Hooray, David Arnold has a five-part radio show broadcasting on Sunday afternoons on ScalaRadio (at 1pm) and you can hear Episode 3here – the link will stop working on Sunday 29th March. Don’t delay 🙂
It’s excellent, he’s extremely knowledgeable and enthusiastic about film scores and music (and he’s written scores for five of the James Bond films himself!) and he’s also an excellent communicator. You’ll be able to listen live to Eps 4 and 5 here on Sunday.
Episodes 1 and 2 are no longer available though quite a few people have tweeted @ScalaRadio (and @DavidGArnold) to say how much they’d like this so why not add your voice…
The above link will open a player if you access it via a laptop browser, if you’re clicking on a phone you can either listen via your browser or, if you have the ScalaRadio app, it will invite you to open the programme in the app. Up to you 🙂
If you are trying to find the programme by searching on ScalaRadio’s website or within the app there are some additional instructions below. Possibly useful for future reference in finding other programmes.
Web browser If you are starting from the landing page https://planetradio.co.uk/scala-radio/ click More at the top, then Listen Again, then look for the date and drop-down menu just below the heading saying “Listen Again” – it’s in reverse date order so scroll down to Sunday 22nd. At the moment David’s programme is the second picture in the second row – click on that and you’ll be on the link as given above.
If your browser says “Autoplay failed” you just need to press the play button (it’s a good thing – switching off autoplay on your browser, gives you more control over what noise is emitted from your newly opened tabs).
Phone app
Lower the volume before opening the app (it’s a bit autoplay-y) or get ready to click the stop button on the bottom right, and make sure you’ve fairly recently updated (might be harder to find the show otherwise).
On the menu at the bottom click Shows, then scroll down and find “The Music of James Bond with David…’ and press play. You will be able to listen to about 20 minutes or so without logging in, so if you aren’t planning to log in, put the link above into your phone’s browser and listen via the web app.
This post is mostly for me. I enjoy a podcast or other audio when I have certain house admin (tidying, dish washing) tasks to do and so to save me searching for where I’ve bookmarked them I thought I’d put them all here and add to them. Most of these are sonically interesting, as well as having interesting content.
Audio about Audio
Tracking the Lincolnshire Poacher (Nov 2006) – Simon Fanshawe http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/j2rhi/ (programme website)
– baffling radio broadcasts known as number stations, and what they might be
Knock Knock: 200 Years of Sound Effects (2023) – Resonance FM, presented by Sarah Angliss https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001hxs4 (BBC Sounds – audio) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001hxs4 (programme website)
– “From noises off to the sounds of tomorrow, composer Sarah Angliss and some of the world’s greatest effects artists celebrate 200 years of the awesome power of sound effects.”
Frontiers: Forensic Phonetics (12 December 2012) – Rebecca Morelle https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/b01p7bxw (BBC Sounds – audio) https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01p7bxw (programme website)
– all sound recordings made near anything plugged in pick up the inaudible variable ‘hum’ of the grid’s power supply, can be used as a forensic timestamp
Making Radiolab (2006) https://radiolab.org/episodes/91746-making-radio-lab – about how they use sound: “In spring of 2006, Jad and Robert took the stage at the SoHo Apple Store to talk about the making of Radiolab. Jad geeks out on the nitty-gritty of digital sound editing, and Robert discusses the editorial questions raised in creating imaginative soundscapes. And film editor Walter Murch weighs in on the components of storytelling.”
Fifteen inches per second (2004) Not available. Radio programme about 1/4″ tape (BBC Genome listing). Features also in a 2022 radio programme about sound with Chris Watson, which is also not available but this is its progamme page: https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000gcm3
Waveguide (from September 1988 to 2001) – BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/brand/p0338l70 (website for 64 episodes)
– “latest developments in radio broadcasting”. There’s an episode on the Radiophonic Workshop, Morse Code and a series on the effects of sunspots and other solar phenomena on radio transmissions and the ionosphere. Each episode ~9 minutes long.
Now giggling at @MichaelRosenYes' 2013 'Word of Mouth' on stenography (transcribing speech, eg shorthand or specially designed typewriter for verbatim court recordings etc), trying to transcribe someone's three-pitch sarcastic Oo-ooo-oooh https://t.co/qPCzJUP3Qo. Haha, fab. 14m+
“The acclaimed Bunk Bed with funny, intimate in-the-dark conversation and the voices of the famous dead. Peter Curran and Patrick Marber let those crazy disconnected thoughts before sleep float into the air.”
