There were already tears in the room when Patrick Darling’s song began to play. The track was written for his great grandfather, someone he never met. But the emotion ran deeper. It marked the first time the 32 year old musician had appeared on stage with his bandmates in more than two years, since he lost the ability to sing.
Darling was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis at 29. Like other motor neuron diseases, ALS slowly strips away muscle control. Over time, people lose the ability to move, speak and eventually breathe. Darling’s last live show was more than two years ago, when he had already started struggling to stand or play and was beginning to lose his voice.
Recently, everything changed. Heading into an event in London on Wednesday, he used a synthetic version of his old voice, reconstructed through an AI tool trained on snippets of past recordings. Another ElevenLabs tool allowed him to compose new songs. For the first time since his diagnosis, Darling could make music again.
“Sadly, I have lost the ability to sing and play my instruments,” he said on stage, using the voice clone. “Despite this, most of my time these days is spent still continuing to compose and produce my music. Doing so feels more important than ever to me now.”
Darling grew up surrounded by instruments. He said he started composing at 14 and later learned bass guitar, acoustic guitar, piano, melodica, mandolin and tenor banjo. Singing was his greatest passion.
He met bandmate Nick Cocking more than a decade ago, joining Cocking’s Irish folk group, the Ceili House Band, in 2014. As a singer and guitarist, Darling “elevated the musicianship of the band,” Cocking said.
Then small changes began to creep in. Darling became unsteady. Cocking remembered one rainy night in Cardiff when Darling kept slipping on pavement. At the time, no one imagined it was the first sign of ALS. His symptoms accelerated. By August 2023, Darling needed to sit during performances. Soon after, he began losing the use of his hands.
“Eventually he couldn’t play the guitar or the banjo anymore,” Cocking said. By April 2024, Darling struggled to talk and breathe at the same time. For one performance, the band carried him onto the stage. The next day, Darling called to say he could not continue. “By June 2024, it was done,” Cocking said. It was their last show together.
A speech therapist encouraged Darling to “bank” his voice, a process that lets people record speech before they lose it. But by then his voice had already changed. “It felt like we were saving the wrong voice,” he told the audience.
A second therapist introduced him to a new option. Richard Cave, a speech and language therapist at University College London and a consultant for ElevenLabs, showed him a tool that could create voice clones using just minutes of audio. The company recently launched a program offering free licenses to people who have lost their voices due to ALS, cancer or stroke.
Gabi Leibowitz, a speech therapist who leads the program, said the tools help people hold on to parts of their identity. They do not solve the physical challenges of ALS, she said, but they let users “create again, to thrive.” Some are able to continue working or doing the things that make them feel like themselves.
Cave used older recordings to rebuild Darling’s speaking voice. The result stunned him. “It sounded exactly like I had before, and you literally wouldn’t be able to tell the difference,” Darling said. He joked that the first word he generated with the new voice was inappropriate.
Rebuilding the singing voice was harder. The system works best with at least 10 minutes of clean audio, and Darling had little more than grainy pub and kitchen recordings. Still, it was enough to create what Cave called a “synthetic version” of Darling’s singing voice. It mirrored the original, right down to the slight rasp and uneven notes. Cave said those imperfections made it sound human.
ElevenLabs also created an AI music generator, Eleven Music, which can compose songs from text prompts. Darling leaned on it to shape his new track. Although the tool can spit out music in a minute, Darling and Cave spent around six weeks refining the arrangement.
Last month, Cave sent the finished track to Cocking. “I heard the first two or three words he sang, and I had to turn it off,” Cocking said. “I was just in bits, in tears. It took me a good half a dozen times to make it to the end of the track.”
Darling planned to debut the song live at the ElevenLabs summit in London. Cocking and fellow bandmate Hari Ma prepared mandolin and fiddle parts to accompany the music. After two years apart, they rolled Darling out onto the stage.
“I wheeled him out on stage, and neither of us could believe it was happening,” Cave said. Darling stayed on stage while the track played, and the band performed live beside him.
Cocking said Darling wants to keep making music with the tools. He hopes they can perform together again, though ALS makes every future plan uncertain.
“It’s so bittersweet,” Cocking said. “But getting up on stage and seeing Patrick there filled me with absolute joy. I know Patrick really enjoyed it as well. We’ve been talking about it. He was really, really proud.”
