The Sound of Music - Brian Eno, Sam Bennett and Trevor Cox

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Speaker 10 BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts.

Speaker 4 Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robin Inks.

Speaker 11 And this is the Infinite Monkey Cage.

Speaker 1 Now, when I told Brian about today's show, I can tell you now he is the most excited I've ever seen because I said we are going to do the science of the sound of music.

Speaker 1 And within like a split second, he came back into the office. He was wearing Laderhosen.
He was yogling about a lonely goat herd. He was getting really excited.

Speaker 1 Go, maybe we can deal with the quantum superposition of Brigadoon with My Fair Lady.

Speaker 13 None of it's true. Well, I mean, none of it's true.

Speaker 4 Well, the Laderhosen.

Speaker 12 It is true.

Speaker 14 He does. No, this is true.

Speaker 1 You probably, Brian, used to wear a lot of Laderhosen. If you look at copies of Kerrang from the late 1980s when he was in the band there, and you've got very small knees.

Speaker 1 Additionally, I don't think your legs should work.

Speaker 11 I bet you've worn Leiderhosen on stage, haven't you?

Speaker 13 I probably have.

Speaker 4 Surely.

Speaker 2 Probably worn them to bed, actually.

Speaker 1 If anyone's been affected by the Leider Hosen conversation of this programme.

Speaker 11 The radio listeners have been there going, who was that who said wear lader hosen in bed?

Speaker 2 And how do I get in touch with him?

Speaker 11 Today we are looking at the history of recorded music. How have changes in technology since since the first recordings affected how music is made, composed and consumed?

Speaker 1 We are joined by an acoustic engineer, a music professor and a musical pioneer who's taken us through the airport and onto the moon. And they are.

Speaker 15 I'm Trevor Cox, I'm Professor of Acoustics at the University of Salford. And the sound I first fell in love with was the music my mum used to play around the house.

Speaker 15 Put some fat swallow on and I'm right back there.

Speaker 10 Hi, I'm Sam Bennett. I'm Professor of Music at the Australian National University.

Speaker 10 And the sound that I first fell in love with was probably the sound of the radio, and dare I say it, probably my dad's status quo records.

Speaker 4 Hello, I'm Brian Eno.

Speaker 2 I'm a musician, and my first sound I can remember being very impressed by was my dad's motorbike, which had a really baso-profundo engine.

Speaker 1 And this is our panel.

Speaker 1 We're going to start off because we're looking at the nature of music and, in particular, the recording of music.

Speaker 1 We thought that we should listen to what we believe is the first ever recording of music and see if, in any way, though we're always seeing these kind of modern technologies and imagining that recording of music has improved, but maybe it hasn't.

Speaker 1 So, I'm going to do a little bit of a radio three introduction to this. So, now for listeners on radio three,

Speaker 1 this is Debussy's Claire de Laloon, the third segment in Sweet Bergamesque, recorded by Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville and reproduced by Pactic Feaster and the team of First Sounds.

Speaker 4 Here it is.

Speaker 4 That was Claire DeLou,

Speaker 1 which is currently shooting up the charts at the moment. Currently, number three, particularly loved by apiarists.

Speaker 11 So, Trevor, could you describe that? What technology was used? What is that recording?

Speaker 15 I think it's also important to say that was 1850s, so it really is a very old recording.

Speaker 15 So, what you had was you had a sort of like a big horn that you spoke down, a funnel, and at the bottom of it was a diaphragm.

Speaker 15 And that diaphragm would be made to vibrate by the air molecules, because sound after all, is just vibrations of air molecules.

Speaker 15 And the back of that diaphragm was a brush, and the brush basically brushed on a sooty piece of paper.

Speaker 15 So you get a trace of the sound, and yeah, they just use optical techniques to sort of recreate it and play it back again.

Speaker 15 If you just take an image of it, you can literally treat that as in the same way as you would if you just took an electrical signal, you can just put it through a computer and replay it.

Speaker 15 They had to do quite a lot of work on it, though, because what you've got is this sooty brush going on a moving piece of paper and it didn't move very evenly.

Speaker 15 So So they had to do a lot of cleaning up to get anything that worked very well.

Speaker 15 And of course, it hasn't got very great fidelity because it's literally a brush brushing in soot, which is the other reason it kind of sounds a bit well, I was going to say rubbish, but I think it's actually amazing considering how old it is.

Speaker 11 Well it's a voice, a voice from 1850, it was 1857 I think it was, wasn't it?

Speaker 16 Yeah.

Speaker 15 You know, for me as an acoustic scientist, being able to actually get sound and analyze it was was a breakthrough at that point.

Speaker 15 Even if you couldn't play it back again, up until that point we'd had no record of sound beyond because it just disappears. So, at that point, you can start doing science of sound at that point.

