Reid My Mind

TR:
In today’s episode, we continue in our ongoing advocacy for the inclusion of Blind people in audio description. Since this is Flipping the Script, where we go beyond the mainstream AD conversation, we’re going to show you how AD contributes to our creativity.

Welcome! I’m Thomas Reid and this is Reid My Mind Radio!

— Reid My Mind Radio theme music.

Kemal:
My name is Kemal Gorey. Some of my friends call me KG. I’m a Media Composer. He him, I identify as blind or legally blind. I have kind of brown gray hairs, medium length, and I have glasses, not sunglasses, but I have some fancy Mont Blanc glasses that I always like to mention because they are fancy.

Sample: “And I’m Super Bad” James Brown

I’m currently serving at ramped as a secretary. Recording Artists & Music Professionals with Disabilities. Also, I have a guide dog, who name is Blute means cloud in English.
She’s a yellowish golden retriever. But when she was a baby, the donors told me that she look like a cloud. So that’s why they gave the name Blute. If I do not mention her, she will make it a big deal.

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
Yeah. My daughter just got a dog it’s a baby, and he just got neutered, or, as I like to say, destroyed.

— Sound of a dog whimpering.

TR:
Now that I mentioned two dogs, I bet this will be one of the highest ranking podcast episodes. (Chuckles) You can’t compete with children or animals!

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
So let’s talk about your relationship to disability, so folks have an understanding of where we’re coming from in this conversation.

Kemal:
My journey as a visually impaired individual starts in my really early months on the face of the earth.

My usual habit was blending in and finding some workarounds. That’s the main, central part of my relationship with my disability.

There’s a two face of this medallion this picture. First part is, yes, being innovative, being an inventor, and trying to blend in into the community.

Yes, I’m a natural problem solver, just like all other individuals with disabilities. But on the other hand, most of the energy that I’ve been spending in my childhood, to find ways to blend in, blend into the community, blend into the kindergarten , in the school, and Everywhere. It’s a matter of fact that how to hide yourself and how to hide your identity. It’s a dark part, because people, at least in 90s in my country, Turkey, it’s always a thing. People try to identify you with something.

you don’t look like you’re blind at all. That’s a thing.

TR:
A thing that we know is not exclusive at all to Turkey. In fact, this isn’t exclusive to blindness.

Over the years of producing this podcast, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with so many people about their own experience with disability. There’s no difference between, “You don’t look Blind” and “Girl, you look too good to be in a wheel chair.”

Another common experience we share, not giving in to the idea of hiding yourself.

Kemal:
And this was the center of my relationship with my disabled identity for a long time of my life, until the adulthood. Then I learned how to accept my identity, welcome it, and make it part of my life.

Yes, I’m blind, and it’s not only the part of my identity, but as a professional, it’s the part of my brand also.
When I decided to accept my identity as a trained musician, as a human being, as a composer , then the color of things started to change in a good way.
because then I know who I am, I accept who I am, I celebrate who I am

Then I found my community, although not in my country, but in the States. In spite of the fact that I still based in Istanbul, my body lives in Istanbul, but my career and my community stays and grows in the States, and I can’t be glad and grateful enough for that.

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
So I’m wondering, when you say blending in, does that have something to do with you and how you took to music? Is there a relationship?

Kemal:
You’re on a really great track here. That’s where my journey with music begins, and that’s the main motivation.

I remember my very first on stage experience, and it was when I was four. My uncle is a well known rock star in my country. Is one of the legends, one of the local and even kind of an international rock legend in Turkey, and my first, very first on stage experience was a duet with him. I think he was thinking it would be adorable to make a duet with a four year old kid.

TR:
Remember what I said about children and animals.

Kemal:
I remember clearly when I’ve seen all the crowd, and I was on stage, I thought, oh my god, the crowd area it’s really messy. It’s overcrowded and there’s a lot of noise in there and dark.
But on the contrary, stage was bright. There was only five or six people on the stage, and I have the microphone, so it looked safer to me.

