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[Indistinct talking]
[Car engines running]
[Subtle beeping]
- [Man Off Camera]: Are you guys going to stop ever,
or are you gonna keep dancing forever?
- I'm gonna keep dancing forever, I mean.
Well, at least 'til I remember
where I put my car.
[Rhythmic electronic beeping]
- [Female Narrator]: This is the story of women
who hear music in their heads,
of radical sounds
where there was once silence,
of dreams enabled by technology.
- Technology is a tremendous liberator.
It blows up power structures.
[Rhythmic electronic beeping becoming more complex]
Women are naturally drawn to electronic music.
You didn't have to be accepted
by any of the male-dominated resources:
the radio stations,
the record companies,
the concert hall venues,
the funding organisations.
You could make something with electronics
and you can present music directly to your audience
and that gives you tremendous freedom.
But somehow women get forgotten from that history.
[Electronic beeping darkens and fades away]
- [Female Narrator]: The history of women
has been a story of silence,
of breaking through the silence.
- We shall not be robbed any longer.
- [Female Narrator]: With beautiful noise
[Rhythmic electronic beeping]
[Beeping merges into a stagnant tone]
- This is April 30th, 1974.
And we're all here at the Bonino Gallery.
- [Woman Off Camera]: What's your name?
- Suzanne Ciani, C-I-A-N-I.
[Giggles]
[Subdued electronic music]
And I'm going to give...
I'm going to play a concert on the Buchla synthesizer.
These instruments are designed by a manufacturer
in Berkeley, California.
They're probably the most sophisticated system
that's available.
And I think they're sensual.
May I have a cigarette?
- [Woman Off Camera]: They're what?
- Sensual.
Thank you.
With this new technology, you could do it all yourself.
So you were the composer.
you were the performer, you were the sole arbiter
of your creation.
[Haunting synthesizer music]
[Repetitive melodic tones layer over prolonged swelling tones]
And the machine was alive.
It was warm.
It communicated.
It was sensitive.
You know, you could move something
just the littlest bit
and then a whole new expression would open up.
[Synthesizer music deepens and intensifies]
[Deep, full tones move quickly as swelling tones continue]
One of the most amazing experiences you can have
is to be in the middle of this sound that's moving.
The thing that I've always loved about electronic music
is that it's in motion.
It's malleable.
It's a much more open set of dynamics.
[A new melody emerges as lower tones steady]
In electronics, you're not dealing so literally with
the architecture of nodes or harmonies,
those building blocks in classical music.
You're dealing in energy.
[Air whooshing]
[Synthesizer music becomes more hurried]
- [Female Narrator]: At the dawn of the 20th century,
the world was no longer silent.
The spirit of modern life was a banshee
screeching into the future.
Futurists wanted to make art out of
the new energy, speed, and noise.
How would we begin to do such a thing,
to capture the sound of this electrified world?
[Humming pitch mirrors Clara's hand movements]
- I do very much what a diver would do.
I just have to take a chance.
And here I am.
[Hum jumps from a lower octave to a higher octave]
See?
A hair breadth off and I'm already on a different note.
Dr. Ray, now we'll have fun.
[Dr. Ray laughs]
Now we'll have fun.
Now, here, hold your hand over this.
[Electronic tones whining in tandem with hand movements]
It is a fallacy to think that the instrument
is easy to play.
It is much more difficult than the violin.
I was a concert violinist before I played this.
[Passionate classical music on piano and Theremin]
As young girls, both my sister and I gave joint concerts
playing the violin and the piano all over Russia
then all over Europe.
We played our way to America.
I met Professor Theremin when he came to America
to demonstrate the instrument.
I was fascinated by
the aesthetic part of the instrument,
the beauty,
and the idea of playing completely
without touching anything.
I also loved the sound of it.
[Classical music continues]
Professor Theremin became a great friend and admirer,
and we really worked on
this particular instrument together.
I making my musical pushes known to him,
and he being the genius that he was
made it work.
[Emotional piano music]
And we played the Nardini Concerto.
We played the whole César Franck Sonata,
which was at that time a rather great surprise
because the Theremin was associated with
just little melodies.
[Theremin plays a deep, passionate melody]
- [Aura Satz]: Suddenly you get someone
who's a total virtuoso
and able to make it sound in a way
that it had never sounded before.
[Mournful classical music with piano accompaniment]
- [Female Narrator]: You cannot play air with hammers,
Clara would say.
You have to play with butterfly wings.
[Mournful classical music continues]
- [Clara Rockmore]: I was a freak at the time.
