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This is ‘What the Future Sounded Like’: Meet the pioneers of ‘music without frontiers’

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If you’re British and of a certain age then Doctor Who was most likely your first introduction to the sounds of electronic music. Apart from its famous theme tune, Doctor Who used an electronic soundtrack composed by Tristram Cary to underscore the arrival of the Daleks onto TV screens in 1963. At the time, most people considered electronic music as weird, alienating noise. Using it in a primetime TV series like Doctor Who was—as one commentator explains in the fascinating documentary What the Future Sounded Like—a rather subversive act.

Tristram Cary struck upon the potential of tape and electronic music while serving in the Royal Navy during the Second World War. The son of the Irish novelist Joyce Cary (The Horse’s Mouth), Tristram was one of the earliest pioneers of electronic music during the 1950s. A classically-trained composer, he had scored such movies as The Ladykillers and Town on Trial but found traditional music inhibiting. Reasoning that music was just the organization of sound, Cary began to experiment with electronic sounds, tape recordings and musique concrète, in a bid to create “music without frontiers.”
 
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At the same, two other electronic music pioneers, the aristocratic Peter Zinovieff and engineer David Cockerell were separately testing out their own ideas. The three eventually came together to form the Electronic Music Studios in 1969. Their intention was to produce a versatile monophonic synthesiser, which could be cheaply produced for public use. While this proved tricky, Cockerell did manage to design one of the first British portable commercially available synthesizer—or Voltage Controlled Studio—the EMS VCS3. This once futuristic-looking “suitcase synth” is what Brian Eno was seen using during his tenure in Roxy Music.

Keep reading after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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03.18.2016
10:44 am
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What the Future Sounded Like:  the story of Electronic Music Studios

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“Think of a sound—now make it.”

Here is a very cool doc by Ian Collie about London’s Electronic Music Studios, the pioneering synthesizer company formed in 1969 that created such items as the voltage controlled synth (VCS3) and the Synthi A.

These and other machines changed the way we listened to music forever. They were used by some of the first pop artists to experiment with electronic music, including Pink Floyd, The Who, Eno & Roxy Music, Tangerine Dream, Kraftwerk and Hawkwind.

Collie puts together a very human and warm exploration of what sound synthesis meant to the lives of EMS principals Peter Zinovieff, Tristram Cary and David Cockerell. And in a segment that involves Hawkwind’s David Brock, he also takes on how well sound synthesis meshed with the psychedelic age.
 

 
After the jump, catch parts 2 & 3…
 

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Posted by Ron Nachmann
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09.29.2010
02:16 am
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