Speaker 1 So, Sam, I mean, what are we able to tell from that noise that we heard? It does have a very ghostly feel, it feels very uncanny.

Speaker 10 It is ghostly, it is uncanny. I think what we're listening to is

Speaker 10 something obviously quite opaque in that it's hard to hear through the technology and actually listen to the sound itself because you know we're talking about quite embryonic technology.

Speaker 10 But I think that it's a great place to start because it just shows you how far we've come over the last sort of 150, going on, 170 years, in terms of noise reduction, which I think has driven sound technology since this point.

Speaker 11 What do you make of that, Brian?

Speaker 2 Well, for me, it's a fantastic moment because it's the first time that sound became physical.

Speaker 2 And the whole history of recording is based on that idea that you could actually hold this ephemeral material and you could move it somewhere else and you could use it in different ways.

Speaker 2 You could turn it backwards, you could cut it up, you could stick it back together in different orders.

Speaker 2 And everything that I do, really, as an artist, is based on that possibility of being able to physically deal with sound. And so that really was the beginning of a new art form.

Speaker 2 And I always think music should have taken a new name then, that kind of music. Just as a theatre took a new name when it went to film, it became cinema or movies.

Speaker 2 And we really completely understand the difference between those two things.

Speaker 2 But you still get this confusion in music where it's still cheating to some people if you do things in the studio to the sound.

Speaker 2 It's somehow unfair, you know.

Speaker 11 I suppose that's the first time that a performance has been heard more than once. Yeah.
So Samantha, we move forward.

Speaker 11 When do we start seeing recorded music as we would describe it today as the technology improves?

Speaker 10 Oh, look, I would think probably early 20th century and the introduction of things like the phonograph.

Speaker 10 Trevor spoke about that technology that we had just before quite beautifully, but obviously that evolved into wax cylinder recordings where instead of making inscriptions on paper, you'd have like a vibrating needle that would then make inscriptions onto wax around around a cylinder.

Speaker 10 And I think that that was definitely an improvement. So going into the 20s and then of course following that you had disc systems which then in turn sort of led into vinyls.

Speaker 10 And I think with every stage, I just come back to the point about noise reduction and that being quite a the sort of common theme throughout that century was with every technological development the idea was to reduce the noise of the technology itself so that what we heard was like the truest possible representation of what you hear acoustically.

Speaker 1 So, with a wax cylinder, how much of a change in the technology are we seeing between the kind of the grooves on a wax cylinder and the grooves on a piece of a record?

Speaker 10 Not a huge change in technology per se, but certainly on a disc, you can certainly fit more information on it, number one.

Speaker 10 Secondly, it's more stable. I mean, wax melts.

Speaker 11 But you're recording, I suppose you're shouting into a horn initially. Yeah, that's right.
Onto a wax cylinder.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it comes back to this point about signal-to-noise ratio, talking about a noise. But the early stars of the phonograph are the ones who could project their voice.

Speaker 15 So it's going to be opera singers and those were those big boomy voices who could shout.

Speaker 15 And there's some great pictures you watch orchestras being recorded of them all crowded around these ginormous horns and you're getting this very direct sound and the violins literally standing right next to this to be loud enough.

Speaker 15 And as soon as you get to the point where you can start using things like microphones, then you start seeing the orchestra set out normally and you start getting room acoustic incorporated into it and you get a much more natural sound.

Speaker 15 And you can record a much more diverse range of sounds because it doesn't just have to be loud people and loud instruments.

Speaker 11 So I suppose that's a big change, isn't it? Because you're using the sound pressure itself initially to make those to cut into the wax. And then there's an interface then, which is the microphone.

Speaker 11 When the microphones begin.

Speaker 2 In 1926 or something like that, they started doing microphone recordings.

Speaker 2 So you can hear it on some early blues recordings, where for the first time, people would just rent a hotel room, drag a blues player off the street, and pay him a few quid.

Speaker 2 He would record his songs, and they would be out on the streets. Because the other thing that was important about the transition to shellac or acetate was that it was much easier to print those.

Speaker 2 So, cylinders are very difficult to copy, to reproduce.

Speaker 2 Somebody, an audiophile friend of mine, once said to me, Well, of course the sound quality of cylinders was far superior to anything that could be done on disc until about the late nineteen forties.

Speaker 2 So this is an instance of a superior technology that just wasn't commercially very viable. So so that didn't catch on, you know.

Speaker 1 Was it easier to hide satanic messages on wax disc

Speaker 1 or the tube kind of version? Which which one would be the easiest way to secrete that?

Speaker 15 Ed Edison played round this idea.