The sixth series of Bunk Bed is currently being broadcast on Radio 4 on Wednesday evenings at 11pm. It’s a rather lovely thing that’s a little difficult to describe. Or rather it’s a very easy thing to describe (it’s two men lying in bunk beds having random chats, with occasional guests) but it’s possibly not very obvious – unless you’ve heard it – why someone might go looking for that. But I recommend that you do 🙂
Two middle aged men gabbing away in bed for fourteen minutes shouldn't be radio gold but six series in @curranradio and @Pmarber 's powers of alchemy are stronger than ever https://t.co/DfhVJ2k7I2
You won’t have to look very far because the lovely BBC have added all the previous episodes from Series 1 to 5 to their BBC Sounds platform, and they’re adding Series 6 episodes after they go out. I love the gentle (sometimes sharp), funny ruminations and observations accompanied by the occasional rustling sound of a duvet.
If this is still a hidden gem I don’t understand why . It’s a gem and should be enjoyed by all . Why I love radio https://t.co/uiI8ocvdTp
You can subscribe to the whole thing (new episodes will wing their way to you) or you can listen on the web or via the app, and even download the episodes.
"I'll just eat this cake to keep my joints soft" – Kathy Burke on 'What I love about being over 50' https://t.co/w51kGVgYzh (2m audio clip). Funny in Four from #BunkBed
Well this is pretty amazing. Also very witty. A great cast performs an updated version of the 1970s The Stone Tape and it’s a treat for audio fans, full of wonderful sounds and rather unsettling. I’m jealous to learn that a bunch of people got to hear it in a crypt as I can imagine that would be the perfect way to hear it. Peter Strickland directs it and he was also behind the wonderful Berberian Sound Studio.
You really, really need headphones for this. It’s on the BBC iPlayer for another month or so.
From reading the Den of Geek post above (about the people hearing it in a crypt) I learned of In The Dark Radio which I think any readers of this blog would enjoy. They have events in London, Bristol and Manchester where you can go and hear stuff. I imagine it’s conceptually similar to the Third Coast Internaional Audio Festival of curated sound in Chicago.
I loved the bit at the end where they told us what equipment they used to record it. Londoners might like to know that it was filmed at 4 Princelet Street, Spitalfields, London. There’s a ‘meet the cast’ photo thing here. The Spitalfields Life blog has some beautiful photos of that part of London too, and a lot of information about its history and the people who’ve lived there.
Cast:
Jill Greely………….Romola Garai
Dr Leo Cripps……Julian Rhind-Tutt
Marvy Wade……..Dean Andrews
Terry Briscoe…….Julian Barratt
Cleft………………..Tom Bennett
Jill’s mother………Jane Asher
The scream………Eugenia Caruso
Music and electronics: James Cargill
Vocal effects: Andrew Liles
Analogue effects: Steve Haywood and Raoul Brand
Sound mix: Eloise Whitmore
Written by Matthew Graham and Peter Strickland
Based on the original TV play by Nigel Kneale
Director: Peter Strickland
Producer: Russell Finch
Executive Producer: Polly Thomas
This sounds lovely and is available to anyone with an internet connection, it’s aimed at children. This came to me via a forwarded email from the Audio Engineering Society who seem to do lots of cool sound-related things.
“Dancing is delightful to the music of the Victrola” – advert from 1908
Scotland: Wednesday 17th December
AES Scotland BBC Christmas Lecture: The Psychology of Sound and Music
Dr Don Knox + guests
First-time collaboration between the AES Scottish Branch / Glasgow Caledonian University (GCU) and BBC Scotland
Christmas Lecture for schoolchildren “The Psychology of Sound and Music” will be held at GCU at 11:00 on 17th December 2014. Featuring audio specialist Dr Don Knox and a host of guests. Questions about “Why you like certain types of music and dislike others?” “Why do some sounds make you jump and others soothe you?” and others will be answered in a fun lecture with lots of demos and interaction. The lecture will be streamed live on the Internet.
Unfortunately this lecture is not open to AES members but will be available to watch online.
A month ago I went to a rather magical event which involved hearing some very old audio recordings made in London. We were played a selection of sound clips that stretched back in time from the 1950s, gradually going back, further and further, until we were listening to a recording made in the 1888 of people singing Handel’s Messiah.
Ian Rawes of the London Sound Survey put the clips in context and it was a nice mixture of oral history and sound-recording history, in a cosy bar which was atmospherically lit with candles on the table.
If I wasn’t doing something else this Friday I’d be heading off to Brighton for the evening because he’s giving the talk there and I’d love to hear it again. Highly recommended.
