If Hugh Bonneville Wants To Know, Then No I'm Not!

I was called sad last week for knowing that Delia Derbyshire "realised" the original Doctor Who theme so it was interesting to see this article today. The experimental track - which she goes to pains to explain is "for interest only" - sounds remarkably like a track from The Aphex Twin's first collection of Ambient works. The Hamlet soliloquy is also excellent. I've been thinking a lot recently, about how I always said I would rather go blind than deaf and nothing has happened to make me change my mind - the thought of not being able to hear musical gems and trinkets such as these is just impossible to contemplate. I have also been thinking that I need to just start recording ambiance but I do not really have anything to do that with. I want one of these.

I have also managed to create a simple program for phasing two identical sound loops in the style of Come Out though from trying to find a suitable phrase to loop I have realised that the skill of the piece is selecting the right segment - technically my version is perfect and I have trimmed the sounds to fit a simple march/waltz time exactly - they just seem flat and uninteresting which is very disappointing.

However, thinking about this and the Delia Derbyshire tapes has made me realise how simple such manipulation has become. The early Radiophonic Workshop team did not use synthesisers, as I am sure you know. They instead, recorded natural sounds and re-recorded them at different speeds to create "hard-samples" of each note, re-recording them again in correct sequence to produce melody. The length of time that this must have taken is frightening but produced some extremely memorable sounds which probably exist somewhere in your subconscious today. It wasn't as if keyboard sounds didn't exist at the time - it was just that either they were unaware of or unable to afford them. This reminds me of my Sixth-form attempt to link two school rooms with an intercom we made ourselves (Stop me if you've heard this before). This failed because our soldering and general electronics ability was v. poor. The link was eventually made using two World War I field telephones which we found in cupboards at the back of the Chemistry Lab. Simple use of pre-existing technology is always cheaper than bespoke creation though always a lot less fun. The bottom line of this rambling is that I am aiming to produce something recognisable as music - melody and rhythm without using midi notes or any keyboard input to the computer - all based on cut-up sound phrases through a VB program. Watch this space.

I think I might try and make weather the theme of this piece what with the rain effects and not actually spending as much time as I should on the Cloud Appreciation Society website what with being a member and all. I may need help.