TR:
And then it went beyond safety.

Kemal:
People shouting your name, clapping, celebrating you, good stuff comes with the live performance.

I can say that my father is an amateur guitar player. Music always was the great part of. My life. Yes, my the stereo was my beloved toy in my childhood when I was a kid. But this is the moment that I decided to start that journey. Maybe I didn’t know that entirely, but it led me to this professional path. That moment on the stage with the lights, and I was the one who has the microphone, who had the microphone.

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
I love that.

What’s your uncle’s name?

Kemal:
My uncle has a really long Turkish name. Nejat Yavasogullari. The band’s name is Bulutsuzluk Ozlemi. He and his band has a really unique and important place, because my uncle himself mentored many other younger rock groups and opened the path for them, that’s why their legend. And also their song is still at the top of the rock genre in Turkey.

TR:
While that was Kemal’s first and last time performing with his uncle , (I’m telling you there’s no competing with children and animals)that set Kemal on his path. It helped him find his instrument.

Kemal:
I instantly fell in love with that big instrument and all the possibilities.

— Music begins: A bright piano melody.

I studied violin and cello in fine arts high school. I took some violin lessons, even drum set lessons. I still in love with bass guitar by myself, but the piano was the weapon I choose back in days, because
in my humble opinion, I think it’s the most complex instrument and the core of the music.

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
What were you listening to as a child that really sort of kind of connected with you?

Kemal:
Even though I’m a Turkish kid born and raised in Turkey because of my father and mother, jazz, blues and rock has (been )the major part in my life.

My dad is a really big Miles Davis fan. My mom herself is a really big fan of Buddy Guy. She still is. We have a little Buddy Guy statue in our house taken from the buddy guys home bar in Chicago.

I’m a really big fan of jazz and blues, even though never managed to become a full time jazz musician.
But somehow, even though it’s not a part my mom’s or dad’s musical life, somehow I decided to go start listening classical music.
Opera, in particular.

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
So tell me a little bit about your experience with audio description,

Kemal:
what if I tell you I’ve never experienced an audio description till I became a media professional.

— Swoosh that builds up and leads into a crash.

TR:
What?

— Music begins: “Dance Noir” By Kemal Gorey, a bright melodic tune consisting of a mix of various string instruments.

Kemal:
My career in the states starts in 2020 with the competition that I won, ran by Abel artist Foundation, founded by Steven letnes. I applied for his content for the contest that able artist foundation runs.

Somehow I recognize as a grand prize winner. There were some prizes linked with some publishers a couple of years past and I found myself in a project, working with Steve, a project called possibilities. You were also part of it, right?

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
I was interviewed for it.

TR:
It’s a documentary produced by the American Foundation for the Blind. They speak with a variety of different Blind people in all sorts of fields. Several are part of the RMM Radio family including Satauna Howery who narrates the open audio description.

Kemal:
That was the first time I’ve experienced the audio description because I’ve been working in the project as an additional music writer and Steve’s assistant, the composer assistant.

TR:
Composing music for a film with open audio description means you’re going to have to compose music that takes the AD into consideration.

Kemal:
I watched that documentary like, 1000 time.

Being visually impaired, legally blind, can put you in weird situations where, because the doctors keep telling you, you should using your site, but at the same time you same doctors keep telling you need accessibility, equipment and tools, all right, but where is the balance?

You are the one who should find the balance in your life and it can be tricky. Also, we really don’t have audio description. Let’s say the audio description was not that popular in Turkey or not existed at all at all, mostly back in the days.

Thanks to my private school education, I have a fairly acceptable English so I can watch movies in English, but I never tried an audio description. I saw audio description as an option, but with the possibilities, I experienced that for a long time, and then I utterly understand how comforting It is then, how crucial it is, because you never thought something’s important, until you experience it all by yourself.

TR:
Today?

Kemal:
Audio description should be the part of the core production budget. It shouldn’t be optional. It should be a requirement, a core budget item, like, we need music in the movie. We need dialog mix in the movie. . We need audio description in a movie or any kind of motion picture, that should be the rule, because the blind community have every right to access all media content in an accessible way.