London’s Lost Worlds of Sound
Friday 7 November, 8pm (£6/5), Marlborough Pub & Theatre, 4 Princes St, Brighton http://www.drinkinbrighton.co.uk/events/marlborough/londons-lost-worlds-of-sound-2014-11-07[there’s a link to tickets but if you’re local you can pick them up in person with no booking fee, cash only]
“In this spellbinding show, hear rare recordings of London life, from the 1950s right back to the 1880s. These sounds, captured by broadcasters and amateurs alike, bring to life a rowdy, vocal London filled with vigour and eccentricity. Lavender sellers and fortune tellers, the vanished songs of schoolchildren, fire stations and sewer workers, the propaganda and reality of the Blitz – all feature in this unmissable night for anyone into the history of sound recording, radio or cities. Presented by Ian Rawes, a former British Library sound archivist, whose world renowned London Sound Survey contains over 1500 recordings of London life. ”
Almost exactly a year ago (12 Sep 2013) the BBC broadcast the first episode of Neil Brand’s fantastic series “The Sound of Cinema – the music that made the movies” which was part of a wider series of programmes (television and radio) about film music. Being quick off the mark where film music events are concerned I managed to get a ticket to a premiere screening of episode one at the BFI the previous week, with a Q&A afterwards. Great fun.
Hopefully they’ll show all three episodes. I also hope the BBC will commission more programmes from Neil about film music – at the Q&A he mentioned that there was soooo much more to say and I would like to hear it.
This is the RadioTimes listing for the first episode: The Big Score and see also Neil’s website (plus events page) and Twitter. The paragraph below is from last year’s blog post on the programme.
Neil Brand’s The Sound of Cinema, episode one: ‘The Big Score’ on orchestral sound, 9pm, BBC Four – detailed programme information: “In a series celebrating the art of the cinema soundtrack, the heart of a BBC-wide season playing on radio as well as TV, Neil Brand explores the work of the great movie composers, and demonstrates their techniques. Neil begins by looking at how the classic orchestral film score emerged and why it’s still going strong today. Neil traces how in the 1930s, European-born composers such as Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold brought their Viennese training to play in stirring, romantic scores for Hollywood masterpieces like King Kong and The Adventures of Robin Hood. But it took a home-grown American talent, Bernard Herrmann, to bring a darker, more modern sound to some of cinema’s finest films, with his scores for Citizen Kane, Psycho and Taxi Driver. Among those Neil meets are leading film-makers and composers who discuss their work, including Martin Scorsese and Hans Zimmer, composer of blockbusters like Gladiator and Inception.”
I’ve found that eps 2 and 3 are on YouTube but from previous experience they might not stay for very long.
Fantastic speakers listed so far include Chris Watson, Nick Ryan, Tim Exile and Martyn Harries with more to follow.
This two-day event on innovation in sound production and broadcast will feature talks by inspirational artists, producers and engineers, and demonstrations of state-of-the-art audio technology. It will be an opportunity for radio and TV producers, engineers and technologists to discover how audio content is made today and discuss what it will be like in the future.
Themes
Creative – finding and creating content in the digital age
Responsive – audio tailored for the listener and by the listener
Immersive – creating engaging aural experiences
Live – capturing large-scale live events
Format
There will be talks in the morning and afternoon from invited speakers on each of the above themes. During lunch and between the sessions, there will be a large technology fair to explore and a wide selection of demonstrations of the latest sound technology.
There will also be a Technology Fair (and a dinner). The first stage is to register an interest in the dialogue box on the bottom of the event’s page.
Should you want to add this to some sort of online calendar hopefully this will work: 19-20 May 2015, BBC Broadcasting House, W1A 1AA
By a happy accident the two things I did on Tuesday stretched across the worlds of modern and old sound recordings.
On Tuesday afternoon I took part in a research experiment which is looking at musical perception (is a song happy, calm, tense etc?) to see if there’s a correlation between that and your experience of how good you think the recording quality is. I sat in a nice modern recording studio with banks of cool machinery (knobs and dials on the mixing desk) and listened to clips of music, then scored them.
On my way home I got a text from pal Sarah inviting me to an event she thought would be right up my street. Amazingly, despite following @LondonSounds on Twitter and plenty of the other sound / audio fans that had retweeted the info, I’d managed to miss that this was happening! A quick bag drop-off and I was heading back into town.
After a delicious meal in a confusing restaurant we headed to The Social and for £3 Ian Rawes weaved a magical spell, taking us back in time with early audio recordings of London. It was perfect. It was also possibly one of the me-est events I’ve ever been to.
If you’ve ever been on a dark ride* you’ve probably had that lovely and slightly eerie sense of being immersed in a time-capsule. Ian achieved a similar effect partly just by playing his recordings, partly by telling us stories about them but also with a neat trick of telling us the changing proportion of people alive today who can remember that point in history first-hand. Plenty of people alive now can give a first-person account of the 1960s but hardly anyone alive today can tell us anything about life before the first world war, other than a tiny handful of super centenarians.
As we went back further in time (starting at 1 in 4 people now alive being able to remember first hand a particular point in time, to 1 in several thousand, and then an ‘event horizon’ where no-one alive now could have been alive then) we were treated to clips from the 1950s, 40s, 30s – all the way back to an Edison wax cylinder recording from 1888. That was one of the spookier recordings I’ve heard – a clip from a 4,000-strong choir singing Handel’s Messiah in London.