The public had to be won over into thinking of it
as a real artistic medium played by an artist,
and I won them over.
[Birds chirping]
A young composer said to me,
"It's listening to this singing of a soul."
Now isn't that a lovely thought,
singing of a soul?
[Harsh, irregular tones]
- The first stage in the realisation of a piece of music
is to construct the individual sounds
that we're going to use.
To do this, we go to these
sound generators here, electronic generators,
and we listen to three of the basic electronic sounds.
First, is the simplest sound of all,
which is a sine wave.
[Stagnant tone]
You can see on the oscilloscope,
it has a very simple form and has a very pure sound.
Now listen to the same note but with a different quality.
This is a square wave.
[Piercing stagnant tone]
It's very square on the picture
and perhaps rather harsh to listen to.
This is because it has a lot of high harmonics
and that's what gives the corners on the picture.
Now a more complex sound still is white noise.
[Staticky, rain-like sound with no distinguishable pitch]
We don't always go to electronic sound generators
for our basic sources of sound.
If the sound we want exists already in real life, say,
we can go and record it.
[Medium-pitched pop]
[High-pitched, sharp tone]
But those basic sounds aren't really interesting
in their raw state like this.
To make them of value for a musical piece,
we have to shape them and mold them.
We can get the lower sounds we need from the rhythm
by slowing down the tape.
[Low-pitched pop]
And the higher sounds by speeding up the tape.
[Pops get progressively higher in pitch]
And then all we have to do is cut the notes
to the right length.
We can join them together on a loop and listen to them.
[Low pops become rhythmic bass tones]
And then with the higher notes of the rhythm, again,
we join them together in a loop
and play it in synchronisation
with the first tape.
[Rapid rhythm of high "pop" tones overlays bass tones]
And over this we can play.
[Rapid rhythm of higher tones layers on top]
[Mysterious melody begins]
[Haunting ringing tones]
Using all of these we can build up any sound
we can possibly imagine.
We spend quite a lot of time trying to invent new sound,
sounds that don't exist already,
sounds that can't be produced by musical instruments.
[Scratching]
[High-pitched squeaking]
The radio, the radio, the radio was
the most important thing in my life.
You know, there weren't books.
The radio was my education.
[Haunting tones and subdued beeping]
I was accepted by the Oxford and the Cambridge
to read mathematics, which is quite something
for a working-class girl in the '50s,
where only one in 10 were female.
- Delia was a brilliant mathematician.
She was fascinated by the inner composition of a sound.
Then she could reach into it and decide
what part of that sound she wanted to use.
[Distant sirens]
[Menacing pulses]
- [Delia Derbyshire]: I was in Coventry during the Blitz.
That was such an influence on me.
It's come to me that my love for abstract sounds were
sounds of the air raid siren.
[Sirens continue]
Because that's the sound you hear and you don't know
the source of it as a young child.
It's an abstract sound and it's meaningful
and then the all clear.
[Sirens merge into electronic music sounds]
[Haunting hum]
[Bombs exploding]
- [Female Narrator]: World War II emptied cities of men.
[Time clock clicking]
And in the absence of men, women worked.
[Machine rattling]
Freedom was more than a feeling.
- [Man]: There isn't much glamour
about this independence.
Women at work are getting to look and behave
more like men.
It's not very attractive.
[Haunting squeaking sounds]
- Welcome to Tower Folly, this lonely host house
on the North Downs of Kent.
Well, as far as I know
this house isn't haunted and there isn't
a mad scientist in sight.
This is in fact a music factory where they can literally
make music out of electronic sounds,
and the woman who makes it has just been awarded a grant
by the Gulbenkian Foundation to help her research.
She's here at her control box,
Miss Daphne Oram.
How did you get involved in this kind of work?
- It dates back really to 1944, I think,
when I read a book
which prophesied that composers in the future
would compose directly into sound instead of
using orchestral instruments, you see.
And well, since then I've been working
in BBC Studios,
and so I've got some little grasp
of this sort of equipment.
[Upbeat orchestral music starts]
I was trained as a musician,
and the two sort of click together, you see.
- Daphne was a very gifted pianist
and she had secured a place for herself
at the Royal Academy of Music, which she turned down
because she was also very interested in technology
and wanted to work at the BBC.
[Haunting electronic sounds]
I was asked to do some incidental music
for a television play,
and I did this by getting together,
in the middle of the night,
all the tape recorders that I could find in studios,
collecting them together in one studio,
and working until they had to be put back the next morning,
sleeping a little bit and then coming back in
to do my normal chamber music work.