Speaker 15 So in in the original phonograph he's hand hang-cranking it and he would sort of speed up to get and slow down to make the voice, you know, sound like someone high-pitched and someone low, and then you would play it back, and

Speaker 15 he'd have mad dog, mad dog, and then play it backwards and things like that. So, they were doing that back in the you know, 19th century.

Speaker 11 And then, when do we begin to move to what we might call modern recording? Because you hear the difference, don't you, in sound quality?

Speaker 11 You listen to some, you said, blues recordings in the 30s, Bessie Smith or someone like that, and it's quite a scratchy kind of recording, even when you enhance it and restore it.

Speaker 11 But then, in the 40s and certainly the 50s, you get recording that doesn't sound too much different from today. So, what's the change in technology?

Speaker 2 Several changes, more microphones, so the use of mixers, so that you could have not just one microphone that everyone's clustered around, but there'd be one mic on that particular violin because it had a solo, and

Speaker 2 this group over here would have a mic, and so on. And so,

Speaker 2 you had live mixing. That was the interesting thing.
You would actually have to mix an orchestra live because you were cutting the disc.

Speaker 11 You had to do the balance. So there's no tape at that point.

Speaker 11 Straight onto the.

Speaker 2 Yeah, so tape didn't really appear until,

Speaker 2 I guess, the early 1940s, was it? Something like that.

Speaker 15 Yeah, it was most developed in Germany during World War II. And actually, when the Allies got into Germany, they rescued the machines and went back and copied them.

Speaker 15 And actually, Bing Crosby was kind of funded a lot of tape development because he liked to record his radio shows rather than do them live because he was doing America, so he'd have to do them on the East Coast, on the West Coast.

Speaker 15 So that's twice as many shows as he wanted to do. He'd much rather record it.
So he was very keen on electric tape, sorry, magnetic tape for that reason.

Speaker 2 Well, now we completely take recording for granted. We expect everything to be replicable.
We expect to be able to hear things again, to see them again.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 the first musician who I think really sort of understood the potential was the guitarist Les Paul, who he was the first person to realize that if you'd recorded something on tape, you could place something else over the top of it later on.

Speaker 2 You didn't have to have a performance limited by a particular moment in time.

Speaker 2 And that really was the beginning, I think, of modern recording, where you could build something up like you would build up a painting over a period of days or weeks.

Speaker 11 And also, Samantha, you have there an instrument that, well, Les Paul, so you begin to have the electric guitar, which I suppose is one of the probably the first widely used electronic instrument.

Speaker 10 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 10 I think that both the electric guitar and the widespread use of analogue tape recording simultaneously sort of was this catalytic kind of combination that was just a perfect combination for the dawn of the record industry, really.

Speaker 10 Brian was talking about Les Paul, but then through the 1950s, you had recordists like Sam Phillips, who used tape recording and multi-track tape recording in really innovative ways and then he invented slap echo so the use of two tape machines together where you record one musician onto one track of one machine but then you delay

Speaker 10 and you record that same singer say for example through a second machine and just vary the playback head and so you end up with this really short delay which you can hear all over like Elvis records and so on it gives that it gave all of that music a really distinctive sonic signature.

Speaker 10 And then you've got stereo recording, but then by the end of the 50s, turn in the 1960s, multi-track recording, four-track tape recorders, so splitting the analogue tape into ever-increasing sections.

Speaker 10 And so it gave you the opportunity to record, say, drums and bass guitar individually. The technology and the

Speaker 10 technological development allowed for sound to be controlled in ever more sort of intricate ways.

Speaker 11 And Brian,

Speaker 11 if you go through your record collections, you go through

Speaker 11 the early Beatles, let's say, or the Beach Boys,

Speaker 11 when do you start

Speaker 11 hearing music that could not have been played live? That really the studio has a big influence on that record?

Speaker 2 Well, even in the late 50s, that's starting to happen with

Speaker 2 Dick and Dee Dee

Speaker 2 The Mountains High, for example. I think that was possibly 1961 or something like that.
That was when people started to realize that you could add reverb to things.

Speaker 2 So that that was one of the first things you could really do. You could create spaces that were imaginary.

Speaker 2 So you could build huge, huge reverbs that made it sound like you were in a cathedral or or between mountains or something like that. And you could do that in a room as big as this table, you know.

Speaker 2 So suddenly sound became detached from location.

Speaker 2 And location became one of the subjects of composing. It just became completely a matter of course that you chose an added reverb to things.

Speaker 2 The other thing that became much more a subject of composition was tembre, so the actual quality of sound. For instance, the invention of microphones meant that people didn't have to go

Speaker 2 anymore, you know. Which is a pity, because I really enjoyed that.
Did you?

Speaker 7 I'll do you a bit more of that.

Speaker 2 So suddenly people could sing like this. They could sing like that.
And you could never, ever hear that against conventional instruments on stage.

