The Infinite Monkey Cage - The Sound of Music - Brian Eno, Sam Bennett and Trevor Cox

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Brian Cox and Robin Ince explore the history of music recording, joined by Acoustics Professor Trevor Cox, Music Professor Sam Bennett and musician and producer Brian Eno. Together they guide us through the evolution of sound recording, a space in which technology hasn’t stood still since its advent in the mid 1800’s. We hear the very first recognisable recording of a voice made with a brush making marks in soot and put a spotlight on the Fairlight CMI, a revolutionary digital synthesizer of the 70’s, used in Brian’s records (Cox & Eno’s!)Plus, we run an audio experiment with our live audience who turn themselves into our in house digital orchestra, with the help of their mobile phones. Now that lots of people have several devices that can play sound, new technology is harnessing this to create a more immersive experience – which (kind of) worked in our experiment!Producer: Melanie Brown Exec Producer: Alexandra Feachem Assistant Producer: Olivia Jani

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. sponsored jobs, your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates, so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data worldwide, sponsored jobs posted directly on Indeed have 45% more applications than non-sponsored jobs. There's no need to wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed, and listeners of this show will get a $100 sponsored job credit to get your job's more visibility at indeed.com slash podkatzca. Just go to indeed.com slash podkatzca right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. This week on Witness History, we're bringing you stories from the space race to mark a 60th anniversary that's out of this world.

How Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk, plus more on the speech that never was. The words that US President Richard Nixon would have said if the moon astronauts hadn't made it back to Earth. And why the battle for space supremacy ended in a handshake between the Americans and Soviets. Search and subscribe to Witness History, wherever you get your BBC podcasts. You just realised your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast?

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Hello, I'm Brian Cox. I'm Robert Inks. And this is the Infinite Monkey Cage. Now when I told Brian about today's show I can tell you now he is the most excited I've ever seen because I said we are going to do the science of the sound of music and within like a split second he came back into the office he was wearing lederhosen, he was yoggling about a lonely goat herd, he was getting really excited to go, oh, maybe we can deal with the quantum superposition of Brigadoon with My Fair Lady.

None of it's true. What do you mean none of it's true? Well, the Lederhosen. It is true, it does, no, this is true, you probably, Brian used to wear a lot of Lederhosen. If you look at copies of Kerrang from the late 1980s when he was in the band Dare, and it's, you've got very small knees. Technically I don't think your legs should work. I bet you've worn lederhosen on stage haven't you? I probably have. I've probably worn them to bed

actually. If anyone's been affected by the lederhosen conversation in this program. The radio listeners over there going who was that who said? And we're later hosed in bed. And how do I get in touch with you? Today we're looking at the history of recorded music. How have changes in technology since the first recordings affected how music is made, composed and consumed? We are joined by an acoustic engineer, a music professor, and a musical pioneer who's taken us through the airport and onto the moon, and they are. I'm Trevor Cox, I'm Professor of Acoustics at the University of Salford, and the sound I first

fell in love with was the music my mum used to play around the house. Put some fat swallow on, and I'm right back there. Hi I'm Sam Bennett I'm professor of music at the Australian National University and the sound that I first fell in love with was probably the sound of the radio and dare I say it probably my dad's status quo records. Hello I'm Brian Eno I'm a musician and my first sound I can remember being very impressed by was my dad's motorbike Which which had a really basso profundo engine. And this is our panel We're gonna start off because we're looking at the nature of music and in particular the recording of music

We thought that we should listen to what we believe is the first ever recording of music and see if in any way though we always seeing these kind of modern technologies and imagining that recording of music has improved but maybe it hasn't so I'm gonna do a little bit of a Radio 3 introduction to this. So now if listeners of Radio 3, this is Debussy's Claire de Lalune, the third segment in Sweet Burgamesque, recorded by Édouard-Léon-Scott de Martinville and reproduced by Pactic Feaster and the team of First Sounds. Here it is. That was Claire de Lune, which is currently shooting up the charts at the moment.

