What the Future Sounded Like
From Dr Who to The Dark Side of the Moon to modern day dance music, the pioneering members of the Electronic Music Studios radically changed the sound-scape of the 20th century. What the Future Sounded Like tells the fascinating story of British electronic music.
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00:00At the moment, there's certainly an increasing interest in electronic music, music that is
00:11produced by electronic oscillators.
00:15Think of a sound and now make it.
00:18Any sound is now possible.
00:20Any combination of sounds is now possible.
00:25I think people who judge it harshly have to remember that it is in a pioneer stage as
00:32a viable art form.
00:35Electronic music proper is not about making instrumental type noises.
00:41One thing which is odd is that there's a missing chapter, which is EMS in all the books about
00:46electronic music.
00:49I do not know what incredible mechanical adventures we were up to.
01:19With electronic music, I was always much freer in the beginning.
01:38I was more inhibited with my instrumental music because I actually took it as a course,
01:43you see.
01:44I went to a counterpoint teacher.
01:46I was, to some extent, inhibited by what I was taught.
01:53Electronic music, we were all at the coalface in the 50s, so anything went, so to speak.
02:05When I started to seriously design a studio, this coincided with the post-war appearance
02:14of an enormous amount of junk from the Army, Navy, and Air Force.
02:19So for someone who knew what to do and could handle a soldering iron and could design audio
02:25equipment, even if you only had 30 shillings in your pocket, you could get something.
02:31And so I was able to get started on my electronic experiments.
02:40At this point in London's history, high modernity, London is being rebuilt after the Second World
02:47War.
02:48And I think you can think of people like Tristan McEary as dreaming of a future soundscape
02:53of London.
03:00Electronic music in the 50s was considered avant-garde, and we were operating on the
03:05fringes of what people generally thought of as music.
03:09Tristan, I'd like to begin by challenging you, first of all, to give me your simple
03:14definition of music.
03:16If you want a very quick and not very complete definition, music is sound which has been
03:22organised.
03:23At any period, a composer tends to use his resources.
03:26Nowadays, we have all the resources of recording and artificially produced sound of various
03:32kinds, and the composers are using it.
03:42With the invention of tape, for the first time, a high-quality, linear recording medium
03:47could be easily edited.
03:49This was a revolution in recording.
03:57Music concrete is music built out of found sounds.
04:00So you'd be applying musical techniques and musical theory to non-musical sound.
04:07So music concrete was what the Parisians called music which is cut from real sounds, recorded
04:15by a microphone.
04:16Electronic music, on the other hand, uses oscillators and no microphones.
04:22It uses generators to generate things.
04:25Personally, I find these distinctions are pretty academic.
04:29I'll mix and match.
04:30I'll use some electronics and some real sounds.
04:34Tristram developed the techniques when he was way ahead of his time.
04:38And he was experimenting with these techniques from the early 50s.
04:44But as private studios went, I think mine was probably one of the best in Britain.
04:50The BBC were fairly slow off the mark, you see.
04:52They didn't start their radiophonic workshop until probably 1957 or so.
04:59I mean, composers often came to me who couldn't handle electronics at all.
05:04And they would lean on me to come and get me to do sounds for them in my studio.
05:10But very often, I would come to a point of working on something where I wanted a certain
05:25sort of filter or a certain sort of gadget which I hadn't got.
05:29So I would stop being a composer for the time being and become an engineer for a couple
05:33of days, design this new thing, build it.
05:37It probably wouldn't work the first time, test it, get it right and put it together
05:41and then go on with the piece.
05:48Electronic music seemed to have no limits.
05:50You get right away from saying this is in the key of E flat, you know.
05:54You can use any pitch you like.
05:56You don't talk about C, you talk about a frequency.
06:00We all dreamt about in the early days that it was a music sans frontière.
06:06It had no boundaries.
06:08Instrumental music has, unfortunately, boundaries by the pitch of the instrument, you know.
06:13The piano will only go so far up and down and no instrument will exceed its range in that way.
06:19In electronic music, you can theoretically go from the highest notes you can hear to
06:24the lowest notes you can hear, the entire audio range.
06:29People didn't take it seriously at first.
06:32I couldn't get any royalties on it, for example, from the Performing Rights Society
06:35because they said it's not music.
06:44I think a lot of his early electronic music with Doctor Who,
06:46he did the very first Dalek story in 1963.
06:50It was totally uncompromising.
06:52They are approaching.
07:07And so you had audience who maybe wouldn't listen to this kind of electronic music
07:11or would dismiss it as rubbish and plinky-plonky or whatever.
07:14They were quite happy to be terrified by it for half an hour every Saturday night.
07:22So the influence it had was a subversive one.
07:25It was introducing this kind of music and sound to audiences by stealth.