Speaker 2 Or the acoustic guitar became a viable instrument because

Speaker 2 you could make that particular instrument louder so it was heard. So suddenly the sense of scale between instruments completely changed.
It disappeared actually.

Speaker 2 You could have somebody singing in a whisper against an 80-piece orchestra.

Speaker 11 Brian mentioned reverb.

Speaker 1 You apparently have the record, I believe, of creating the longest echo. So, in terms of reverberation, is this still correct?

Speaker 15 As far as I know, I have, yes, I have the longest reverberation time in the world at 78 seconds.

Speaker 7 And tell us a little bit. Yeah, this is where

Speaker 7 is that you'll remember that?

Speaker 15 So, it's an oil tank, which was a World War II shipping oil container up in just north of Inverness.

Speaker 15 And they basically carved it out of the inside of a Scottish mountain so it was safe from bombing, essentially. So, it's this vast, cavernous place.
place.

Speaker 15 And the reason it is so reverberant is because they made it bomb-proof. So, the walls are half a meter thick of concrete bedded onto bedrock.
So, yeah, I've played a sats phone here.

Speaker 15 You play a sats note and it just keeps going on and on and on. It's just quite amazing.
Very difficult to make music in, actually, unless you think very carefully.

Speaker 15 I mean, you can either go for whale song where you play really slowly, because all the notes are just lingering on, or you have to play really fast.

Speaker 15 You know, when you come out of a church service and you hear the organist just going fast and fast, and you get this sort of build-up of this smog of sound, don't you?

Speaker 15 But you can still hear the melody going on top. That's the other technique you can use in a place like that.

Speaker 11 So, these are we've talked initially about these are analogue techniques using bits of metal or even electronics.

Speaker 11 And then, I suppose we come into electronic music sampling and so on, and in instruments like the well, the fair light being a famous example of a tremendously expensive piece of musical equipment.

Speaker 1 So, Sam, yeah, what is the fair light for those of them who haven't played them on various heavy metal records in the late eighties?

Speaker 10 They weren't actually synonymous with metal bands or music. But no, the Fairlight CMI was a computer-based sampler sequencer synthesizer.

Speaker 10 So it was the very first time you had a digital synthesizer with pre-programmed sound libraries, a sampling capability, so the ability to record a short excerpt of sound and store it and then play it it back, and a sequencer, so the capability of layering up different musical tracks and different musical sounds, but not on analogue tape.

Speaker 10 And also, it was the very first combined sort of what I would now call a digital audio workstation, where this thing was pretty big and it had a massive keyboard, and it also had like one of those old kind of TV monitors and bright neon green visualizations.

Speaker 10 And it was the very first time that you could not only do all of that work in one space, so you could pull up sounds that were either pre-programmed, you could manipulate them.

Speaker 10 It had this incredible

Speaker 10 tool on it called the light pen. So you could actually just look at the screen and then kind of click this light pen, which was almost like a proto-mouse against certain sounds.

Speaker 10 And you could move crotchets a couple of bars later and you could adapt your music. And it was the first time that you had this in an all-in-one system, which obviously we take for granted today.

Speaker 11 And it was ruinously expensive, wasn't it?

Speaker 10 It really was, yeah, it was at least £20,000.

Speaker 10 And this was in the

Speaker 10 early 80s. At the turn of the 1980s, yeah.
So I mean it was quite an elitist object and put it. It was more than a house at that time.

Speaker 1 I want to know though, hang on, Brian Cox, not Brian Nina, Brian Cox, you said earlier that you played a fair light and then Sam said it wasn't used on heavy rock-based records.

Speaker 11 It was used on the first.

Speaker 11 I made an album in 1988, I think, which was, and we used it for the drum samples on that album in 1988. But it was a...

Speaker 11 I realized in the sequence of things, because before that, and not long before, you go back 10 years, I suppose, just a bit more, the first synthesizers were around, the Mini Moog and things.

Speaker 11 And you pioneered the use of those machines.

Speaker 11 So what was the first truly electronic instrument that you had?

Speaker 2 It was an EMS. Well, no, actually, that's not true.
The very first one I had was a test oscillator that I bought on Lyle Street in 1967.

Speaker 2 I was sort of fascinated by trying to make an electronic instrument. And I bought

Speaker 2 a signals generator, which was just a way of producing a sine wave from zero to 40 kilohertz or something like that. So all I could do with it was go,

Speaker 12 woo, woo,

Speaker 2 that was the extent of it. I was quite pleased with that.

Speaker 2 And then I got a wa-wa pedal and fitted that to it. So now I could go, woo-hoo-hoo-oo-eee!

Speaker 11 Did that make it onto any records?

Speaker 2 It gave me a musical career.