Currently number three, particularly loved by apiarists. So Trevor, could you describe that? What technology was used? What is that recording? I think it's awesome, Ponce. That was 1850s, so it really is a very old recording. So what you had was you had a sort of like a big horn that you spoke down, a funnel, and at the bottom of it was a diaphragm. And that diaphragm would be made to vibrate by the air molecules, because sound after all is just vibrations of air molecules. And the back of that diaphragm was a brush, and the brush basically brushed on a sooty piece of paper.

So you get a trace of the sound, and yeah, they just use optical techniques to recreate it and play it back again. If you just take an image of it, you can literally treat that in the same way as you would if you just took an electrical signal. You can just put it through a computer and replay it. They had to do quite a lot of work on it, though, because what you've got is this sooty brush going on a moving piece

of paper, and it didn't move very evenly. So they had to do a lot of cleaning up to get anything that worked very well. And of course, it hasn't got very great fidelity, because it's literally a brush brushing in soot which is the other reason it kind of sounds a bit well I was gonna say rubbish but I think it's actually amazing considering how old it is. Well it's a voice a voice from 1850 was 1857 I think it was wasn't it? Yeah you know for me as an acoustic scientist being able to

actually get sound and analyze it it was was a breakthrough at that point even if you couldn't play it back again up until that point we'd had no record of sound because it just disappears. So at that point you can start doing science of sound at that point. So Sam, what are we able to tell from that noise that we heard? It does have a very ghostly feel, it feels very uncanny. It is ghostly, it is uncanny. I think what we're listening to is something obviously quite opaque in that it's hard to hear through the technology and actually listen to the sound itself because we're talking about

quite embryonic technology. But I think that it's a great place to start because it just shows you how far we've come over the last sort of 150 going on 170 years in terms of noise reduction which I think has driven sound technology since this point. What do you make of that Brian? Well for me it's a fantastic moment because it's the first time that sound became physical. And the whole history of recording is based on that idea that you could actually hold this ephemeral material and you could move it somewhere else and you could use it in different ways. You could turn it backwards, you could cut it up, you could stick it back together in different orders.

And everything that I do really as an artist is based on that possibility of being able to physically deal with sound. And so that really was the beginning of a new art form. And I always think music should have taken a new name then, that kind of music. Just as a theater took a new name when it went to film, it became cinema or movies.

And we really completely understand the difference between those two things But you still get this confusion in music where it's still cheating to some people if you do things in the studio to the sound It's somehow unfair, you know, I suppose that's the first time that a performance has been heard more than once. Yeah. So Samantha, if we move forward, when do we start seeing recorded music as we would describe it today, as the technology improves? Oh, look, I would think probably early 20th century and the introduction of things like the phonograph. Trevor spoke about that technology that we heard just before quite beautifully, but obviously that evolved into wax cylinder recordings,

where instead of making inscriptions on paper, you'd have like a vibrating needle that would then make inscriptions onto wax around a cylinder. And I think that that was definitely an improvement. So going into the 20s and then of course following that, you had disk systems which then in turn sort of led into vinyls. And I think with every stage, I just come back to the point about noise reduction and that being quite the sort of common theme throughout that century was

with every technological development, the idea was to reduce the noise of the technology itself so that what we heard was like the truest possible representation of what you hear acoustically. So with a wax cylinder how much of a change in the technology are we seeing between the kind of the grooves on a wax cylinder and the grooves on a piece of a record? Not a huge change in technology per se but certainly on a disc you can certainly fit more information on it, number one. Secondly it's more stable, I mean wax melts so...

But you're recording, I suppose you're shouting into a horn initially. Yeah that's right. Onto a wax cylinder. Yeah it comes back to this point about signals noise ratio, talking about a noise that the early stars of the phonograph are the ones who could project their voice so it's going to be opera singers and those with those big boomy voices who could shout and there's some great pictures you watch orchestras being recorded of them all crowded around these ginormous horns and you're getting this very direct sound and the violin's literally standing right next to this to be loud enough and as soon as

