Cool Old Music
Dean
You know, it's really interesting to see sometimes what people were doing to make synthetic music a reality back before computers and even before synthesizers. Take, for example, this unforgettably haunting theme music from a 1960s British TV show: Click here to hear the haunting theme song.
That was recorded in 1963--three years before I was born. Now that's fascinating on more than one level.
First off I find it compelling in its own right. Second, they created that without synthesizers: there were no synthesizers in those days.
Got that? No synthesizers. Furthermore, they didn't have multitrack recording. They could do "sampling" like we call it today, but that meant they had to record the sound on one tape. Then if they had a second sound they wanted in, to "mix" two sounds, they'd have to play two tapes on two different machines, and record them both onto a third.
Furthermore, there is no "live performance" anywhere in the piece. For the whole thing, no more than one note at a time was ever recorded. The whole thing was spliced together from various tapes cut and pasted together.
Furthermore, most of the music comes from 12 test tone generators, each capable of producing only a single note. Combine that with a few "samples" of a single plucked string, tape loops to create hissing effects, some minor voltage fluctuations to create wobbling effects, and tape looops. I understand that sometimes the splices of tape were only an inch or so apart.
It basically took the BBC Radiophonic Workshop weeks to create that recording, and there's not a single "live performance" recording on it. It's nothing but tone generators and tape loops and splices. Yet it sounds surprisingly organic doesn't it?
Oh by the way: the TV show it's based on was the longest-running non-soap opera TV serial in television history. It ran from 1963 to 1989.
Oh also, it's coming back, and the new Doctor is the best since Tom Baker.
No, it really is. I know because thanks to a friend (heheh) I've seen a sneak peak of the first episode. :-)
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For a brief moment I imagined the Daleks rampaging through the MTV Music Awards.
It was... beautiful...
I thought they had two- and four-track systems back then, anyway.
The best description I've ever heard of what the Mellotron sounded like was “a heavenly choir with a chest cold”.
You can read a much more extensive writeup on the theme music and how it was crafted right here.
The latest rumor is that if no one in the US picks it up, they will do a DVD-only release around the same time they release it in the UK, which should be October-November.
Of course by then, all the hardcore fans will have downloaded and burned DVDs already, so they'd better include some kick-ass extras.
And let us not forget Wendy Carlos' Switched-On Bach, also done note-by-note. While Ms. Carlos doesn't like it herself (her ambition is to use electronics to replicate actual orchestral sounds, and not the tones of the Moog or other synthesizers) it is still a popular album with the rest of us.
At any rate, those guys were very creative with sine-wave test-tone noisemakers, a piano harp and some plucky thumb thingies.
Link here
"Hartnell.wav"? Must confess, I've never seen any of the old Hartnell episodes. It was Tom Baker's portral of the Doctor that first captured my attention, lo these many years ago.
I wish more Patrick Troughton Dr. Who episodes had survived. It's kind of rough to compare with the later Who's for whom we have complete sets. I'd have to say my own favorite was Jon Pertwee.
So far as I'm concerned, based on the first episode, Christopher Eccleston is exactly the right man to bring back The Doctor in a new series. When I saw his photograph I doubted that very much, but by the end of the episode he'd completely won me over. Both he and the producers strike just the right note: Dr. Who should be engaging, witty, a little daffy, yet sincere and compelling, within scripts that are a little campy without being over the top.
In other words, I think the new series is damn near perfect. It's everything I ever loved about Dr. Who.
When I first heard that they were going to show Dr. Who here in Chicago, I was excited (many, many years ago). I'd heard about it for years from my Brit friends.
The first episode I happened to catch was “The Deadly Assassin”. You may recall that this episode has that deadly dull coronation sequence that goes on interminably. Well, as fate would have it for some unknown technician's glitch-type reason, WTTW played the reel with the coronation scene twice in succession (they later did the same thing with the Peter Davison episode “Castrovalva”). I didn't realize it was a repeat and gave up in frustration (WTTW was also playing the episodes the way they were shown in the UK—one short episode per day rather than editing them together as they did later). I caught all the Pertwee episodes when they started editing those together.
Then a couple of years later they played the whole series over starting with the Hartnell episodes and going through the Troughton, Pertwee, Baker, Davison episodes.
Re: "Switched-On Bach" - it was played using conventional keyboards, not note-at-a-time. I have the "Switched-On Box Set" from a few years ago where Wendy digitally remastered all the discs and there are extensive liner notes and outtakes as well :-) Wendy's TRON score remains the high-water mark for that style, IMO.
And let's not forget that other BBC SF classic...