Special Sound

Special Sound
Author: Louis Niebur
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 273
Release: 2010-11-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0195368401

This text traces the creation and legacy of the BBC's electronic music studio, the Radiophonic Workshop, in the context of other studios in Europe and America.

An Individual Note

An Individual Note
Author: Daphne Oram
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2016
Genre: Electronic music
ISBN: 9781910221112

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music. Having declined a place at the Royal College of Music to become a music balancer at the BBC, she went on to become the co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In 1972, she authored her only book, 'An Individual

Tuning in to the Neo-Avant-garde

Tuning in to the Neo-Avant-garde
Author: Inge Arteel
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2021-07
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9781526155719

This collection offers the first in-depth study of the radio medium's significance as a site of artistic experimentation for the literary neo-avant-garde in the postwar era. It addresses institutional and contextual aspects of audio drama, as well as intermedial and material issues alongside ideological and political topics.

BBC Radiophonic Workshop's BBC Radiophonic Workshop - A Retrospective

BBC Radiophonic Workshop's BBC Radiophonic Workshop - A Retrospective
Author: William L. Weir
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2023-05-04
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1501389165

In 1958, an anonymous group of overworked and under-budgeted BBC employees set out to make some new sounds for radio and TV. They ended up changing the course of 20th-century music. For millions of people, the work of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was the first electronic music they had ever heard. Sampling, loops, and the earliest synthesizers-long before audiences knew what they were-made up the groundbreaking scores for news programs, auto maintenance shows, and children's programming. They also produced the Doctor Who theme, one of the first electronic music masterpieces. The Beatles, Pink Floyd, and others borrowed from them. A generation of musicians raised on BBC programming-Aphex Twin, Portishead, and Prodigy among them-took these once-alien sounds and carried on the Workshop's legacy. Ignored for decades by music historians, the Workshop is now recognized as one of the most influential forebears of electronica, psychedelia, ambient music, and synth-pop.

Tape Leaders

Tape Leaders
Author: Ian Helliwell
Publisher:
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2021-10
Genre: Music
ISBN: 9781913231125

In the form of a richly illustrated compendium, Tape Leaders is an indispensable reference guide for anyone interested in electronic sound and its origins in the UK. For the first time, a book sets out information on practically everyone active with experimental electronics and tape recording across the country to reveal the untold stories and hidden history of early British electronic music. With an individual entry for each composer, it covers everyone from famous names like William Burroughs, Brian Eno and Joe Meek to the ultra-obscure such as Roy Cooper, Donald Henshilwood and Edgar Vetter. There are sections for EMS and the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and amateurs, groups and ensembles that experimented with electronics, including The Beatles, Hawkwind and White Noise. Author Ian Helliwell draws on his experience and extensive research into electronic music. After six years and dozens of interviews, he has amassed information never before brought to light in this fascinating subject. An essential book for anyone interested in electronic music history during the 1950s and 60s.

Noise

Noise
Author: David Hendy
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2013-10-15
Genre: History
ISBN: 006228309X

What if history had a sound track? What would it tell us about ourselves? Based on a thirty-part BBC Radio series and podcast, Noise explores the human dramas that have revolved around sound at various points in the last 100,000 years, allowing us to think in fresh ways about the meaning of our collective past. Though we might see ourselves inhabiting a visual world, our lives have always been hugely influenced by our need to hear and be heard. To tell the story of sound—music and speech, but also echoes, chanting, drumbeats, bells, thunder, gunfire, the noise of crowds, the rumbles of the human body, laughter, silence, conversations, mechanical sounds, noisy neighbors, musical recordings, and radio—is to explain how we learned to overcome our fears about the natural world, perhaps even to control it; how we learned to communicate with, understand, and live alongside our fellow beings; how we've fought with one another for dominance; how we've sought to find privacy in an increasingly noisy world; and how we've struggled with our emotions and our sanity. Oratory in ancient Rome was important not just for the words spoken but for the sounds made—the tone, the cadence, the pitch of the voice—how that voice might have been transformed by the environment in which it was heard and how the audience might have responded to it. For the Native American tribes first encountering the European colonists, to lose one's voice was to lose oneself. In order to dominate the Native Americans, European colonists went to great effort to silence them, to replace their "demonic" "roars" with the more familiar "bugles, speaking trumpets, and gongs." Breaking up the history of sound into prehistoric noise, the age of oratory, the sounds of religion, the sounds of power and revolt, the rise of machines, and what he calls our "amplified age," Hendy teases out continuities and breaches in our long relationship with sound in order to bring new meaning to the human story.

Mars by 1980

Mars by 1980
Author: David Stubbs
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Total Pages: 346
Release: 2018-07-31
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0571323987

Electronic music is now ubiquitous, from mainstream pop hits to the furthest reaches of the avant garde. But how did we get here? In Mars by 1980, David Stubbs charts the evolution of synthesised tones, from the earliest mechanical experiments in the late nineteenth century, through the musique concrete of the Futurists and radical composers such as Pierre Schaeffer and Karl Stockhausen, to the gradual absorption of electronic instrumentation into the mainstream, be it through the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, grandiose prog rock or the DIY approach of electronica, house and techno.Stubbs tells a tale of mavericks and future dreamers, malfunctioning devices and sonic mayhem. But above all, he describes an essential story of authenticity: is this music? Mars by 1980 is the definitive account that answers this question.

The Lord of the Rings

The Lord of the Rings
Author: John Ronald Reuel Tolkien
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 1994
Genre: Baggins, Frodo (Fictitious character)
ISBN:

After the Apocalypse

After the Apocalypse
Author: Srećko Horvat
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 107
Release: 2021-02-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1509540091

In this post-apocalyptic rollercoaster ride, philosopher Srećko Horvat invites us to explore the Apocalypse in terms of ‘revelation’ (rather than as the ‘end’ itself). He argues that the only way to prevent the end – i.e., extinction – is to engage in a close reading of various interconnected threats, such as climate crisis, the nuclear age and the ongoing pandemic. Drawing on the work of neglected philosopher Günther Anders, this book outlines a philosophical approach to deal with what Horvat, borrowing a term from climate science and giving it a theological twist, calls ‘eschatological tipping points’. These are no longer just the nuclear age or climate crisis, but their collision, conjoined with various other major threats – not only pandemics, but also the viruses of capitalism and fascism. In his investigation of the future of places such as Chernobyl, the Mediterranean and the Marshall Islands, as well as many others affected by COVID-19, Horvat contends that the ‘revelation’ appears simple and unprecedented: the alternatives are no longer socialism or barbarism – our only alternatives today are a radical reinvention of the world, or mass extinction. After the Apocalypse is an urgent call not only to mourn tomorrow’s dead today but to struggle for our future while we can.