You get to the point where you can start using things like microphones Then you start seeing the orchestra set out normally and you start getting room acoustic incorporated into it You get a much more natural sound and you can call a much more diverse range of sounds because it doesn't just have to be loud People and loud instruments. I suppose that's a big change in it because you're using the sound pressure itself initially to make those instruments. So I suppose that's a big change isn't it because you're using the sound pressure itself initially to make those to cut into the wax and then there's an interface that which is the microphone. When the microphones begin... 1926 or something like that they started doing microphone recordings so so you can hear on some early blues recordings where for the first time people would

just rent a hotel room, drag a blues player off the street and pay him a few quid, he would record his songs and they would be out on the streets because the other thing that was important about the transition to shellac or acetate was that it was much easier to print those. So cylinders are very difficult to copy, to reproduce. Somebody, an audiophile friend of mine once said to me, well of course the sound quality of cylinders was far superior to anything that could be done on disc until about the late 1940s. So this is an instance of a superior technology that just wasn't

commercially very viable, so that didn't catch on, you know. Was it easier to hide satanic messages on wax discs or the tube kind of version? Which one would be the easiest way to secrete that? Edison played around with this idea. So in the original phonograph, he's hand-cranking it, and he would sort of speed up and slow down to make the voice sound like someone, Hi, bitch! And someone, hello! And then you would play it back and it had mad dog mad dog and then play it backwards and things like that so they were doing that back

in the you know 19th century and then when do we begin to move to what we might call modern recording because you hear the difference don't you mean sound quality you listen to some you said blues recordings in the 30s at the Bessie Smith or someone like that and it's quite a scratchy kind of recording, even when you enhance it and restore it. But then, in the 40s and certainly the 50s, you get recording that doesn't sound too much different from today. So what's the change in technology? Several changes. More microphones, so the use of mixers, so that you could have not just one microphone that everyone's clustered around, but there'd be one mic on that particular violin because it had a solo and this this group over here would have a mic and so on. And so you had you had live mixing, that was the interesting thing,

you would actually have to mix an orchestra live because you were cutting the disc, you had to do the balance. So there's no tape at that point? No tape. Putting straight onto the... Yeah, so tape didn't really appear until, I guess, the early 1940s, was it? Yeah, it was most developed in Germany during World War II, and actually when the Allies got into Germany, they rescued the machines and went back and copied them. And actually Bing Crosby was kind of funded a lot of tape development.

And because he liked to record his radio shows rather than do them live. Because he was doing them in America. So he'd have to do them on the East Coast, on the West Coast. That's twice as many shows as he wanted to do. He'd much rather record it. So he was very keen on magnetic tape for that reason. Well, now we completely take recording for granted.

We expect everything to be replicable. We expect to be able to hear things again, to see them again. But the first musician who I think really sort of understood the potential was the guitarist Les Paul, who he was the first person to realize that if you'd recorded something on tape, you could play something else over the top of it later on you didn't have to have a performance

limited by a particular moment in time and that really was the beginning I think of modern recording where you could build something up like you would build up a painting over a period of days or weeks. And also Samantha you have there an instrument that well Les, so you begin to have the electric guitar, which I suppose is one of the, probably the first widely used electronic instrument. Yeah, absolutely. I think that both the electric guitar and the widespread use of analog tape recording

simultaneously sort of was this catalytic kind of combination. There was just a perfect combination for the Dawn of the Record industry really. Brian was talking about Les Paul but then through the 1950s you had recordists like Sam Phillips who used tape recording and multi-track tape recording in really innovative ways and then he invented slap echo. So the use of two tape machines together where you record one musician onto one track of one machine but then you delay and you record that same singer, say for example, through a second machine and just vary the playback head and so you end up with this really short delay which you

can hear all over like Elvis records and so on. It gave all of that music a really distinctive sonic signature and then you've got stereo recording but then by the end of the 50s turn the 1960s multi-track recording full-track tape recorder so splitting the analog tape into ever-increasing sections and so it gave you the opportunity to record, say, drums and bass guitar individually. The technology and the technological development allowed for sound to be controlled in ever more sort of intricate ways. And Brian, if you go through your record collections, you go through the early Beatles, let's say, or the Beach Boys, when do you start hearing music that could not have been played

live, that really the studio has a big influence on that record? Well, even in the late 50s, that's starting to happen with Dick and Dee Dee, The Mountain's High for example, I think that was possibly 1961 or something like that. That was when people started to realize that you could add reverb to things. So that was one of the first things you could really do. You could create spaces that were imaginary. So you could build huge, huge reverbs that made it sound like you were in a cathedral or between mountains or something like that. And you could do that in a room as big as this table, you know.