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
Absolutely, I will not fight you on that. (Laughs)

Kemal:
(Laughing) You should not!

(The two laugh.)

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
Now that you are aware of it after possibilities, do you access more content with audio description today?

Kemal:
I can’t say that because, I still have some sight.

My usual habit is still consuming the visual content with my eyes, but I’m also getting older, so I don’t know what future holds, but it’s really comforting and heartwarming that at least there is an option.

TR:
Options are great! Kemal, actually did take the opportunity to listen to audio description, not as a consumer, but as a creator.

Kemal:
actually, it was a really interesting, strange, challenging, definitely, maybe the most inspiring project that I have ever been. It’s called, how great is your darkness? A silent movie about disability culture and how medical institutions treats the disabled persons and why the ableism is really strong in that field.

It’s like a art house short movie established by seven short stories. Each one of them reflects different problems in the medical industry.

TR:
The film is currently making the film festival rounds and will hopefully arrive on a streaming platform at some point for us all to see.

Kemal:
A Finnish director, Jenny Iulia, please forgive me that I cannot pronounce her really long last name. She warned me not to try that.
She decided to create an audio description for that movie.

A Finnish person who is the father of the Finnish audio description scripted the audio description. They recorded it. She decided she wants music in that movie, but the music will be sync with the other description.

TR:
Yulia decided, she didn’t want the composer of the music for her film to actually see the film. Rather, she wanted to music to be composed based on the audio description.

Kemal:
It’s a comedy movie.
There’s a lot of sync points, like cartoonish sync points. Well,

TR:
A comedy? Not the first genre that comes to mind when thinking about ableism in medicine, but ok.

I haven’t seen the film, but if you’re not clear about sync points, think slap stick. You need the music to be timed with the pie in the face or the fall after slipping on the banana peel.
— Slapstick music

Kemal:
it’s a real comedy.

TR:
The challenges go beyond hitting the comedic sync points.

Kemal:
One, because it’s a silent movie, there’s no dialog. Everything is told by gestures and that’s why all the description never stops, talking, talking, talking. (Fades away)

So for a Media Composer, it’s a nightmare, because since the voiceover never stops, how I score something has its own taste, has its own part, but will not fight with the voiceover, which never stops.
But the bigger challenge is the director told me that she will combine the score, the audio description and the picture after I deliver everything to her. And I was like, okay, then give me the picture so I can catch all sing points, and it will be done. She told me , nah, I won’t give you anything, score the music, and we will see whether or not it will fit with the picture.

TR in conversation with Kemal:
She’s definitely a comedian.

(The two laugh.)

Kemal:
She’s a multidisciplinary artist. And I still can’t believe how inspiring she is. She took all the time talk about all the allegories that she used, all the reflections, all the sub context, and she was always accessible for questions and more debates in terms of how the music should be. And she didn’t give any hint what kind of music that she wants.

TR:
Fortunately, she hinted that she wanted the music to sound fancy. By that she meant classical.

Kemal:
I scored a Hollywood style comedy score, all the bells and whistles, all the wind, strings, brasses, percussion, everything.

TR:
The director’s plan was to move a few things around if necessary to sync the score to the film.

Kemal:
She called me eventually And she was like, Kemal, guess what? I said what? I decided to not change anything. I will place all cues as they are. I was like, Okay, why did you decided to do that? She was like, you will see. I will send you the picture.

TR:
He watched it. And of course, like any artist, he found some technicalities he could change, but all in all…

Kemal:
The score nailed it. It was like a magical moment for me, because I never tried to do that in my entire life. I used to work with picture. I’m proud of myself. It just worked with just audio description. And it’s a silent movie Thomas.

TR:
Audio description is more than entertainment. It’s empowering.

