Massachusetts Department of Public Health
"Hepatitis C" Audiotape

Through Soundscape's work with the Harvard School of Public Health, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health (MDPH) contracted Michael Moss to produce an informational tape notifying the state's primary care physicians about a possible Hepatitis C infection caused by contamination of the blood supply.

Working with MDPH's Jim Hyde, Soundscape planned a program that would include several field recordings of the leading experts on the disease combined with a studio recording of narrator Lisa Mullins of WGBH. The object was to make it seem as if the people were all in the same room and the interview had been conducted live. To ensure that the information was tendered succinctly, each question was asked several times in the field interviews. The answers were then transcribed and the best replies selected and edited into the final product.

The project was rapidly assembled on the Sonic Solutions Workstation. To provide a professional finish, MDPH desired that theme music be used. Budgetary constraints pointed to library music, and a suitable theme was found from the Soundscape original music library. Fourteen-thousand copies were then duplicated and delivered in a timely fashion to the MDPH offices in Jamaica Plain, Boston.

The project was very well received by the physician audience, and went on to be adopted by Schering Plough, the maker of treatment drugs for Hepatitis C, as their standard informational tape on the subject.