[Upbeat flute and piano chamber music]
Then it grew from that.
I was asked to help start the radiophonic workshop.
- [Man Whispering]: Listen.
- Without Daphne,
it would never have started because BBC did not want
an electronic music studio.
We were just using anything we could grab hold of.
We had basic laboratory equipment
and a pair of tape machines that had been liberated
at the end of the war.
[Banging and oscillating electronic sounds]
- Playwrights were writing in a surreal
kind of style,
which was a legacy of the war.
The style required a different kind of sound.
- [echoing, haunting male voice]: Bird or angel?
- [Male Radio Announcer]: This program is an experiment.
We think it's worth broadcasting
as a perfectly serious first attempt
to find out whether we can convey a new kind of
emotional and intellectual experience
by means of what we call radiophonic effects.
[Trudging, heavy beat]
- [Echoing, rhythmic chanting]: Round and round
like a wind from the ground.
[Unintelligible]
- [Male Radio Announcer]: It's a sort of modern magic.
Some musicians believe that it can become an art form
complete in itself.
Others are skeptical.
In fact, we've decided not to use
the word "music" at all.
[Whispering and howling sounds]
- [Female Narrator]: What began as a research trip
to the Brussels World Fair became a fateful pilgrimage.
There, Daphne hears an electronic composition
fed through 350 speakers
with synchronised projections.
[Low rumbling]
Electronic music was more than just incidental.
It was the sound of the future.
- [Daphne Oram]: The radiophonic workshop was concentrating
somewhat on the drama side,
and I wanted to concentrate on the music side.
So I set up my own studio.
- She was a woman,
in the 1950s, set up her own
independent electronic music studio.
It's extraordinarily brave.
[Fluttering, whistle-like sounds]
- [Male Interiewer]: Now Miss Oram,
how do you go about manufacturing
this sort of sound?
- Well, let me introduce
this little electronic generator here,
which produces a sound like this.
[Resonant tone getting progressively lower]
Now I made a little loop of tape here
with varying pure tones on it.
[Rapidly ascending tones]
Now if I then put a little artificial reverberation
on that, I think you'll see
we're just beginning to get somewhere
with the music.
[Reverberating, ethereal ascending tone patterns]
[Simple melody playing]
[Joyful melody plays over percussive tapping]
- [Male Interviewer]: What are you going with this
three-and-a-half thousand pounds that you've got?
- Well, this is very exciting to me
because I have ideas for a piece of electronic equipment,
not quite like this.
In this case, the composer,
we're going to be able to feed in drawn symbols
straight into the equipment and out will come the sounds.
[Rumbling]
I have a new technique completely,
one that I've evolved over the years,
which I call oramics.
Now that is using graphic representation of sound.
[Reverberating tones]
There seems to be no real notation system
in electronic music.
I wanted a system where I could graphically represent
what I wanted and give that representation,
that musical score, in fact, to a machine
and have from it the sound.
[Reverberating tones continue]
[playful waltz of electronic tones]
- This idea of drawn sound
is a sound that comes from nowhere.
It's a sound that is synthesised from nothing,
but she's not the ghost in the machine
her hands are all over it.
[playful waltz continues]
- The composer wants to project something of himself.
The great works of art are a projection of a human mind.
And unless this machine can accept and produce exactly
this projection of the composer's thought,
then I think it's just a machine and I can quite see
why people can get frightened at the thought.
[Percussive beat resembling a train on tracks]
[Eliane Radigue speaking French]
[Percussive beat continues]
[Ocean-like waves of sound]
[Airplane engine roaring]
[Prolonged metallic tones]
Pierre Schaeffer said, "In between noise and music,
"there is the hand of the musician."
[Man speaking French]
[French voice recording repeats on a loop]
- Stop.
[Eliane speaking French]
[light chiming tones overlay deep airy sounds]
- [Female Narrator]: Eliane dreamt of an unreal,
impalpable music appearing and fading away like clouds
in the blue summer sky.
[Slow pulses of pleasant tones and chimes]
[Eliane speaking French]
[Mix of mysterious electronic sounds]
[Pierre Henry speaking French]
[Eliane speaking French]
[Single tone splits into multiple dissonant tones]
[A complex chorus of tones emerges]
- [Man]: Greenwich Village is mostly a state of mind.
[Blues music]
- [Bebe Barron]: The Village in the 50s had to be
the most exciting, wonderful place in the world.