07:38Electronic music was seen in Britain in this period, you know, the late 60s,
07:43as a totally weird thing.
07:45People would be exposed to it through shows like Doctor Who.
07:48But I think to make the transition to this being a form of entertainment
07:52that's kind of enjoyable, that was a huge leap.
07:57You haven't lived if you haven't got a tape recorder.
08:02But in the 60s, we were sort of at a peak of our belief in science and technology,
08:07trips to the moon, trips to Mars, nuclear power stations.
08:11In terms of the scientific revolution...
08:15So there's a famous speech by the British Prime Minister, Harold Wilson.
08:19The Britain that is going to be forged in the white heat of this revolution
08:23will be no place for restrictive practices
08:26or for outdated methods on either side of industry.
08:30That Britain was going to move ahead with science and technology.
08:34If you think of electronic music in that context, it kind of fits in.
08:38Here was the science and technology of music being pushed to the next level.
08:45I don't know quite how I came into electronic music itself.
08:50I like doing experimental music by recording sounds.
08:54And it was very early on that I realised that cutting tape was a hopeless procedure
09:00and that really this had to be done in a more sensible way.
09:03And this was the beginning of a digital age.
09:09Because the way that electronic music was made back then
09:12was with essentially quarter-inch tape.
09:14And that's a very time-consuming process.
09:16So I think a lot of people, including Peter, were thinking,
09:19if only we could have an electronic way of doing this
09:21where we could make one sound after another.
09:24And that device that makes one sound after another is called a sequencer.
09:30So my first searches were to get somebody who could design a sequencer.
09:35But nobody seemed to be able to do it
09:37until somebody said that I should go and see David Koch.
09:41A friend of mine gave me a crystal set.
09:45And that started me on electronics.
09:49Putting aerials out of the window.
09:53Risking death by lightning.
09:57Peter had some technical ability,
09:59but David Koch, as Peter would describe him, was his kind of electronic genius.
10:04I would say it's a mad idea.
10:07Can we have this? I want this.
10:09And he would produce it.
10:11He would understand exactly what my pathetic way of putting something was.
10:16He would be able to interpret it into a concrete electronic idea
10:21and make the bloody thing.
10:23And it worked.
10:26And very soon he realized that what we needed, the ultimate sequencer,
10:31was not going to be something which he could build or another engineer could build,
10:35but would be, quite simply, a digital computer.
10:39Well, a PDP-8 minicomputer was the first cheap computer,
10:45but cheap at that time was £5,000,
10:48which was not at all cheap in terms...
10:51well, as much as a house.
10:53I was lucky in those days to have a rich wife,
10:56and so we sold her tiara and we swapped it for a computer.
11:00And this was the first computer in the world in a private house.
11:04Putney, where Peter Sanoviev has a hobby which is strictly for boffins.
11:08He keeps it in his garden shed, and it's called Digital PDP-8 Oblique S.
11:13Yes, it's a computer, and it has a hobby too, composing music.
11:17Peter helps with the ideas, but the actual performance is all digital's worth.
11:22Digital computers were already used in process control in factories.
11:28That's exactly what we wanted.
11:30We wanted to process control for different sounds,
11:33so that one would follow another,
11:35or a combination of them would be heard together.
11:38He wanted to make, well, innovative music,
11:42sounds that nobody had made before.
11:45Peter Sanoviev was using computers
11:49in a way that would become commonplace in the mid-'80s.
11:53He was doing this almost 20 years earlier.
11:56With equipment that was large and unwieldy, not designed for the purpose.
12:01And he and his co-engineers were developing things
12:05that had never been even considered up to that point,
12:09let alone considered possible.
12:12Many of the things that Peter did were really quite advanced,
12:17and one of them was sampling.
12:21He made the first sampler that I know of,
12:25anywhere in the world.
12:27The trouble with sampling is that to get a sound
12:31which sounds the same as what you put in
12:35requires a huge lot of information.
12:38So the whole of his computer's memory,
12:41which was about 8,000 characters,
12:45was occupied with storing this little fragment of sound.
12:56CHOIR SINGS
13:09It was at the cutting edge, and neither the people who came,
13:14nor ourselves, knew what we could do with this apparatus.
13:19I remember once Karl Heinz Stockhausen came,
13:23and they collaborated for quite a while,
13:26and spent a long time making a box the size of a fridge,
13:31which was insulated, from a sound point of view,
13:35so that they could record the sound of a fly screaming.
13:40FLY SCREAMS
13:47Also, it was very lonely.
13:51I had no idea that there was anybody else in Britain
13:55doing it at all, nobody.
13:58Then I discovered that Tristram
14:00had been doing it for much longer than I had,
14:03and that was a great revolution.
14:06He was very well known.
14:08He'd done lots of film music,
14:10and we formed this new company, EMS.
