BBC radiophonic sound experiment from 1957

From 1957, "Private Dreams and Public Nightmares," an incredibly weird and fantastic BBC sound experiment by writer Frederick Bradnum, pioneering electronic music composer Daphne Oram, and producer Donald McWhinnie. Oram went on to co-found the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the massively influential sound effects and music studio. From McWhinnie's narration introducing the piece:

This programme is an experiment. An exploration. It's been put together with enormous enthusiasm and equipment designed for other purposes. The basis of it is an unlimited supply of magnetic tape, recording machine, razor blade, and some thing to stick the bits together with. And a group of technicians who think that nothing is too much trouble - provided that it works.
"You take a sound. Any sound. Record it and then change its nature by a multiplicity of operations. Record it at different speeds. Play it backwards. Add it to itself over and over again. You adjust filters, echoes, acoustic qualities. You combine segments of magnetic tape. By these means and many others you can create sounds which no one has ever heard before. Sounds which have indefinable and unique qualities of their own. A vast and subtle symphony can be composed from the noise of a pin dropping. In fact one of the most vibrant and elemental sounding noises in tonight's program me started life as an extremely tinny cowbell.
"It's a sort of modern magic…"

"Early BBC radio phonics: Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (1957)" (via @chris_carter_)

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http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty

A friend had to do something similar for his Music Technology course at college. Record one sound, then create an entire extended piece by copying, reversing, splicing, repeating and distorting it. Took him ages, sounded amazing, lasted about a minute.
- Beanolini
  
  Did he do it with tape & a razor blade, or digitally? Our local university was still teaching tape manipulation (looping, splicing etc) to all music degree students ten years ago, though I don’t know if they still do it.
  - http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty
    
    Sorry, should have been clearer. He did it with tape and razor blade, and tape-path-demagnetizer-wand, despite having a Roland MC500 sequencer and Akai S950 sampler in his room!
    It was an exercise in patience and discipline, rather than what was possible with the current technology.
    - Beanolini
      
      Same with the local music students- they had a rack of samplers, and Macs with Pro Tools, in the same room as the tape machines. They were only taught how to use the modern methods once they’d done the tape stuff.
      - http://www.matthewpetty.com/ Matthew Petty
        
        It’s arguable whether there is any point in it now. The principles are useful knowledge, but it’s not a vocational skill these days.
        It’s like my wife’s time at London Film School in 2000. She used the big Steenbeck film editing machines, but on a recent visit, she found all the students using AVID workstations. The Steenbecks were all gathering dust – and because there is no elevator in the old building, they will stay there!
Max

Looking forward to some drum & bass or dub step remixes of the talking at the start!
Roy Trumbull

A number of people have experimented extensively with sound manipulation. My first experience with it was finding if you took the sound of an audience cheering and clapping their hands down to one quarter speed it sounded like a cattle stampede.
itsgene

And of course, the most famous application of these techniques at the Radiophonic Workshop was the original “Doctor Who” theme music – constructed note by note from sampled electronic sounds, flipped, flopped, reversed, looped, stuck together by sticky tape and run through side-by-side tape decks in an era before multitracking.
m1kesa1m0ns

The tape manipulators- 20th century Avant Garde types like Daphne Oram, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Morton Subotnick, Terry Riley- were true artists, manipulating their medium as ably as Picasso wielded paint. I’ve had a soft spot for this stuff ever since I volunteered at a college radio station in the early 1980s. I was free to play whatever I wanted and discovering albums of this stuff in the library completely changed my show. Many listeners had never heard anything like it, and apparently I blew the mind of more than one tripping individual by playing these guys. Which is high praise in my book.
timquinn

Is that Brian Eno’s mum?
noah django

no disrespect to the BBC sound engineers, who were giants in their field. But this programme is pedantic and boring.