It was unbelievable, like Paris in the 20s.
We were married in '48 and Louis's cousin brought us
a tape recorder for a wedding present.
I think we were the only ones in the country
with that machine.
We had all the artists in The Village coming to us
for recording work.
[Reverberating high and low tones]
- [Female Performer]: I remember my first
birth in water.
I sway and float, stand on boneless toes,
listening for distant sounds,
sounds beyond the reach of human ears.
[Whistling tones join the reverberating tones]
- [Bebe]: We started a recording studio.
We built almost all the equipment ourselves
because there wasn't any to buy.
[Upbeat orchestral music]
- [Male Announcer]: The great American boy is hard at work
inventing, creating, building something.
And the desire to build and create new things
is the energy that develops
industrious, dependable citizens of tomorrow.
- [Louis Barron]: It was exciting because you were
building these things and you're experimenting with
the electronic media.
[Bubbling sounds dance atop an asymmetrical beat]
- [Female Narrator]: Louis made sounds
by overloading circuit boards,
which Bebe then processed and manipulated to create music.
To the writer, Anaïs Nin,
it sounded like a molecule had stubbed its toe.
- [Bebe]: And we started working on avant-garde films.
That's what this was all about,
was the avant-garde.
[Mysterious, space-like music]
The sense of wonder and awe,
the beauty coming from the circuits.
I mean we would just sit back and let them take over.
[Deep roars and descending, spinning tones]
- [Louis]: These circuits are not instruments.
They are performance.
- [Bebe]: We would record
everything that came out of the circuits.
I spent hours and hours and hours
listening to all that stuff.
- [Louis]: Oh yeah.
Well, later you went through-
- [Bebe]: Days!
- [Louis]: Miles of tape. - [Bebe]: Yeah.
- [Louis]: Incredible, and she could hold it in her memory.
She could remember where to go for a certain feeling
in the sound.
[Sounds resembling sirens]
- Bebe had a formal musical education.
She made most of the compositional decisions
while Louis dealt more with the technical side of things.
The Barrons' greatest achievement
was with the music for Forbidden Planet.
[Spinning high-pitched tones]
It was the first movie with an all-electronic score.
[Whale-like moaning]
- The pride and joy of that period was in coming up
with the music for the monster.
[Descending, spinning tone meets an ascending moan]
We were just beside ourselves.
Suddenly, this circuit started generating
the most complex sounds.
The dying of Morbius was the actual dying of the circuit.
[Deep moaning]
[Harsh, distressed screeching]
[Screeching getting higher and higher]
[Tones descend into silence]
[Bubbling sounds]
- [Louis]: We would have a credit that said,
"Electronic music by Louis and Bebe Barron."
But a memo was circulated among the executives.
How would the American Federation of Musicians
respond to a credit that says electronic music?
- The Musicians' Union would not
allow the soundtrack to be considered music.
[Haunting, spinning tones sprinkled with bubbling sounds]
They were afraid that someday their jobs would be replaced
by machines and so they would have none of it.
That's why it's credited as "electronic tonalities."
[Deep, haunting sounds]
- [Bebe]: It was so awful.
We were barely acknowledged as composers.
[Harsh, metallic swell of sound]
[Rhythmic, determined melody]
[Sweeping whoosh of air]
[Mysterious space-like melody]
- Prior to Dr. Who,
there's a lot of distaste of electronic music.
Delia's music is absolutely crucial
in changing that perception.
[Mysterious, reverberating tones]
- [Woman]: It's like a lighthouse, isn't it?
I wonder what it's like up there in a thunderstorm.
Think of being up there on a starry night,
with all the world at your feet.
- You get people who are writing in
saying, "What is this?"
"How is it made?"
- Imagine what life must have been like
before samplers, before synthesizers,
before sequencers?
It took her 40 days to make the Doctor Who theme.
40 days.
- She would sample a green lamp shade,
speed it up, reverse it,
and just completely changed the nature of the sound.
[Bell chiming]
[Sustained, warm bell tones]
[Birds chirping]
- This was a documentary program
about the Tuareg tribe,
the Tuareg tribe of nomads in the Sahara desert.
In the piece, I tried to convey
the distance of the horizon and the heat haze,
the strand of camels wandering across the desert.
That, in fact, was made from square waves
put through every filter I could possibly find.
[Harsh sustained tones over warm, swelling bell tones]
- [Barry performing]: There must be a god.
Oh, yes.