So suddenly sound became detached from location. And location became one of the subjects of composing. It just became completely a matter of course that you chose an added reverb to things. The other thing that became much more a subject of composition was timbre. So the actual quality of sound, for instance, the invention of microphones meant that people didn't have to go, brrrr, anymore, you know. Which is a pity because I really enjoyed that. Did you?

I could, I'll do you a bit more yeah so so suddenly people could sing like this they could sing like that and you could never ever hear that against conventional instruments on stage or the acoustic guitar became a viable instrument because you could just you could make that particular instrument louder so it was heard so suddenly the sense of scale between instruments completely changed. It disappeared actually. You could have somebody singing in a whisper against an 80 piece orchestra. Brian mentioned reverb.

You apparently have the record, I believe, of creating the longest echo. So in terms of reverberation, is this still correct? the longest echo so in terms of reverberation is this still correct as far as I know I have yes I have the longest reverberation time in the world at 78 seconds and where tell us yeah so it's an oil tank which was a World War Two shipping or container up in up just north of Inverness and they basically carved it out of the inside of a Scottish mountain so it was safe from bombing essentially so it's this vast cavernous place and the reason it is so reverberant is because they made it bomb proof so the walls are half a meter thick of concrete bedded onto bedrock so yeah I've played a

saxophone you know you play a sax note and it just keeps going on and on and on it's just quite amazing very difficult to music in actually unless you think very carefully I mean you can either go for whale song where you play really slowly because all the notes are just lingering on or you have to play really fast you know when you come out of a church service and you hear the organist just going fast and fast and you get this sort of build up of this smog of sound don't you but you can still hear the melody going on top that's the other technique you can use in a place like that so so these are we've

talked initially about, these are analog techniques using bits of metal or even electronics. And then I suppose we come into electronic music, sampling and so on, and in instruments like the, or the Fairlight being a famous example of a tremendously expensive piece of musical equipment. So saying, yeah, what is the Fairlight

for those of them who haven't played them on various heavy metal records in the late 80s? They weren't actually synonymous with metal bands or music, but no, the Fairlight CMI was a computer-based sampler sequencer synthesizer. So, it was the very first time you had a digital synthesizer with pre-programmed sound libraries, a sampling capability, so the ability to record a short excerpt of sound and store it and then play it back, and a sequencer, so the capability of layering up different musical tracks and different musical

sounds but not on analog tape. Also it was the very first combined, what I would now call a digital audio workstation where this thing, it was pretty big and it had a massive keyboard and it also had one of those old TV monitors and bright neon green visualizations. It was the very first time that you could not only do all of that work in one space, so you could pull up sounds that were either pre-programmed, you could manipulate them. It had this incredible tool on it called the light pen so you could actually just look at the screen and then kind of click this light pen which was almost like a proto

mouse against certain sounds and you could move crotchets a couple of bars later and you could adapt your music and it was the first time that you had this in an all-in-one system, which obviously we take for granted today I was ruinously expensive wasn't it? It really was. Yeah, I was at least 20,000 pounds and this was early 80s at the turn of the 1980s Yeah, so I mean it was quite an elitist object and put it it was more than a house of that I want to know that hang on Brian Cox not Brian in a Brian Cox You said earlier that you played a fair light and then Sam said it wasn't used on heavy rock based records.

It was used on the first, I made an album in 1988, I think, which was, and we used it for the drum samples on that album in 1988. But it was a, I realized that in the sequence of things, because before that, and not long before, you go back 10 years, I suppose, just the sequence of things, because before that, and not long before, you go back 10 years, I suppose, just a bit more, the first synthesizers around, the Mini Moog and things, and you pioneered the use of those machines. So what was the first truly electronic instrument

that you had? It was an EMS. Well, no, actually that's not true. The very first one I had was a test oscillator that I bought on Lyle Street in 1967. I was sort of fascinated by trying to make an electronic instrument. And I bought a signals generator, which was just a way of producing a sine wave from 0 to 40 kilohertz or something like that so all I could do with it was go that was the extent of it I was quite pleased with that and and then I got a wah-wah pedal and fitted that to it so now I could go wooow, aieee, wooow Did that make it onto any records?