Speaker 7 So you used that setup?

Speaker 2 Well, I couldn't play anything else.

Speaker 11 So you used that on the early Roxy Music records?

Speaker 2 Yeah, so on the first Roxy Roxy Music album, there's a bit on one of the songs where I actually emulate it on my new synthesizer, which was an EMS

Speaker 2 that was made in Putney. In fact, the first one I had was called the EMS Putney.
The most unglamorous name for a synthesizer you can have, really.

Speaker 15 But what's funny about these synthesizers is, of course, everyone wants emulators for them now because they have become the sound of the time.

Speaker 15 And so they still live on, even if you haven't gotten a version of it, people want to emulate it and put it into their music still.

Speaker 2 That's a sort of rule of art that the shortcomings of an instrument become the sound of that period. You know,

Speaker 2 whatever it couldn't do becomes the characteristic.

Speaker 11 We were talking about your digital, so sampling the use of digital technology for, I suppose, what the early 80s.

Speaker 11 Which actually, to my mind, so I wonder what your opinion was, to my mind, it makes recording sound worse in the early 80s.

Speaker 11 I think you can really see that digital technology was being used because it was there.

Speaker 11 So, do we see that, that people are using the technology really almost too early?

Speaker 2 Well, yes, and what you see now is people

Speaker 2 buying instruments that offer you the possibility of emulating those shitty sounds

Speaker 2 from the early 1980s.

Speaker 1 That's fascinating, isn't it? The way that sometimes what was grotesque becomes nostalgic.

Speaker 15 Yeah, I mean, a good example of that is computer music, isn't it? If I think back to the computer home computer games of the 80s, they're so iconic, aren't they?

Speaker 15 And they're still replicated, even though they're pretty crude synthesizers in those

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Speaker 11 By the way, we talk about the multi-tracks, so the Beatles, maybe four tracks, as you spoke about. Where do we see that max out?

Speaker 2 How many tracks did in tape? Yeah. The most I ever worked on was 32 tracks.
I think

Speaker 2 that was as far as it ever went. Then it went to digital, and digital you can have infinite tracks, and people unfortunately often do.

Speaker 1 You know, when you've certain albums that you hear for the first time, or certain songs you hear for the first time, and sometimes you will hear a noise, or you will hear a certain soundscape, and you will go, I need to investigate this.

Speaker 13 Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I mean, the track that I always come back to as being quite definitive in that decade is

Speaker 10 The Tornadoes Telstar, which was recorded by Joe Meek.

Speaker 10 It's not just about the layers of the sound within that, and there's very instantly recognizable instruments, but it's more about the soundscape that is created and that use of the fabrication of space that Brian's been talking about.

Speaker 10 You can really hear compression at that point. And then I think that sort of set the precedent for those

Speaker 10 for that kind of late 60s space exploration, stuff like space oddity and the sounds in there where you know all of the cymbals are kind of panned around the stereo field to make it sound like, you know, we're in space.

Speaker 2 The funny thing about all space music is that it assumes huge long reverbs. But of course, there is actually no reverb in space.

Speaker 11 The universe is an infinite box.

Speaker 4 So, yes.

Speaker 7 So I like that.

Speaker 1 That's like the alien version, the prog version of alien. In space, no one can hear the reverb.

Speaker 1 But I wonder, you know, because thinking of your Apollo, when you are are there and you're thinking, for instance, you're thinking about music, which is representing the Apollo missions, and that sense of what you are trying to both emulate but also inspire in the listener.

Speaker 1 So, how do you approach that?

Speaker 2 So, just to explain that for context, I was asked to do the music for a film, which was a compilation of bits of film of the Apollo missions.

Speaker 2 I knew that the astronauts were each allowed one cassette tape to take on the mission with them. So, So I wanted to find out what they took.
And they nearly all took country and western music.

Speaker 2 And I thought that was so kind of beautifully American in a way. Here's the new frontier, so we'll use the old frontier music.

Speaker 2 So in that record, I thought, how could you make country and western music sound like space age music? So that was the sort of mission. I made it with my brother and friend.

Speaker 2 So we used pedal steel guitar, which is anyway quite a spacey sound, and keyboards and so on. And it's really sounded like space cowboys, you know, people on the edge of a new world, a new reality.

Speaker 11 You suggested earlier in one of your answers that

Speaker 11 the almost unlimited creative possibility now opened up with modern computers, you can almost do anything. You almost suggested that was a negative in some respects

Speaker 11 because of the constraints.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it makes people spend a lot longer making albums because you want to try everything in the studio. And now that everything, all the things you can do with sound,

Speaker 2 I should say it's like Moore's Law, they double every 18 months.

Speaker 2 Every single day, I get at least a dozen emails offering me new pieces of equipment, things that very often do things you already knew about, but quite a lot of them do something you could never do before.