14:14When I got together with Zinovio and Cockerell
14:18towards the end of the 60s, one of the decisions made
14:22was that there wasn't enough electronic concert music
14:25going on in England.
14:27A few miles down the Thames, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall,
14:31the first concert in Britain given by a computer.
14:34The next item, Partita for Unattended Computer by Peter Zinoviev,
14:38is a true live performance,
14:40in the sense that no magnetic tape is being used at all.
14:44There is a choice at various stages in the procedure,
14:47and the piece therefore comes out different every time it's played.
14:51The performance you're about to hear is therefore unique and unrepeatable.
14:55First of all, checks are made to see that the composition
14:58is correctly loaded into the computer.
15:00The computer is started
15:02and will carry out the performance unattended.
15:08DRUMMING
15:14WHISTLING
15:20The audience is a capacity one,
15:22but the computer's performance didn't meet with universal approval.
15:26The Financial Times said,
15:28technically, it may be a triumph of skill and knowledge,
15:31but what we heard resembled the dreariest kind of neo-Webern
15:35drawn out to inordinate length.
15:37What we were making was very, very simple sounds.
15:41It's...
15:44..things like that.
15:46On the other hand, if you were a technician,
15:49you'd realise that into those simple sounds
15:52had gone a huge amount of effort.
15:54The computer was actually controlling sound equipment,
15:58the sound equipment was controlling an amplifier,
16:01and out it came all by itself.
16:03This was incredible technology for those days.
16:07And I've got the reviewers, some of which were a bit scaredy, you know,
16:12and some of them were saying,
16:14well, it's an interesting noise and it's not music.
16:23The whole purpose of EMS was to pay for Peter's computer studio.
16:28That was his first love.
16:30He thought he could pay for it
16:33by making miniature versions of the things he had in his studio
16:37that could be sold.
16:40And I thought that perhaps we could all work together
16:43and make something which was very profitable.
16:46We were approached by the Australian composer Don Banks.
16:50He was an avant-garde composer
16:52who wanted an electronic box of tricks.
16:56And I built the box and David filled it up with electronics.
17:00And the VCS-3 was the first synthesiser in Europe.
17:05So it's very, very rare for a whole new class of instruments
17:08to come along, and that's what the synthesiser is.
17:11So in that extent, I think it's one of the pivotal moments
17:14in 20th-century musical instrument history,
17:16the invention of the synthesiser.
17:18It's happening, it's been invented in America by Bob Moog,
17:21but Peter Zinoviev and Tristan Keary and David Cockrell
17:24have a unique part of this by building the VCS-3,
17:27one of the very first synthesisers.
17:30The whole thing of it spinning off into, you know,
17:35progressive rock, experimental rock music,
17:38I think that was just a complete coincidence.
17:41Aspiring rock musicians, experimental people
17:44who never dreamed that they could own a synthesiser,
17:47suddenly it's within their price range
17:49they can afford this piece of equipment.
18:06Well, one of the kind of unique London bands
18:10who bought a VCS-3 synthesiser
18:13was a band called Hawkwind, started by Dave Brock.
18:16It was a busker.
18:18And Hawkwind had this incredible psychedelic space sound.
18:22I mean, what we were doing, we were doing very basic riffs,
18:25you know, that used to go dun-dun-dun.
18:27Actually, we used to practice on audiences,
18:30and we'd go, you know,
18:32Actually, we used to practice on audiences,
18:35cos what we're talking about is, using these,
18:37you can actually get similar earthquake velocity,
18:40real bottom-end, going for a big PA, the whole thing's...
18:49Consequently, we're talking about sounds of the spheres,
18:52working with sort of colours of light,
18:54so, you know, what you're doing is actually...
18:57Our, I suppose, perspective was to take people on trips
19:01without taking LSD.
19:04Some of these musicians would actually be tripping
19:07when they first encountered the synthesiser,
19:09and I think that what was happening to these musicians
19:12is that it was, you know, part of the 60s classic thing
19:15for, you know, expanding your consciousness,
19:17and here was this wonderful new instrument
19:19that could almost take you on this magical trip,
19:21and you never knew quite for sure
19:23what you were going to get out of this instrument.
19:25It was very capricious, you'd mess around with it,
19:27some of the sounds were horrible, could be a bad trip,
19:30and some of the sounds would just be heavenly
19:32and would be just beautiful and take you away,
19:34and I think the performers of the synthesiser,
19:36they described the BCS-3 in particular,
19:38which had an incredible range of sounds,
19:41like acid, sort of like an electronic form of the drug acid.
19:45We used to record a lot of our earlier albums
19:47under the influence of LSD,
19:49because we used to reckon that all the sound frequencies
19:52that we used to get were key sort of little things on people,
19:56when people were tripping,
19:57they'd feel the same thing as what we did,
19:59so, yeah, that's what we used to do in the early days.