[Ethereal, layered choral chanting]
Delia Derbyshire created
some very, very beautiful things
and some things that had
a very strange and unearthly quality
that couldn't quite be got, I think, by normal musical means
and yet didn't sound as if
they were electronically manufactured.
[Ethereal choral chanting continues]
- Some of it was worked out mathematically.
[Repeated beeping tones]
I've tried to get into it
a feeling of simplicity and loneliness,
of a man on a moon.
[Ethereal, sliding melody]
- [Neil Armstrong]: That's one small step for man,
one giant leap for mankind.
- [Mandy]: She created a kind of pathway
for electronic music.
- [Delia]: I did all sorts of things
I was told I couldn't do.
I think I've always been a very independent thinker.
[Ethereal, sliding melody ends]
[Bomb exploding]
[Rumbling sound expands, then fades]
- [Female Narrator]: While the work of women
like Delia and Daphne
came from the deafening sounds of wartime,
it was the chilling silence of the Cold War
that took others to the limits of listening.
- The bomb scare psychology
that was inculcated,
that had a big effect on the artists
that were emerging at that time.
[Upbeat guitar music]
Everybody was pushing for opening things up,
a kind of way through all the terrible stuff
that was going on in the world at the time.
So there was a lot of political motivation behind
what we were doing.
- [Protestors] Peace now!
Peace now! Peace now!
[Crowd cheering]
- [David Rosenboom]: The effect was to say,
okay, we've got to break through
anything that was rigid, anything that was limiting,
and try to move things forward.
[Space-like, harsh, high-pitched tones]
- The music scene
was evolving into an area that was
very fresh and exciting.
[Screaming, elongated tones]
First time I heard live electronic music
was early '60s.
Pauline was on stage with an accordion.
The room was exploding with a sound that was ear-splitting.
I had never experienced that kind of volume before.
[Piercing, screaming tones ascending and descending]
- [Pauline Oliveros]: I can't remember
when I wasn't interested in sounds.
I remember particularly things like riding in the car
with my parents for instance, maybe in the backseat,
listening to the sound of the motor
and listening to the sound of my parents' voices
being modulated by the motor.
[Muffled conversation]
Listening to my father turn his shortwave radio,
listening to the whistles and pops and static.
I mean, I was always fascinated with
the in-between sounds in the stations,
just tuning in between.
I loved that.
[Radio tuning]
I credit my mother.
For my birthday, she sent me a tape recorder,
and that was a very significant event
because nobody had tape recorders, you know.
It was in the 50s.
[Relaxed, marching dance music]
I began to do field recording from my apartment window.
[High-pitched screeching tones Trolley bell ringing]
And then in 1959 got started making
a tape piece called Time Perspectives.
[Wind chimes ringing]
[Hollow object sliding on a surface]
The tape recorder that I had, it was possible to record
by hand winding the tape in record mode.
That gave me a variable speed so I could do
some interesting things with that.
[Bells continue ringing]
[Sounds resembling birds cawing]
And I used the bathtub for reverberation [chuckles]
and cardboard tubes as filters.
I'd put microphones in the tube and then record sounds
through the tube.
[Hollow sound of water gurgling]
[Airy wash of sound]
[Sustained accordion chord]
[Object dropping]
Eventually, I met up with a group of people
who were interested in new music,
[Haunting, avant-garde music]
which led to the founding of
the San Francisco Tape Music Center.
- The San Francisco Tape Music Center
was not associated with an institution.
So it was friends brought together what equipment
they had to share.
- Our sense of what we were doing
at that point was opening a place where poets,
painters, film, and electronic or tape music,
where all this stuff could be done.
[Echoing, haunting sounds]
It was a sense of individuality.
Nobody wanted to be like anyone else
and everybody was very supportive
of what everybody else was doing.
- My interest was always in live performance
and I started to find out ways to use tape recorders
and perform live with them, and that was making
a tape delay system, which allows me
to maintain that physical contact with the sound.
[Screeching, high-pitched tone]
[Classical choral music begins as tone continues]
- [Female Narrator]: How do you exercise the canon of
classical music of misogyny
with two oscillators, a turntable, and tape delay?
- Feminism was at the center
of what she was doing,
and it's strange because it seems like if the boys' club
is going to pick a token woman, you would not pick
a woman who is that outspoken.
[Drone-like tone]
- Pauline was conscious of the fact that
she was different.
She had a streak of a revolutionary in her.
- Pauline, it was hard, you know,
she had come out in the 50s
and here she was a woman, gay,
avant-garde music,
each thing by itself would be hard,
but she had three things that were hard
and women composers
were not being performed, you know.