Speaker 2 For instance, just recently, I got a thing called de verb,

Speaker 2 and it does something that I always thought must be impossible, which is it removes the reverberation from a recording.

Speaker 2 I thought, that's incredible. That's like being able to de-blur a photograph, which actually you can also do now.

Speaker 2 As soon as I hear of something like that, I always think, what else could you do with it? If you can take away the reverb of something, what else could you take away?

Speaker 2 Could you subtract the pitch and leave everything else? It always ends up being used to do something that you never thought of doing before.

Speaker 2 And this is my day job.

Speaker 15 I mean, what's happening that the big explosion is in machine learning, and it's these tools that are giving things like dereverb. I mean, we work on a

Speaker 15 project working on hearing aids and music, and we do demixing of tracks. So take a stereo track and separate out to its original components.

Speaker 15 And, you know, five, ten years ago, this was not possible. No.
Now it's pretty much a solved problem. And we're going to see more and more of this because essentially,

Speaker 15 what's in recording now is we have it in digital format. So it's a computational problem, it's a computer science problem of what we do with it.

Speaker 15 What I find fascinating, what Brian says, it's actually what the musicians then do with it. It's what's really interesting.

Speaker 15 And they abuse the systems which create the really interesting stuff.

Speaker 2 That's exactly right. Distortion is actually one of the most interesting things.
So, you know, in the early days of the electric guitar,

Speaker 2 people very much wanted it to sound clean and nice like a real guitar sounds.

Speaker 2 And then people started finding that when you really turned it up loud, because you were in a big auditorium or something, that crunchy sound was kind of exciting.

Speaker 2 Because crunch in a musical instrument means the message is too big for the medium. It's like this thing is bursting to get out of this confined medium, you know.
And that's exciting.

Speaker 1 So Sam, I was just thinking about that again. We're talking about advances, and then we hit that point where, again, we go backwards.

Speaker 10 Yeah, I think it's really interesting. And Mark Ronson did very similar things with Amy Winehouse Records as well in terms of recreating those kind of technological sounds, I suppose, of the sixties.

Speaker 10 What I think is really interesting about

Speaker 10 today's technology is just how much of it is based on old technology.

Speaker 10 So, software plug-ins and the layouts of digital audio workstations and things like that, they're so often based on technologies from the past.

Speaker 10 So, you know, when you're buying new plug-ins for your Pro Tool system or whatever, sometimes it's just full of EMT plate reverbs or it's impulse responses of very particular rooms that records were made in in the 50s and 60s.

Speaker 10 So we've certainly long passed a point where there has been a clear sort of return to those past sonic aesthetics.

Speaker 11 Essentially, you can't forget, I suppose, that ultimately you're trying to capture a performance of some description. And I wonder whether, as you said, you can simulate any room now.

Speaker 16 But

Speaker 11 how much as a record producer do you think about the environment itself? So, whilst you can make any performance sound like it was performed anywhere, how important is it for the musicians to be there

Speaker 11 in a studio?

Speaker 2 Irrelevant.

Speaker 11 Oh, irrelevant. I thought you were going to say, well, it affects the way they play and so on.
So, you really.

Speaker 2 No, no, sorry, I perhaps misunderstood what you were saying, but I think so few records now are made as a recording of a performance,

Speaker 2 even if there are live players involved, which they don't have to be, of course, because with samplers and so on, you can make it completely on your own in your bedroom. But

Speaker 2 the musicians involved probably rarely record together. So the drummer might do it alone to start with,

Speaker 2 or they might include, they might start with a piano and then two weeks later the guy, the drummer comes back off holiday and he does the drums. So it's a patchwork now.

Speaker 2 Of course there are bands who perform in front of the microphones, but that's really quite unusual to have an actual performance recorded now.

Speaker 2 And I don't see anything wrong with that. I mean, I think nobody would expect every painting to be done on the same day it was started.

Speaker 2 You know, we're quite used to the idea in other media that you do something over an extended period of time and that you can retract steps as well.

Speaker 2 So it's much more constructive now than it's ever been before.

Speaker 2 The problem of all of this is that you end up with sort of super pasteurized music where everything has been nicely finished and ironed out and there's no fibre left at all.

Speaker 2 You know, auto-tune is a good example of this. I mean I love the sound of auto-tune when it's used

Speaker 2 for what it can do that human voices can't do. I hate the sound of it when it just turns a voice into every other voice.

Speaker 1 It seems like some of the technology we're talking about almost approaches that uncanny valley situation where there's something that seems that the connection between the human who created it and then the final process, we lose that emotional connection.

Speaker 1 Do we ever, do we see that in certain recordings where you go, this has now been so ironed out that you have that Uncanny Valley experience?