Kemal:
it was my proudest moment on my professional career, I nailed a ridiculous challenge, and it opens a whole new door in my creativity and in the world of creativity, I assume because now we have a proof of concept that a Blind Media Composer can score a motion picture thing. It can be a short movie, it can be a feature film, it can be a cartoon. It can be anything, if there’s audio description that will be enough. And if you want to make it perfect, then provide some time codes, it will be perfect.

TR:
Octavia Butler wrote; “there’s nothing new under the sun.”

In 1979 Stevie Wonder released the album Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants. This was the score to the documentary titled Secret Life of Plants.

— Audio from the documentary…

Stevie, or some of y’all know I like to refer to him as my uncle Stevie, (a filtered voice remarks, “He’s not your uncle.) scored the film based on the description he was given of the films visuals; ahem, audio description.

This doesn’t take anything away from Kemal’s accomplishment . I share this to be factual and model the idea that we’ve been here y’all!
An awareness of our history, especially going beyond what we’re spoon fed, is inspiring and let’s us know it’s all possible.

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
What made Jenny Yulia choose you?

Kemal:
She wanted to work with a blind composer and the creator team found me because I published an article in blind new world in beginning of 2024.

TR:
I’ll link you to that article in this episode’s blog post at ReidMyMind.com.

Kemal
Then we connected on Zoom. And something clicked between Yulia and I, and I knew that it will be hell of a journey with her. And it really was

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
You have a great energy, bro. So I can see why people would click with you.

Kemal:
it’s very kind of you, thank you so much for that.

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
You mentioned that this accomplishment open the door for creativity. Yes, we can score animation. We can score movies. Does it go beyond that for you?

Kemal:
Actually, yeah. I want to focus on Western art music Impressionism, and expressionism. These are the two genres in the Western art music area and there are fathers of that, two genres, one with you, interpretate what you see. It can be a painting, it can be a sculpture, it can be anything. It can be even a kind of a story or poem.

— “Mona Lisa” Nat King Cole

TR:
I’ve been interested in sound designing image descriptions for various pieces of art including paintings and sculptures.
Rather than your straight vanilla reading of an image description, imagine how engaging an experience could be when
we combine a performed reading of a poetic image description with musical composition and sound design?

As Blind people, we aren’t going to have the same experience with visual art so why not strive for new experiences.

Kemal:
The music should serve the story, it’s like a sidekick to the story, and audio description, even though tells what’s going on
it will definitely fail to express all the allegories in it. And the music comes to help, because music tells whether or not it’s creepy, lousy, fictitious, Mystic, empowering, engaging, heroic, the music, the one which expresses the emotions, like anger, love, being desperate, outrage, or the expressions like, hilarious, annoying, embarrassing.

from a blind audience perspective, they will not be able to see the clouding, they will not be able to see the color grading because audio description has a limited time to tell what’s going on.

TR:
We’re talking about all of the small details in a scene whether static or moving. Could it be written? Yes. But is it always the most engaging?

Kemal:
The score can do those kind of things.
What if score tells the weather is cloudy and the woman, even though look pretty, she has something in her mind that makes her sad. An audio description will maybe express some of those, but will not be able to tell all of it. But music can express those things with the sounds that opens the whole new world of creativity to me.

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
What does the ad viewer need to know? Are we literate enough to be able to translate what you’re communicating musically?

I think what I really probably should say is that we need to pay more attention.

I’ll admit that I listen to the music and I listen to sound design and I get the vibe, but I don’t know if I always put it into context of what the story is saying.
I feel like I need to be paying more attention to that music, that sound design, and the AD. It’s a lot of work.

Kemal:
It’s not entirely your fault.

Maybe audio description might mask the score in some certain places. Maybe the director wants to go another route. Maybe they don’t want to use music at all. We should look at the masterpieces here. I think the most famous score, Star Wars.

TR:
Next time on Flipping the Script on Audio Description, we’ll explore sound design and music in movies.
What are some of the things we should know, how can we become more active listeners and maybe take a listen to some examples.

Not just for the sake of doing so but with the intention of making use of the other ways information is communicated in visual media. Creative ways that we as non visual consumers can explore and benefit from.

