Malcolm Clarke was a composer and engineer for the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, composing the music for many Doctor Who series. Apparently he wrote about the Workshop and his career for a thesis on interactive CD format (remember them?) and his son Ollie with Ray White has wisely converted and adapted the format for the web so it can be seen and hopefully preserved for the future.
It includes history of the Workshop and his personal history with radio and film, sound clips of his work and work in progress, various synthesisers and short potted history of the EMS Synthi, Vocoder and the ‘Delaware’ and various Workshop inventions. It also has quite a few technical descriptions and ‘how it was done’ anecdotes. It includes the best analogy of synthesis I’ve ever heard:
The subtractive approach can be likened to the production of a sculpture by Michelangelo, who would start a new work by choosing a block of Carara marble, inside which he said he could see the finished design…
The more common process of synthesis is the constructive or ‘additive’ method. This can be likened to a sculpture by Degas. His method was to start with a simple wooden plinth (silence) onto which he would build layer upon layer of clay (the harmonics), until he achieved the form (the sound) he desired.
Malcolm Clarke
It’s a fascinating read in 7 chapters – currently on Chapter 5 about his adaption of Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains” which is a story that haunts everyone that come across it, myself included. Here are the chapters:
(Originally posted over at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Facebook page by Ollie Clarke – he wants people to share it, so link away.)
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