Speaker 10 Yeah. Sound recordings are full of happy accidents and they can sometimes really make a recording.
I mean, there are just so many examples of

Speaker 10 famous recordings where right at the very end of it,

Speaker 10 particularly where there's fade outs, if you turn it up, you can hear a recording engineer talking to a musician. It's really fun to kind of keep those things on.

Speaker 10 When did things start to be ironed out? I think certainly when the audio capability of digital audio workstations became such that you could literally start chopping out breaths between

Speaker 10 sung parts of verses and choruses to the point where it's like, okay, that person's singing something, but they're not even drawing a breath. How does that work?

Speaker 10 You know, there were certainly certain styles of music at the turn of the 2000s that became quite clinical.

Speaker 1 Make the thing that a Ringo star, is it? He says at the end of Helter Skelter screams, My fingers are bleeding. Is it? You're on its way.

Speaker 11 I've got blisters on my fingers.

Speaker 1 But I've got blisters on my fingers, that's it. And it's just like that is such a great way to end a sound.

Speaker 11 Trevor, you mentioned this idea that you can already now we can begin to split up sound,

Speaker 11 which is a remarkable tool. I think it was used in some of the latest Beatles films when it's a remix, those things.
But so we've got an experiment that we're going to try.

Speaker 11 So for the listeners at home, what we've done is we've given everyone in the audience a QR code.

Speaker 11 And so, what we'd like to ask you to do now is turn your phones back on or off aeroplane mode or whatever you did, scan the QR code, and then you'll find yourself on a web page and that has a picture you can scan down and select where you're sat in the audience.

Speaker 11 And what we're going to do, and this is with the BBC RD department, the audio RD department, is we're going to split some sound up into sort of regions in the radio theatre, and we're going to play it.

Speaker 1 Let the experiment begin.

Speaker 4 Yeah?

Speaker 7 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, as you'll see, now the room appears to be pink.

Speaker 12 Anyway, so

Speaker 1 the experiment kind of worked, by which I mean the beginning bit worked and then the rest of it didn't.

Speaker 1 The music did come out of phones, but didn't get the sense of in different sections of the audience, the tune moving around them.

Speaker 1 And so we are going to try and create that effect at some point. And interestingly enough, sound-wise, does this sound like I am actually sat in front of the audience?

Speaker 1 Because if it does, it means we found the right way of faking doing retakes when everyone's left, which itself is an experiment. So, here's what it should have sounded like.

Speaker 11 But in terms of that idea, so you worked on

Speaker 11 the U2 live show at the Sphere, which had this remarkable

Speaker 11 sort of capability to throw sound around a venue. So, we see that, we're used to it in cinema, I suppose.
But so, are we going to see more of that, that spatial positioning of sound in 3D?

Speaker 2 I I'm sure of it, yes. I mean I think that in that U2 show there was something like sixty thousand loudspeakers

Speaker 2 and they were all very small speakers, but they were coordinated in such a way that the sound could be moved around. I didn't actually go to the show, even though I designed part of it.

Speaker 15 This is where some of the big developments are happening in audio is actually just sheer number of devices. So you talk about recording with one microphone.

Speaker 15 No, we're recording with huge arrays of microphones now, which enables us to do lots of manipulation of sound, but also in playback, we can have huge numbers of loud speakers nowadays, which allow us to do some most amazing things.

Speaker 11 Yeah, and I think one of the ideas of that demo is the technology can be used to harness the fact that we all have multiple speakers in every room in our house, pretty much.

Speaker 11 So, to begin to use that to build soundscapes.

Speaker 15 Yeah, the BBC RD sort of developed that. Actually, I was involved in that project as well.

Speaker 15 As the idea that, you know, this idea of having surround sound you have in cinema, how can we get it back into the home?

Speaker 15 And you're thinking, well, people don't want to redecorate their rooms and make put loud speakers everywhere, but everyone's got mobile phones. So, what can we do with mobile phones?

Speaker 15 And actually, it's interesting when you try and, I don't know, do a horror movie, having the sound behind you, it doesn't matter if it's not quite right, but having the sound behind you gives you a much more sort of visceral sort of effect.

Speaker 15 So it was quite effective.

Speaker 2 I started experimenting a few years ago with the idea of using lots of different types of loudspeakers for their own particular characteristics.

Speaker 2 So that instead of doing the thing that people normally do, which is try to make the speakers completely invisible, sort of neutral, as it were, so that every sound sounded the same going through every loudspeaker, I thought, why not use the fact that different speakers have different voices, just like different instruments in an orchestra have different timbres, you know.

Speaker 2 Because the thing about electronic instruments is that they don't have bodies. The body is the speaker, actually.
That's where the resonance happens and where the air is actually moved from.