[Choral voices emerge over the drone-like tone]
- [Male Interviewer]: You wrote an editorial
to the New York Times once called
"Don't Call Them 'Lady' Composers"
- [Pauline]: That's right. - Tell us about
when you wrote that and why.
- [Pauline]: I just want to be introduced as a composer.
That has caused me to use that title
and to start to point out
how hard it was for women to be taken seriously
as creators of music.
[Drone-like and choral tones continue]
- [Female Narrator]: Go out walking at night.
Tread so quietly the bottoms of your feet become ears.
Working with an all-women ensemble,
instructions like these were intended to encourage
deep listening.
[Drone-like tone continues]
[Long tones resembling brass]
- [Pauline]: I was alarmed
as many were, of course,
with the Vietnam War,
and I began to seek some ways of working with sound
that I could discover more of a kind of inner peace.
[Drone-like and brass tones continue]
I found myself listening to long sounds
and becoming more interested in
what the sounds did themselves
than what I would do with them.
And as this work proceeded,
I began to become interested in what the kind of listening
I was doing did to me and my own internal processes.
[Drone-like tones continue]
[Brass tones sing gently]
- [Female Interviewer]: Does it have
social and political implications to you,
the kind of music that you write?
- Oh, yes.
Well, I feel that one's interactions,
the way one relates in an organization of any kind,
is political and social and very important.
The path that I hope to be on is one where the energy
that comes out of the work that I do is beneficial
to others as well as myself.
I want my work to be mutually beneficial.
I'm not interested in
making an object of art and entertainment.
I'm interested in making something that helps me
to grow and expand and change as an individual
and in relation to others.
[Warm, layered brass tones]
- [Female Narrator]: Pauline's preoccupation with
how we hear and feel
the sounds within and around us
were shared by Maryanne Amacher at MIT,
who was sounding out the city.
[Fluttering high-pitched sounds]
[Seagulls cawing]
- I had installed a microphone
in eight locations at the Boston Harbour
in the New England Fish Exchange
connected to telephone links.
It was very nice to come in late at night
at 1:00 in the morning
and just turn on the mixer and have the sound
coming from the distant night when I liked it best
because I could hear patterns in various shapes.
[Seagulls cawing]
[Fluttering high-pitched sounds continue]
I realized, my, there's a tone of this place.
There's a whole undercurrent that exists here
that makes this recognisable in some way.
It wasn't hard to analyse it in Boston.
It was like a low F sharp.
Then other places, for example, New York,
it was like a low E.
[Subway train clattering]
It wasn't that I wanted the sounds of the birds
or the sounds of the harbour or any of these sounds,
I really wanted to experience and learn about hearing.
[Pleasant harmony of tones]
- [Male Interviewer]: When people say to you,
"Yeah, but is it music?"
After you say, "Yes it is,"
how do you expand on that?
- [Maryanne]: Well, I think that's sort of
an old question [chuckles].
Much of our music, classical pop, has this beat,
has this gallop, has this trot.
I'm interested in music that communicates some ideas,
finding places where there is space and dimension
to the sound,
sounds very very far away and very close up.
[Deep, airy sounds]
- Maryanne was really interested in
contemporary science.
She had been very interested in muon research,
these particles that speed through the universe.
- She was constantly thinking about
intersections of science, life, and sound.
[Airy and metallic, droning sounds]
- Her house was incredible.
It was in breathtakingly bad condition.
There was this whole rack
full of these sine wave oscillators
straight out of a physics lab.
And there's this woman sitting there
with this really intense, buzzy energy.
[Quivering metallic sounds]
- She'd have a rock-and-roll attitude
towards, "I'm going to make this whole house
"vibrate and come alive."
[Metallic sounds intensify and rumble]
- She wanted to develop an extremely
rigorous approach to listening,
[Low, constant tone subtly shifting in quality]
to activating sights,
to thinking outside of composition as it's known.
She didn't want to push around
dead white men's notes.
- I wanted to create music where
the listener actually had
vivid experiences of contributing.
In composing, I am conscious of the tones
that you make in response to the tones
that a musician plays.
[Subtle, harsh violin string sounds]
- One of the phenomenon she was
most interested in was otoacoustic emission.
She referred to them as ear tones.
If you have two frequencies and they sound together,
the ear and the mind try to sort of resolve them.
There is an emergent third pitch.
She can compose these outer things that will produce
this inner thing.
[low, constant tone subtly shifting in quality]
She would refer to it as
ghost writing the listener's music.
