Howard Audio is proud to be a significant part of a project to track down and honour the very first South African of colour to get a degree. The project – an online interactive experience informed by nine months of intense historical research – shines a much-needed light on some of South Africa’s pioneering intellectuals whose contributions, either in full or in part, have never before featured in the country’s history books.
Howard Audio composed, sound-designed and final-mixed the audio for the entire online experience which consists of two videos that top and tail a total of ten audio stories along a visually-striking interactive timeline. Featuring bespoke solo piano music for every single piece of storytelling, Adam Howard was in his element over this project.
‘It was a brief like we’d never had before,’ he says. ‘It was almost like composing a whole movie, made up of different scenes reflecting a series of graduates of colour who had deliberately been sidelined from the mainstream South African history narrative. Working hand in glove with the Promise team, and Tebza Malope of Star Films, we crafted the ten narrative tales that take place over a more than one-hundred-year period. I composed and arranged around forty minutes of music. Unconstrained by the usual 30-second or even 2-minute format, I could set my musical imagination free. When the story required, I included African percussive and vocal moments to highlight the narrative.’
