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Audio on the Web - Rediscovering the era of the Radiophonic Workshop

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Olivier Thereaux | 11:46 UK time, Wednesday, 23 May 2012

For the past two years, our team has been involved in the activity, participating in an effort to bring open, standard technology to process and synthesise audio on the web.

With recent progress on and early implementations, we felt it was time to start playing with the emerging APIs. There were already many demos showing what can be done with the now-defunct as well as the proposed and , yet we felt there was room for us to build something which would not only help show the capabilities of these APIs, but could also feed into the standardisation work by revealing gaps in features, by gathering impressions of working on some less-used sections of the specs, and perhaps even by stretching the implementations enough to raise flags about performance.

Daphne oram blowing a Mijwiz, an Arabic reed pipe, while Richard Bird records the sound on a tape machine. ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radiophonic Workshop, Maida Vale, 1958

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What, then, should we build?

We knew we wanted our work to link the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳'s long history of audio (90 years this year) and what we think is its future - on the web. We also knew there were many things the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ might want to build with a working web audio processing technology. Wouldn't it be great if people could create their favourite binaural mix on the fly rather than having to listen to several pre-processed mixes? Wouldn't it be fun if everyone could create their own Radio1 MiniMix, directly in their browser?

Unfortunately, the time was not ripe to build those just yet - being early in the innovation and standardisation process means that our raw materials are specifications which are bound to change, and implementations ill-distributed across browsers and platforms. Not the greatest recipe for a public service the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ would want to promote to its wide audience and support in the future.

A new frontier for audio innovation

This is a new frontier. And it reminded us of one of our favourite bits of ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ history: the emergence of at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳, half a century ago.

Equipment in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Radiophonic Workshop, Maida Vale, 1962

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The Radiophonic Workshop was born in a wild west of new sounds and technology, where engineers and musicians worked together in a rapidly blurring symbiosis. At first the roles were fairly clear: engineers creating and handling machines, and composers using those machines to create new soundscapes. A few years later, as technology evolved and new hardware such as synthesisers appeared, there were only people creatively playing with music technology.

Fast forward to today: such things are no longer the sole prerogative of a unique workshop, a professional studios with specialised equipment or even amateurs with the means to buy advanced software: if we succeed in our work, anyone with a web browser, a text editor and an idea will be able to create new sounds, new connected audio experiences.

Re-discovering the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ radiophonic workshop

As we dived into whatever material we could find about the history of radiophonics and the now cult-worthy ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ workshop, including the excellent 2003 documentary , we realised how timely our idea of using it as a link between the past and the future was: the science museum was running an exciting exhibition on the early days of electronica and the weird and wonderful machines which pioneers such as Daphne Oram had then devised. And half-way through our 8-weeks project, we learned that a new incarnation of the Radiophonic Workshop may be brought to life as part of .

After a visit to the science museum, dynamic trio Chris Lowis, Matt Paradis and Pete Warren began their detective work to find interesting material about the radiophonic workshop. We had all seen the excellent documentary "Alchemists of Sound" and made note of the equipment and processes shown in it, but our first exciting trove was a ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Engineering Division Monograph from November 1963: Radiophonics in the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳. The not only gave a list of all the equipment used in the two workshops at the time, it also included diagrams of several systems, as well as a number of anecdotes.

Electronic gunfire effect generator, from ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ Engineering Monograph 51: Radiophonics at the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

One of our favourite goes:

Prior to 1954, gunshot effects in drama were made either by the actual firing of a gun in front of a microphone or by slapping a ruler on to a table. The former, whilst being a pretty obvious method, was more difficult in practice than it seemed. The noise produced by a stage-pistol, firing blanks, does not sound at all convincing when picked up by normal means in a studio. Because of their comparatively loud peak energy, they had to be used a long way from the microphone and they sounded unreal. Then occasionally they 'misfired' (disastrous in a tense situation), they scared the performers, and they required a special license and safe keeping to comply with Home Office regulations.

Thus was born 'an electronic gunfire effects generator', which the monograph then describes, including even a block diagram and a photograph of the unit - quite the perfect material to base a demonstration of the Web Audio API (which itself works by connecting a graph of processing and synthesis nodes together).

The mystery of the workshop journals

The Wikipedia article on the workshop also brought an ounce of mystery to our investigation. It mentioned a series of journals documenting the hardware and processes of the workshop, which would be a fabulous trove for any radiophonics enthusiast, and would be an incredible help in our effort to reproduce some of that equipment on the web:

The Workshop regularly released technical journals of their findings - leading to some of their techniques being borrowed by sixties producers and engineers such as Eddie Kramer.

We looked everywhere we could for the mythical journals, even enlisting the help of our R&D librarian Louise Martin, to no avail. Louise helped us find plenty of material such as articles and books on the workshop, but the journals were nowhere to be found. It eventually took a conversation with radiophonic workshop veteran Dick Mills to dispel our dreams of poring through a pile of workshop journals: the workshop team did not publish its own journals, but had, through the years, contributed a number of articles to magazines such as Practical Electronics, Studio Sound and the Dr. Who Magazine

So much for the hidden treasure. In our quest for it, however, we had accumulated knowledge about several pieces of equipments, which we began recreating with web standards.

In the next post in this series, we will be looking at how we recreated some of the cult radiophonic equipment on the web, porting old-school knobs and switches to the screen and contributing to emerging web standards in the process.

Comments

  • Comment number 1.

    Way back in my youth I write to Jim'll Fix It to ask if I could visit the Radiophonic Workshop, not least because at the time Roger Limb worked there and although not a relative, shared the same surname. Sadly I never received a reply.
    Rowan Limb

  • Comment number 2.

    From1964 to 1978 I worked on many Dr Who episodes as a sound operator, and remember Dick Mills, who was very helpful. I remember a bit of kit to create the Dalek voice, it consisted of 4 diodes in a ring modulator, flying jack leads and a reel of tape with continuous 30 Hz tone, all attached to a breadboard. Any photos of this amazing but effective construction in your researches. It was superceded by the 'Synthi A' analogue synthesiser. Tony Millier. PS. the gun shot generator was brilliant.

  • Comment number 3.

    @tony - We've been working on an emulation of just that piece of kit that we hope to be able to share with you soon. It's been a lot of fun! I'd love to see some photos of the original ring modulator too. Do you have any more information about the gun shot generator? We're trying to find some examples of when and where it was used. Thanks so much for your interest!

  • Comment number 4.

    I have one of these gunshot simulators! Rescued nearly 20 years ago from a skip after it had been used to simulate the sound of a metal box being thrown down a flight of stairs. I'm pleased to say that after some TLC it's back in working order again. It's a wonderful "Heath Robinson" device that can even add the sound of a ricochet to your gunshot. Watch out Dick Barton, I've got you covered! BANG -WHIZZ!

  • Comment number 5.

    Is the gunshot simulator still used in radio drama production by the ³ÉÈËÂÛ̳ or is it always a digital effect now?

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