- The first time one encounters her music
and the way that it dances inside your ear
is this light bulb moment.
You can actually play with
the physicality of the listener.
[Soft, harsh violin string sounds]
[Low tone continues]
[Tones are replaced by a constant high-pitched tone]
- Merce Cunningham commissioned
a piece from her.
[Sustained, chant-like tones]
You'd hear this very high pitch.
[High pitch and low tones continue]
And then there would be thunder,
[Thunder rumbling softly]
beautiful thunder recorded in stereoscopic sound
that would shift across the room.
[Thunder rumbles swell]
And when it hit, there would be this array
of other frequencies that would happen.
It was very very beautiful.
[High pitch continues as thunder waxes and wanes]
- [Female Narrator]: The idea of
a slowly-evolving composition
that alters the listener
also fired the imagination of Eliane Radigue.
[Grunt-like prolonged tone]
[Eliane speaking French]
[Varied electronic beeps]
[Man singing to an upbeat rhythm]
- When I met Eliane,
she had been working with the Buchla synthesizer,
yet this piece that she wrote, Chry-ptus,
sounded nothing like a Buchla.
[Spinning low tone]
[High, piercing pitch emerges]
[Phone ringing sound]
[Eliane speaking French]
[Medium-pitched, spinning tone]
- We're talking with Eliane Radigue
who's here from Paris.
Are you working with both synthesisers
and tape recording processes?
- [Eliane]: Yes, the ARP synthesiser
and the tape recorder.
My main involvement with music is to work on
slow changing of the sounds.
- [Charles]: So in a way,
you're working with time?
- [Eliane]: Yes, my last work, Adnos II,
is 75 minutes long, and it couldn't be shorter.
It just goes like a stream.
[Constant tone slightly pulsates rhythmically]
[A dissonant tone emerges]
I should say that this music I make
is not so much welcome,
except by a few people, of course.
There is nothing in between.
People likes it, or not at all.
For the music establishment,
they think that I don't make music.
That's not music.
- [Charles] Oh, still arguing about that, are we?
[Eliane laughs]
- Our music was meant to be listened to
in a different way than how you'd listen to, like,
a pop song.
In a pop song you're listening for
melodies, harmonies, lyrics.
In her music, you're listening not just
for the things that are changing in the sound,
but for the way that the experience
is changing your disposition.
[Two main spinning tones]
[Spinning gets more rapid]
[Spinning slows, causing the two tones to alternate]
[Speaking French]
[Man speaking French]
[Dramatic whoosh of sound]
[Baroque-like electronic melody]
[Man speaking French]
[Piano notes playing]
- [Wendy Carlos]: I'll make it start very dull
and then get very bright like that.
It sounds more like a trumpet sound.
[Brass-like synthesizer notes playing]
[Man speaking French]
[Experimenting with brass-like notes]
And I'll add a little echo.
[Brass-like notes become more sustained]
[Rapid baroque music]
- The transgressive act of
recontextualizing these classic Western art music tropes,
that takes a lot of strength, humour, and vision.
- [Suzanne]: Up until that moment,
electronic music had this promise
of a different vocabulary, a different language,
a new paradigm, a new way of working.
Switched-On Bach, the way it impacted
the public's consciousness of what a synthesiser was,
was completely retroactive.
[Bach piece playing on synthesizer]
Everybody thought that these things were about
replicating sounds.
To me, electronic music wasn't about making baroque music
with new timbres.
It was a different kind of music.
You just had the Summer of Love.
Everything we knew was being thrown out,
and it was a whole new world.
Electronics were part of that world.
[Ascending and descending scales of electronic tones]
- What are they?
- Oh, these are patch cords.
These are the things that route the signal
from one little module to another to get the sound.
You can patch it a lot of different ways and the way
you patch it will determine what you get.
It's like creating an instrument.
- [Woman Off-Camera]: Do you know before you put them in
what it's going to sound like?
- Well, you're always going towards an idea.
That's what makes you put the patch cords in certain places.
- [Suzanne]: Part of an instrument is what it can do
and part of it is what you do to it.
The other part of music of course is the motion
and the personal involvement that a musician gives
to his instrument,
and that's something that I happen to feel
and have with synthesisers.
So I play the synthesiser the same way
somebody else would play cello or violin.
[Majestic melody begins over the scales]
- For a classically trained pianist
to turn her back on a keyboard,
she's crazy.
It was like learning a new language
via the means of cutting out your own tongue.
