These Hopeful Machines

Recording and electricity crack open the world of sound.

We start at the Brussels World’s Fair, Expo ’58 where a number of threads in the story were to converge and thence to radiate.

Then we go… Read more Audio

New musics rise from the secret projects and surplus junk of World War II.

Pierre Schaeffer and musique concrète – early tape recording: the life-threatening steel wire tapes at the BBC, the German… Read more Audio

We continue to plunder the junk of World War II: Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna and the new studio at Italian Radio – Tristram Cary, Peter Zinovieff and Robert Moog talk about finding cheap… Read more Audio

The early development of analogue synthesizers: the Moog, the Buchla and others – Raymond Scott – Eric Siday – the San Francisco Tape Music Center – Paul Beaver and Bernie Krause, the go-to guys for… Read more Audio

Born of war and raised on mainframes, computer music comes of age in the 70s and hits the charts thanks to the sampler.

It all starts in 1950 or so with Sydney’s CSIRAC computer and its loudspeaker… Read more Audio

Synthesizer bands of the 70s: Kraftwerk, The Human League etc and their equipment - via hip-hop to house/techno/intelligent dance music and all the sub-, sub-sub-, and sub-sub-sub-genres of electronic… Read more Audio

Long before the advent of radio, the phonograph and gramophone were being used as creative media. Hear about the 'Descriptive' category of recordings from the 1890s, and one of its biggest stars… Read more Audio

The Theremin and the Ondes Martenot are still in use today - indeed the latter includes Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood amongst its players. The Trautonium, a contemporary of these early electronic… Read more Audio

Bell Labs' Vocoder technology was at the heart of SISGALY, the Allies' wartime speech-encryption system. Read more Audio

Mark Ayres talks about the 'Crystal Palace' - a device built by Dave Young, renowned engineer at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Read more Audio

Before there was the VCS3, there was the VCS1 synthesiser! The first one was built by EMS at the request of Australian composer Don Banks, who took quite a shine to it... Read more Audio

Mark Ayres talks about Malcolm Clarke's 'in-your-face' electronic score for the Dr Who series The Sea Devils from 1972, realised on the Delaware, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's huge Synthi 100… Read more Audio