels beautiful. It’s almost like Cyrillic. Perhaps you could somehow learn it if someone told you what each letter was, and you might kind of figure it out.

I can tell you, this is E, E capital.

Yeah.

And what’s that, what’s next to the?

N.

N.

Wow.

Wow. I’m excited from there, from Matthew. I think that was really interesting.

And you can actually hear Matthew running his fingers over the, over the Braille. So I kind of really wanted to keep that in, which is why there was no music underscoring that.

And then you could hear the creaky floors of Louis Braille’s house, which is great.

Amazing. Well, I think that’s a lovely example to, to draw the session to a close on. Kevin, Matthew, have you got any kind of closing thoughts?

Oh, I think it’s been great.

Thank you for having us both on, Jay, and to everyone for, for your interest and questions. And it’s been nice to relive it, actually, because we put so much into it. And then you move on and do other things.

And it’s lovely that it’s, it’s had an impact and just keep up the great work at Sound Without Sight.

Yeah. Thank you very much for the invite. Thank you all for, for listening.

And I think the thing I’d always say is, you know, when I got the commission for the documentary and how to make it, I honestly felt like how am I going to do this? It’s a 45-minute documentary. How, how is it going to come together?

But as long as you have a plan, as long as you’ve got your research, as long as you give yourself enough time, you find a way through.

I found a way through chipping away at the interviews bit by bit, finding that structure, taking things out, taking things in, adding things back in, just playing around with the material. I think just following that dream and that passion.

If you’d said to me a few years ago that I’d be producing a documentary for the BBC, I’d be like, no, I can’t do this. I wouldn’t do it. I think one of the best things, and I learned this from Matt’s can do attitude, just give it a go.

You’ll learn along the way and you’ll have a great time doing it.

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