MetaFilter posts tagged with bbc and audio

On The Origin of Darwin

Alvy Ampersand — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 08:39:07 -0800

2009 marks not only the 150^th anniversary of the publication of Charles Darwin's On The Origin of Species* but the 200^th anniversary of his birth as well. To celebrate, BBC Radio 4 presents a special series of Melvyn Bragg's In Our Time exploring Darwin's life and work: Episode 1 explores Darwin's unhappy childhood, his time at Cambridge University and his failure to become a priest, episode 2 focuses on Darwin's round the world voyage on the Beagle and the objects and the ideas he bought back, episode 3 looks at the publication of Darwin's masterpiece, On the Origin of Species, and the controversy it stirred, and episode 4 is set in Down House where Darwin lived out the final years of his life and which became both family home and experiment lab. The BBC also presents Dear Darwin, a collection of letters written to Darwin by modern academics and scientists. If you prefer to read actual correspondence between Darwin and his contemporaries, you may enjoy perusing the Darwin Correspondence Project *.

Forget about this," she says, "it's for interest only."

le morte de bea arthur — Fri, 18 Jul 2008 02:54:47 -0800

A recently uncovered musical experiment by Delia Derbyshire predicted the sound of modern dance music three decades before it became fashionable. Derbyshire (1937 - 2001) is best-known for her long-uncredited contribution to the Doctor Who theme. After her death in 2001 a set of 267 tapes were found in her attic, and among them was this oddly prescient gem. Wikipedia article on Derbyshire. Previously and more previously.

Click click victorious, buzz buzz glorious, Long to reign over us, buzz buzz click click.

Artw — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 10:49:44 -0800

The first known recording of a digital computer playing music, recorded by the BBC in 1951. The music played on a Ferantti Mark 1, one of the first commercial general-use computers, and was entered via punchtape and played on a speaker usually used for making clicks and tones to indicate program progress.

The shoulders of a radiophonic giant.

boo_radley — Wed, 21 Mar 2007 10:04:25 -0800

Create Digital Music has two pieces on the making of Doctor Who's theme song. The second is an introduction to Delia Derbyshire, who is considered to be the "woman behind the men" behind the notability of the song. She pioneered techniques of synthesizing sounds, sampling and looping in the sixties. One WFMU blogger waxes on about Delia, who "was an inspiring collaborator" working behind the scenes of the BBC's Radiophonic Workshop. BBC Four produced a documentary about the workshop called Alchemists of Sound which aired in 2005, ten years after the workshop closed due to budget cuts.

I'm rather tired, so I think I'll sit this title out.

Rev. Syung Myung Me — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 00:44:36 -0800

BBC Radio 2 -- Sold On Song The website for this show on BBC Radio 2 is pretty awesome; it's got a list of pages on various classic songs in their library (also sortable by artist), which includes song clips and (where available) clips from covers of the songs, taken from the same place -- check out the various It Must Be Loves (originally by ~~Madness~~ Labi Siffre) -- my favorite will always be the Madness one, but the Lyn Paul version is actually pretty cool. There's also some weird and awful covers available for the picking. I've just been spending about an hour or two picking through random songs and noting on which ones are as good as the original or ones that just fall so very short. (They've also got lots of other content, like the songwriting guide, but the real fun is in the song pages, reading about these great songs and listening to other people do their own cuts on them. [All links go to text; all sound files are in RealAudio.]

Voices from the past

starscream — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 19:02:03 -0800

Getting back into the groove : In the corner of a California university laboratory, two men are battling against time to perfect a machine that will read old recordings - using special microscopes to scan the grooves - and software that can convert those shapes into sound. Their work could bring history to life.

helloboys — Wed, 26 Dec 2001 19:56:46 -0800

The BBC are testing out Ogg Vorbis for audio streaming. Ogg is a completely Free and open audio codec. This is great news for Ogg Vorbis, as you don't get a much better endorsement than one of the most respected media services trialling your system.