It gave me a musical career So you used that set up? Well I couldn't play anything else So you used that on the early Roxy music records? Yeah, so on the first Roxy music album there's a bit on one of the songs where I actually emulate it on my new synthesizer which was an EMS that was made in Putney. In fact, the first one I had was called the EMS Putney,

the most unglamorous name for a synthesizer you could have really. What's funny about these synthesizers, of course, everyone wants emulators for them now because they have become the sound of the time. Yeah. And so they still live on, even if you haven't gotten a version of it, if you want to emulate it and put it into their music still. That's a sort of rule of art that the shortcomings of an instrument become the sound of that period. You know, whatever is, whatever it couldn't do becomes the characteristic.

We were talking about your digital, so sampling the use of digital technology that I suppose what the early eighties, which actually into my mind, so I wonder what your opinion, but to my mind it makes recording sound worse in the early 80s. I think you can really see that digital technology was being used because it was there. So do we see that, that people using the technology really almost too early? Well yes and what you see now is people buying instruments that offer you the possibility of emulating those shitty sounds from the early 1980s. That's fascinating, isn't it, the way that sometimes what was grotesque becomes nostalgic. Yeah.

I mean, a good example of that is computer music, isn't it? If I think back to the home computer games of the 80s, they're so iconic, aren't they? And they're still replicated, even though they're pretty crude synthesizers in those. You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast?

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sponsored job credit to get your job's more visibility at indeed.com slash podkatzca. Just go to indeed.com slash podkatzA right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. This week on Witness History, we're bringing you stories from the space race to mark a 60th anniversary that's out of this world. How Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk, plus more on the speech that never was, the words that US President Richard Nixon would have said if the moon astronauts hadn't made it back to Earth, and why the battle for space supremacy ended in a handshake between

the Americans and Soviets. Search and subscribe to witness history wherever you get your BBC podcasts. Systems. So we see a move from tape recording and recording studios. By the way, we talk about the multi-tracks, so the Beatles maybe four tracks. Where do we see that max out? How many tracks did...? In tape, the most I ever worked on was 32 tracks. I think that was that was as far as it ever went. Then it went to digital and digitally you can have infinite tracks and people unfortunately often do. You know when you've

when you've certain albums that you hear for the first time or certain songs you have the first time and sometimes you will hear a noise or you will hear a certain soundscape and you will go I need to investigate this. Yeah absolutely. Yeah I mean the track that I always come come back to as being quite definitive in that decade is the Tornadoes, Telstar, which was recorded by Joe Meek. It's not just about the layers of the sound within that and there's very instantly recognizable instruments but it's more about the layers of the sound within that and there's very instantly recognizable instruments but it's more about the soundscape that is created and

that use of the fabrication of space that Brian's been talking about you can really hear compression at that point and then I think that sort of set the precedent for those for that kind of late 60s space exploration, stuff like space oddity and the sounds in there where, you know, all of the cymbals are kind of panned and around the stereo field to make it sound like, you know, we're in space. The funny thing about all space music is that it assumes huge long reverbs, but of course there is actually no reverb in space. The universe is an infinite box. I like that, that's like the alien version, the

prog version of alien. In space no one can hear the reverb. But I wonder, thinking of your Apollo, when you are there and you're thinking for instance, you're thinking about music which is representing the Apollo missions and that sense of what you are trying to both emulate but also inspire in the listener. So how do you approach that? So just to explain that for context, I was asked to do the music for a film, which was a compilation of bits of film of the Apollo missions. I knew that the astronauts were each allowed one cassette tape to take on the mission with them. So I went to find out what they took and they nearly all took country and western music. And I thought that was so kind of beautifully American in a way. Here's the new frontier, so we'll use the old frontier music.