An Edison wax-cylinder phonograph. The horn acts as both a recording device and playback.
We heard how changes in portability of recording technology made it easier for people to get out and record stuff. I had no idea that records were made directly in some earlier recordings (ie not a transfer of magnetic tape to vinyl, or shellac, but directly onto a record).
There were clips from people singing their street cries or at markets. We still get market callers in London but I don’t often hear newspaper sellers these days – since so many papers are given away free perhaps there’s less incentive. I used to hear “E’enin’ Stan’d” sellers touting the Evening Standard, but hardly ever now and nothing for Metro, Time Out or Stylist either, though I can imagine what they might sound like.
A strong contender for my “mind-blown factoid of the evening” is probably that the tune for the old Thames Television ident (bah bah bah bah, ba-ba-ba baaaah) is in fact a flower-seller’s song “Will you buy my sweet violets?” arranged by composer Johnny Hawkesworth (we heard a clip of another flower seller calling attention to her blooms). Gosh!
As my friend Sarah observed there was a bit of a class, or at least RP, gulf between the interviewers & subjects. Men (mostly, though there was a fun clip of a woman interviewing children as they explained their “Do you know the muffin man?” song) in clipped tones talked about a topic or spoke to working men going about their business. Sarah wondered about any recordings made by working class voices themselves and gave an example of recordings she’s found of submariners merrily singing a ribald song, without mediation from the BBC. These types of recordings appear to be in short supply though and it also seems that Lord Reith (then head of the BBC) wasn’t too keen to hear the voices of the ordinary man (or woman) as he thought they were poorly qualified to speak on anything. Fortunately many of his colleagues disagreed.
As we all chatted later we wondered if / hoped that Ian might take his talk on a bit of a tour. He pointed out that it’s London-centric (a consequence of the BBC I suppose) so wondered if it would have as wide appeal in other cities. I hope that it would as the recordings and voices, and the narrative context Ian gives them, are a lovely thing to hear, wherever you’re from.
*Dark rides have been much-used in historical museums. The Jorvik Viking Centre’s one is still going strong though a number of them have fallen by the wayside including the Oxford Story which closed in 2007 and London’s Tower Hill Pageant. They are more often found in amusement parks.
Further reading The origins of actuality sound on BBC radio (date unknown) London Sound Survey – which includes this great description of one of the recording devices, the Blattnerphone.
“The Blattnerphone was an intimidating device which recorded sound onto sharp-edged steel tape either 3mm or 6mm wide. The tape moved briskly at 1.5 meters a second between reels which could weigh around 20 kg when fully wound. Errant reels which fell off the Blattnerphone’s heavy iron frame and rolled away were reputedly capable of smashing through partition walls.
The hazards posed to the operator by a flailing, broken tape meant that the Blattnerphone had to be worked by remote control. Editing was done by means of soldering or spot-welding. The sound quality was sufficiently good for broadcast speech. A familiar example of a Blattnerphone speech recording is Neville Chamberlain’s broadcast at the outbreak of the Second World War.”
Last weekend I was at the LSE for a talk on sonic landscapes. It included a presentation on some of the sounds recorded by helioseismologists (people who study movements within the Sun). Technically space is a bit silent because, despite tripping over planets and asteroids, there aren’t many molecules floating around freely that would be able to support transmitting any sound. Fortunately there are ways around it* and in this 3 minute clip (annoyingly I don’t seem to be able to embed it) Dr Maggie Aderin-Pocock takes us on an audio tour of the universe, in advance of a sounds of the universe special on BBC 4 tomorrow. Can’t wait 😀
(1) Sound of the Sun – wide-band-pass-filter, Birmingham Solar Oscillations Network
(2) Jupiter’s Chorus – Nasa/Donald Gurnett, University of Iowa
(3) Voyager leaving the heliosphere – Tim O’Brien/Nasa
(4) Pulsar – Tim O’Brien/Patrick Weltevrede/Cees Bassa/Sam Bates.
Slideshow production by Victoria Weaver, Rob Liddell and Paul Kerley. Publication date 8 March 2014.
* “The acoustic waves detected by BiSON are analogous to sound waves on the Earth. Imagine the oscillating surface of the Sun behaving like a sound source. For instance, a loudspeaker produces sound by generating compression waves in the air due to the movement of the cone. These pressure waves are detected by the ear and transmitted as electrical impulses to the brain. Similarly, the BiSON spectrometers are sensitive to spectral lines in sunlight. By observing the Doppler shift of these spectral lines we are able to reconstruct the movement of the solar surface and calculate the frequencies present using discrete Fourier methods. We can think of this as listening to the sound of the Sun. As with many sound sources, these are not pure tones and we need to extract the notes which are of interest to us.”
Source: Sounds of the Sun from High-Resolution Optical Spectroscopy, Birmingham BiSON