20:02Obviously, as you get older, you stop taking it.
20:04Of course, I might add, you know!
20:09Because we had very, very revolutionary equipment
20:13and a very revolutionary studio,
20:15we attracted top people of all kinds.
20:18As a result of which, they started adopting some of the ideas
20:22that had up to that point been very much
20:24in the sort of the boutique electronic studio.
20:27Slowly, people's soundscape was expanding,
20:29first of all, through feedback of Jimi Hendrix.
20:32Suddenly, people realised,
20:33hey, this is a new way of experiencing sound,
20:36and, you know, bands that we're into,
20:38like the Pink Floyd doing it, it sort of crept up.
20:47The sound of the Pink Floyd is always associated, in my mind,
20:51with the EMS synthesizers, the BCS-3s.
20:54Much faster than a human could ever play it.
20:56They got this new, very innovative sound.
20:59And this sort of track is sort of bubbling along.
21:03You hear the EMS-256 sequencer.
21:07It engenders a feeling of paranoia,
21:10technology out of control.
21:15EMS equipment had enormous impact
21:17for musicians who really knew electronic music.
21:20Kraftwerk, famous German band, bought EMS gear,
21:24Tangerine Dream,
21:26Tonto's Expanding Headband bought EMS gear
21:29for use with Stevie Wonder, but many other bands.
21:32Brian Eno bought his first synthesizer, it was a BCS-3,
21:36and that's one of the great sounds of early Roxy music,
21:39is Brian Eno's synthesizer.
21:55People didn't know what to call the early operators of synthesizers.
21:59Were they engineers or were they musicians?
22:02Some albums, if you look, they're described as madcap scientists.
22:06Nobody knows what to call these folk cos it's a new instrument.
22:16I was, by now, I'm a bit out of my depth.
22:19I'm no businessman.
22:21I was beginning to feel the whole thing was getting out of hand.
22:25What am I supposed to be? Am I a composer or what?
22:28And I didn't get out of it all
22:31until the early 70s when I came to Australia.
22:42I looked at my life and I said,
22:45what are you going to do about your concert music?
22:48Where are your symphonies, where are your string quartets?
22:56When EMS was at its height,
22:59we were at the very front of technology,
23:02really not just in electronic music, but of all technology.
23:06But our studio had never had any support
23:10from the government whatsoever,
23:12and it seems such a shame looking back on it.
23:15And it seems such a shame looking back on it
23:18that we were foremost in the world
23:21and yet in the end became famous
23:24for rather pathetic little synthesizers.
23:27Thinking of the demise of the EMS company,
23:30there were many factors that led to it folding.
23:34One of them was that Peter's marriage to Victoria broke up
23:38and she was an important benefactor to the company.
23:42It's either Peter or Tristram wrote a letter to the Times
23:45offering the studio to the nation.
23:47It was worth quite a lot of money by this point.
23:50Maybe electronic music wasn't well enough understood in Britain.
23:53No one took up his offer.
23:55And so sadly when the EMS went bankrupt
23:58and Peter then became really strapped for cash,
24:01the equipment was stored, I think, at the National Theatre
24:05in what Peter told me was a dungeon,
24:08I guess it was just a basement, and it had flooded.
24:11It had been chopped to pieces with wire cutters and saws
24:16and there was a leak and rain was pouring on it.
24:20It was heart-rending.
24:25Think ahead just 50 years perhaps
24:27to the day when everyone will appreciate
24:30the nuances of electronic music.
24:42PIANO PLAYS
24:51Peter's computer at EMS only had about 20k of memory.
24:56The average laptop these days is vastly more powerful.
25:00Music technology has been democratised.
25:07It's true that every home has a very powerful computer.
25:10Many millions of times more powerful than the computers which we had.
25:15Anybody can make electronic music now.
25:18It is used everywhere, and the formidable obstacles
25:22which we had to even make the simplest sounds,
25:25like in the beginning by editing tape
25:28or by having these huge juggernaut bits of equipment,
25:32is, thank goodness, gone forever.
25:36I think that what we can do now with computers
25:40is to start again with exactly the same aims that EMS had,
25:44which is this, let me put it in a sentence.
25:47It's to be able to analyse a sound,
25:52put it into sensible musical form on a computer,
25:58to be able to manipulate that form
26:01and recreate it in a musical way.
26:06And that is just now I wish I could find somebody to work with.
26:23Every sound I make is crazy.
26:25It's the only thing that I use to make strange science fiction noises.
26:32It's forever an inventive synth,
26:34and it kind of tells you what it wants to do, really.
26:37And before I know it, the original bass sound I wanted
26:40and created to begin with is gone,
26:42and I've come up with this kind of new sound.