In addition to composing for film, Kemal has some top secret projects I look forward to learning more about in the future.

Kemal:
We’ve been working on a project with Lachi, my friend and colleague. I can’t tell more about it just yet, NDA’s.

There’s also something coming up. I just saw the papers in my email just before I connected here. It will be kind of a different project, that much I can tell. It won’t be a motion picture thing, it will be a theatrical. Takes place in New York.

TR in Conversation with Kemal:
If you’re gonna be in New York City, definitely let me know. I’m right there man.

Kemal:
I will definitely do that.

TR:
For Kemal, music helped him, in his own words, blend in. For some that may sound like hiding and perhaps at one point it was. But today, Kemal is clear about what that means to him.

Kemal:
In the past? It means, if people doesn’t get the clue that I have a site condition, then I will consider myself blended.

I think it kind of ruined my social life when I was young, and it kind of ruined my love life.
Now, blending is celebrating who you are.

Everybody, including myself accepts my identity. Everybody including myself celebrates it, because that’s who I am.

Thanks to my dear friend Steven Letnes, and thanks to ramped recording artists and music professionals with disabilities, thanks to all those, I’ve found a community. Now blending is celebrating who you are, celebrating your identity, celebrating that out loud. Hey, my name is Kemal and I identify as blind. And what’s up with that?

(The two proudly laugh.)

TR:
That’s right, what’s up with that. (Ouie!)

I respect that commitment to shouting out those who support you along the way, especially mentors and those in your community.

Check out this episodes blog post for links to both The Able foundation and RAMPD.
And of course I’ll link you to KemalGorey.com where you can check out more about Kemal and his music.

Kemal:
kilo, Echo, Mike, Alpha, Lima, golf, Oscar, Romeo. Echo, yankee.com.

TR:
As the kids used to say, Google him baby!

Find him on all social media platforms.

Kemal:
Everything KemalGorey, blue sky, Instagram, LinkedIn, IMDb and ramped also. All professional members have their profiles at RAMPD.

TR
This is right about the time when I let the guest know how much I appreciate the fact that they shared their expertise and time with the family.

I was inspired to do that a little differently now, check this out.

— Music begins: A piano synth loop that leads to a strong kick and driving beat.
TR:
In 2014 I introduced you to this podcast | It’s a passion project, that means all love, no cash
Over 10 years bringing you nothing but facts | my goal for this has always been impact!
I invite a guest, take a topic tailor it just for you | a disability perspective always shining through
Thanks to my guest for sharing your time with me, You’re official | Reid My Mind Radio Family… Raa!

Official, uh uh official | Official, uh uh official !
Official, uh uh official | Official, uh uh official
You’re Official! | Reid My Mind Radio Family!

Official, uh uh official | Official, uh uh official !
Now whose official? | Official, uh uh official
Kemal: Kemal Gorey
You’re Official! Reid My Mind Radio Family!

For all y’all thinking, hmmm, what can I do| I wrote a checklist so you can become official too
Sample: “One” Chuck D!
You just can’t be down if you don’t follow or subscribe | That’s the number 1 way to join this tribe!
Sample: “Two” Chuck D!
Shout it out! Tell all your friends and your foes | That’s the way we help each other when the podcast grows
Sample: “Three” Chuck D!
Buy merch, shirt or hoodie for yourself or your boo | Now look at that, you’re official too! Woo!

Official, uh uh official | Official, uh uh official !
Now whose official? | Official, uh uh official
You’re Official! Reid My Mind Radio Family!

Official, uh uh official | Official, uh uh official
I said who’s official? | Official, uh uh official
(Applause)
You’re Official! | Reid My Mind Radio Family!

There it is!

Follow or subscribe wherever you get podcasts!
You know how we do, right?
Transcripts and more are at ReidMyMind.com
And so there’s never, ever, ever, ever any confusion
That’s R to the E I
Sample: D! And that’s me in the place to be! Slick Rick
Like my last name!
— Reid My Mind Radio Outro
Peace

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