Speaker 2 So, why not exploit that and make special loud speakers for electronic instruments? This was my business plan, which has

Speaker 2 so far not succeeded.

Speaker 1 I find it very again just thinking of how much an audience changes in its expectations, because I was thinking a lot, listening to some of your ambient records, Brian, and then thinking of soundtracks like to recent films like All of the Strangers, where soundtrack albums used to have, you know, very orchestral or synthetic and it was and it was big and it was saying, This is how you're meant to feel now.

Speaker 1 Whereas it seems like there's a new understanding of usat where you almost don't notice how you're being carried by the music, and that seems to be an interesting transformation in our expectations of music as well.

Speaker 2 And even

Speaker 2 more subtle tricks, even. For instance, somebody was just telling me they went to see Conclave.

Speaker 2 And there's one scene, apparently, I haven't seen the film myself, I never go out anywhere, really, so

Speaker 2 where the Pope is speaking in a huge cathedral, St. Peter's or the Sistine Chapel or something like that.
And as he's speaking, they reduce the amount of reverbs.

Speaker 2 So finally and quite slowly, apparently, the voice is right next to your ear.

Speaker 2 He doesn't move position at all, but they just subtract the reverb and they come in onto a close mic.

Speaker 2 And that is such a clever trick because it's like the thing becoming much more personal and focused on you. And I hear a lot of that kind of sound manipulation now going on in films.

Speaker 2 I think that's so interesting. It's so much more interesting than most film soundtracks are.

Speaker 1 I think you did go and see Conclave, but you were worried that you'd mentioned you hadn't been to see U2, and you thought they'll be furious if they know I went to see a film about the Pope but didn't go and see Bonaire.

Speaker 2 Anyway, so pretty much the same thing, really.

Speaker 11 So we asked the audience a question.

Speaker 1 If a piece of music played whenever you entered a room, what would it be and why?

Speaker 11 So Helen says, Fix you by cold play because I'm a paramedic.

Speaker 1 I've got the arrival of the Queen of Sheba. I like people to know I've arrived.

Speaker 11 It says, My son says it should be the Imperial March from Star Wars. And that's Luke's mum who said that.

Speaker 2 Isaac Bolton says anything from a Paul McCartney supergroup because wings can only ever get better.

Speaker 4 Do you know what? The invention.

Speaker 1 Every single show we have some version of that song that Brian wrote for Tony Blair.

Speaker 12 And

Speaker 1 the hallelujah chorus, because I have a terrible sense of direction, and it's a flipping miracle that I found the room.

Speaker 13 Right.

Speaker 1 Well, thank you very much to our panel: Professor Trefford Cox, Professor Samantha Bennett, and Brian Eno, who probably is a professor. I'm sure you are.
You're bound to be an honorary professor.

Speaker 1 Next week's show, the final of the series, is it's kind of a Scrabble special. It's not about Scrabble, but the words that are in that episode, you are going to love.

Speaker 1 We've got Siziji, which is 75 on a triple word score. We've got Gombok, which is only 45.
Check it in a dictionary, you'll find it, it's there.

Speaker 1 So we are going to be talking about the mathematics of nature and shape. Thank Thank you.
Bye-bye.

Speaker 5 In the infinite monkey cage.

Speaker 17 Till now, nice again.

Speaker 14 From BBC Radio 4, this is What Seriously?

Speaker 4 I'm Dar Aubrey.

Speaker 10 And I'm Izzy Sutty. And in our new series, we're bringing you short stories and tall tales.

Speaker 14 What seriously? It's packed with real-life, strange, but true stories that make you go, what, seriously?

Speaker 1 And provide you with excellent social ammo to impress your friends.

Speaker 10 The twist is, we don't know how each story unfolds, and we'll have to figure it out one fragment at a time with our special guests who each have a mysterious connection to the tale.

Speaker 2 That's right. I am your spy expert.

Speaker 10 And I don't really want to bring you back to the real facts of the story because you're making me laugh so much, but I feel like I should.

Speaker 7 We're the only country in the world that ate the animal on our crest, like, and I never know whether to feel terrible or brilliant about that.

Speaker 10 All these engineers trying desperately to reduce the amount of dust in space, and you get Izzy taking up a balloon balloon full of blitz like, wow.

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Speaker 4 Shut that one on the house.

Speaker 4 I know, right?

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Speaker 21 Hello, I'm Greg Jenner, host of You're Dead to Me, the comedy podcast from the BBC that takes history seriously.

Speaker 21 Each week, I'm joined by a comedian and an expert historian to learn and laugh about the past.

Speaker 21 In our all-new season, we cover unique areas of history that your school lessons may have missed, from getting ready in the Renaissance era to the Kellogg Brothers.

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