So in that record I thought, how could you make country and western music sound like space age music? So that was the sort of mission. I made it with my brother and friend. So we used pedal steel guitar, which is anyway quite a spacey sound, and keyboards and so on, and it's really sounded like space cowboys, you know, people on the edge of a new world, a new reality. You suggested earlier in one of your answers that the almost unlimited creative possibility now opened up with modern computers, you can almost do anything. You almost suggested that was a negative in some respects, because of the constraints. Yeah, it makes people spend a lot longer making albums, because you know, you want to try everything in the studio.

And now that everything, all the things you can do with sound, they, I should say it's like Moore's law, they double every 18 months. Every single day I get at least a dozen emails offering me new pieces of equipment, things that very often do things you already knew about, but quite a lot of them do something you could never do before. For instance, just recently I got a thing called D-Verb, and it does something that I always thought must be impossible, which is it removes the reverberation from a recording. I thought, that's incredible.

That's like being able to de-blur a photograph, which actually you can also do now. As soon as I hear of something like that, I always think, what else could you do with it? If you can take away the reverb of something, what else could you take away? Could you subtract the pitch and leave everything else? It always ends up being used to do something

that you never thought of doing before. And this is my day job. I mean, what's happening that the big explosion is in machine learning and it's these tools that are giving things like dereverb. I mean we work on a, I've got a project working on hearing aids and music and we do demixing of tracks. So take a stereo track and separate out into its original components and you know five ten years ago this was not possible. Now it's pretty much a solved problem and we're going to see more and more of this because essentially what's in

recording now is we have it in digital format so it's a computational problem it's a computer science problem of what we do with it. What I find fascinating what Brian says is actually what the musicians then do with it is what's really interesting and they abuse the systems which create the really interesting stuff. That's exactly right. Distortion is actually one of the most interesting things. So you know in the early days of the electric guitar, people very much wanted it to sound clean and nice like a real guitar sounds. And then people started finding that when you really turned it up loud because you

were in a big auditorium or something, that crunchy sound was kind of exciting because crunch in a musical instrument means the message is too big for the medium. It's like this thing is bursting to get out of this confined medium, you know, and that's exciting. So Sam, I was just thinking about that again. We're talking about advances and then we hit that point where again we go backwards. Yeah, I think it's really interesting and Mark Ronson did very similar things with Amy Winehouse Records as well in terms of recreating those kind of technological sounds I suppose of the 60s. What I think is really interesting about today's technology is just how much of it is based on old technology. So software plugins and the layouts of digital audio workstations and things like that,

they're so often based on technologies from the past. So you know when you're buying new plugins for your ProTool system or whatever, sometimes it's just full of EMT plate reverbs or its impulse responses of very particular rooms that records were made in in the 50s and 60s. So we've certainly long passed a point where there has been a clear sort of return to those past sonic aesthetics. Essentially you can't forget, I suppose, that ultimately you're trying to capture a performance of some description.

And I wonder whether, as you said, you can simulate any room now. But how much as a record producer do you think about the environment itself? So whilst you can make any performance sound like it was performed anywhere, how important is it for the musicians to be there? In a studio irrelevant irrelevant. I thought you were gonna say well it affects the way they play inside so you really

Know no, sorry. I perhaps misunderstood what you were saying, but I think So few records now are made as a recording of a performance So few records now are made as a recording of a performance. Even if there are live players involved, which they don't have to be of course, because with samplers and so on you can make it completely on your own in your bedroom. But the musicians involved probably rarely record together, so the drummer might do it alone to start with, or they might include, they might start with a piano and then two weeks later the guy, the drummer comes back off holiday and he does the drums.

So it's a patchwork now. Of course there are bands who perform in front of the microphones but that's really quite unusual to have an actual performance recorded now. really quite unusual to have an actual performance recorded now. And I don't see anything wrong with that. I mean, I think nobody would expect every painting to be done on the same day it was started. You know, we're quite used to the idea in other media that you do something over an extended period of time and that you can retract steps as well. So it's much more constructive now than it's ever been before. The problem of all of this is that you end up with sort of super pasteurized music where everything has been nicely finished and ironed out and there's no fiber left at all. You know, auto-tune is a good example

of this. I mean I love the sound of auto-tune when it's used for what it can do that human voices can't do. I hate the sound of it when it just turns a voice into every other voice. It seems like some of the technology we're talking about almost approaches that uncanny valley situation where there's something that seems that the connection between the human who created it and then the final process we lose that emotional connection do we ever do we see that in certain recordings where you go this has now been so ironed out that you have the uncanny valley experience yeah sound

recordings are full of happy accidents and they can sometimes really make a recording I mean that there are just so many examples of famous recordings where right at the very end of it, particularly where there's fade-outs, if you turn it up you can hear a recording engineer talking to a musician. It's really fun to kind of keep those things on. When did things start to be ironed out? I think certainly when the audio capability of digital audio workstations became such that you could literally start chopping out breaths between sung parts of verses and choruses to the point where it's like, okay, that person's singing something but they're not even drawing a breath. How does that work? You know there were certainly certain styles of music at the turn of the 2000s that became quite clinical.

Make a thing that Ringo Starr is it? He says at the end of Helter Skelter screams my fingers are bleeding is it? I've got blisters on my fingers. I've got blisters on my fingers that's it and it's just like that is such a great way to end us. Trevor you mentioned this idea that you can already now we can begin to split up sound. We can, which is a remarkable tool I think was used in some of the latest Beatles films when it's a remix, those things. So we've got an experiment that we're going to try. So for the listeners at home, what we've done is we've given everyone in the audience a

QR code. And so what we'd like to we've given everyone in the audience a QR code. And so what we'd like to actually do now is turn your phones back on or off aeroplane mode or whatever you did, scan the QR code, and then you'll find yourself on a webpage and that has a picture you can scan down and select where you're sat in the audience. And what we're going to do, and this is with the BBC R&D department, the audio R&D department, is we're gonna split some sound up into sort of regions in the radio theater,

and we're going to play it. Let the experiment kind of worked, by which I mean the beginning bit worked and then the rest of it didn't. The music did come out of phones, but didn't get the sense of in different sections of the audience, the tune moving around them. And so we are going to try and create that effect. And interestingly enough, sound wise, does this sound like I am actually sat in front of the audience?

Because if it does, it means we've found the right way of faking doing retakes when everyone's left, which itself is an experiment. So here's what it should have sounded like. But in terms of that idea, so you worked on the U2 live show at the Sphere, which had this remarkable sort of capability to throw sound around a venue. So we see that, we used to in cinema, I suppose. But are we going to see more of that, that spatial positioning of sound in 3D? I'm sure of it, yes. I mean I think that in that U2 show there was something like 60,000 loud speakers and they were all very small speakers but they were coordinated in such a way that the sound could be moved around.

I didn't actually go to the show, even though I designed part of it. This is where some of the big developments are happening in audio, is actually just sheer number of devices. So you talk about recording with one microphone, now we're recording with huge arrays of microphones now, which may do lots of manipulation of sound, but also in playback, we can have huge numbers of loud speakers nowadays, which allow us to do some most amazing things. Yeah, and I think one of the ideas of that demo is the technology can be used to harness

the fact that we all have multiple speakers in every room in our house pretty much. So to begin to use that to build soundscapes. Yeah the BBC R&D sort of developed that, actually I was involved in that project as well, as the idea that you know this idea having surround sound you have in cinema, how can we get it back into the home? And you're thinking, well, people don't want to redecorate their rooms and make loud speakers everywhere, but everyone's got mobile phones. So what can we do with mobile phones? And that's just interesting when you try and, I don't know, do a horror movie, having the sound behind you, it doesn't matter if it's not quite right, but having the sound behind you gives you a much more sort of visual sort of effect.

So it was quite effective. I started experimenting a few years ago with the idea of using lots of different types of loudspeakers for their own particular characteristics. So instead of doing the thing that people normally do, which is try to make the speakers completely invisible, sort of neutral as it were, so that every sound sounded the same going through every loudspeaker, I thought why not use the fact that different speakers have different voices, just like different instruments in an orchestra have different timbres, you know, because the thing about electronic instruments is that they don't have bodies. The body is the speaker, actually. That's where the resonance happens and where the air is actually moved from. So why not exploit that and make special loud speakers for electronic instruments?

This was my business plan, which has so far not succeeded. I find it very, again, just thinking about how much an audience changes in its expectations, because I was thinking a lot, listening to some of your ambient records, Brian, and then thinking of soundtracks, like to recent listening to some of your ambient records, Brian, and then thinking of soundtracks like to recent films like All of the Strangers, where soundtrack albums used to have, you know, very orchestral or synth and it was big and it was saying this is how you're meant to feel now. Whereas it seems like there's a new understanding of our set where you almost don't notice how you're being carried by the music and that seems to be an interesting transformation in our expectations of music as well. And even

more subtle tricks even, for instance somebody was just telling me they went to see Conclave and there's one scene apparently, I haven't seen the film myself, I never go out anywhere really so, where the Pope is speaking in a huge go out anyway really so where the Pope is speaking in a huge cathedral St. Peter's or the Sistine Chapel or something like that and as he's speaking they reduce the amount of reverb so finally and quite slowly apparently the voice is right next to your ear he doesn't move position at all but they just subtract the reverb and they come in onto a close mic and that

is such a clever trick because it's like the thing becoming much more personal and focused on you. And I hear a lot of that kind of sound manipulation now going on in films. I think that's so interesting. It's so much more interesting than most film soundtracks are. I think you did go and see Conclave, but you were worried that you'd mentioned you hadn't been to see U2 and you thought they'll be furious if they know I went to see a film about the Pope But didn't go and see Bono anyway, so they I'm pretty much the same thing So we asked the audience a question if a piece of music played whenever you enter the room

What would it be and why so Helen says fix you by Coldplay because I'm a paramedic Why? So Helen says, fix you by Coldplay, because I'm a paramedic. I've got the arrival of the Queen of Sheba. Like, people don't know I've arrived. It says, my son says it should be the Imperial March from Star Wars. And that's Luke's mum who said that.

Isaac Bolton says, anything from a Paul McCartney supergroup because wings can only ever get better. Do you know what? The invention. Every single show, we have some version of that song that Brian wrote for Tony Blair. And the hallelujah chorus, because I have a terrible sense of direction,

and it's a flipping miracle that I've found the room. Right, well, thank you very much to our panel, Professor Trefford Cox, Professor Samantha Bennett and Brian Eno, who probably is a professor, I'm sure you are, you're bound to be an honoree. APPLAUSE Next week's show, the final in the series, is kind of a Scrabble special. It's not about Scrabble, but the words that are in that episode you are going to love.

We've got zizagy, which is 75 on a triple word score. We've got gombok, which is only 45. Check in a dictionary, you'll find it, it's there. So we are going to be talking about the mathematics of nature and shape. Thank you. Bye bye. In the infinite monkey cage Turned out nice again. From BBC Radio 4, this is What Seriously? I'm Dara O'Brien. And I'm Izzy Suttie. And in our new series we're bringing you short stories and tall tales. What Seriously? is packed with real life strange but true stories that make you what? Seriously? And provide you with excellent social ammo to impress your friends.

The twist is we don't know how each story unfolds and we'll have to figure it out one fragment at a time with our special guests who each have a mysterious connection to the tale. That's right. I am your spy expert. And I don't really want to bring you back to the real facts of the story because you're making me laugh so much but I feel like I should. We're the only country in the world that eats the animal on our crest, like, and I never know whether to feel terrible or brilliant about that. All these engineers trying desperately to reduce

the amount of dust in space and you get Izzy taking up a balloon full of glycerine. Wow! You're welcome. I've had that one in the house. I know, right? It's like I'm reading from a sheet or something but never have. Join us for What Seriously? from BBC Radio 4, available now on BBC Sounds. This week on Witness History, we're bringing you stories from the space race to mark a 60th anniversary that's out of this world. How Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov made the first spacewalk, plus more on the speech that never was, the words that US President Richard Nixon would have said if the moon astronauts hadn't made it back to Earth, and why the battle for space supremacy ended in a handshake between the Americans and Soviets. Search

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