- [Suzanne speaking as harmonies mimic her voice]:
Yeah, I can sing out of tune
and it'll still be in tune
because it depends on what I'm playing.
This is all the pitch so you don't have to really be able
to sing to do this.
So, it's great. it's great.
Hello, hello, hello.
[Suzanne Narrating]: I couldn't get a record deal
because the record companies
were not interested in a woman who did not sing.
Advertising wanted to be on the edge.
They were looking for something different.
I had total freedom.
Nobody could tell me what to do.
They didn't know what I did.
[Mysterious chiming music]
[Electronic squeaky melody]
- [Male Announcer]: The new Clairol custom care
coon brush.
[Upbeat rock-like music]
- [Male Announcer]: Atari is going to
turn your head around.
[Exploding sound]
- [Male Announcer]: Big news from Covergirl.
- There's a whole new thick lash mascara.
[Liquid pouring with electronic bubbling sound]
- The landscape that she must have walked into
must have been like something from Mad Men.
I remember Suzanne telling me stories like
she'd turn up early to set up
all the modular gear in studios
and a young engineer would come in and go,
"Which mic are you going to sing on?"
or, "What are you going to sing for us?"
Because those stereotypes were
so commonplace in studios in those days.
[Upbeat rock music]
- [Suzanne speaking as chords mirror her voice]:
Welcome to Xenon.
- More than anybody else,
she built a career out of making weird music,
which is something I think everybody aspires to.
She had her own company.
She was able to turn her art into something
she can live on.
[Suzanne's sigh is mirrored by a low electronic echo]
- [Suzanne with a low and echoey voice]: Don't be afraid.
This is my almost male voice.
[Audience laughs and applauds]
- Make the thing make noises for us.
- Okay, let's-
- Now first of all, why do you have this stuff?
What do you do with this?
- Well, this is how I make a living.
- But I mean, you don't go door-to-door saying,
I'll make you sound goofy.
- Yeah, they call me. they call me.
- They call you.
[Complex wash of sound slowly ascends]
- [Suzanne] Should I stop?
- No, let it go for about half an hour.
[Sound stops]
That's wonderful.
[Audience applauds]
- [Suzanne]: It was 1980.
I was hired to do a Hollywood feature.
[Hollow, spinning sound gets progressively higher]
It was a Lily Tomlin movie.
Lily was a woman, the head of the production
at Universal was a woman.
So I had two women in positions of power.
And guess what? I got hired.
- Is that package for me?
- Mike, it's for me.
I didn't know I was the first woman
to be hired to score a major Hollywood feature,
and I didn't know that it would be 14 years
until another woman was hired.
[Hollow, spinning sound gets progressively higher]
We are casualties of a day-to-day system
that operates without awareness
that we're even there.
♪ Galaxy glue ♪
♪ Life would go to pieces without galaxy glue ♪
- [Laurie]: There weren't any women composers
that I knew of.
I had never heard of one.
[Rapid percussive tones]
Composers were old white dead men.
It was just not something I ever thought of
as something I could do.
When they asked me in high school,
"What would you like to do with your life?"
I said, "I would love to do music."
They said, "Totally out of the question.
"You would have needed to have music lessons
"all during your childhood."
So I did a degree in social sciences,
but secretly I really always wanted to do music.
After I got my bachelor's and moved to New York,
I thought, I'm going to regret it
for the rest of my life if I don't give it a real try.
[Man singing a vocal warm-up]
I was taking ear training and music at Juilliard
and happened to be in Mike Czajkowski's class.
And he was working with Mort Subotnick.
Mike dragged me down to Mort's studio and it was like
music went from black and white to color.
[Complex, drone-like sound expands]
I fell in love with electronic music.
It completely changed the way I heard everything.
The sounds of the traffic in the street
no longer sounded the same.
I always wanted to do something in the arts
that had to do with the real, authentic experience
of being alive, in contrast to
the 1950s hypocritical reality in which I lived,
in which everything was glossed over
with cotton candy.
[Spoon banging]
[Upbeat, sweeping classical music]
- A perfect dinner Judy.
And you said she couldn't boil water
without burning it.
- [Laurie]: I got involved in the downtown art scene,
which is like "try anything," you know?
[Low drone]
[Mechanical sounds]
I tackled learning the Buchla modular analogue system.
While I could do all kinds of wonderful things with sounds,
what I really wanted was the precision of the computer.
I got involved with computers in music out of frustration
at other ways of doing music, in part,
and also because of the incredible potential
that they had for combining the best of all other worlds,
let's say.
The memory, the logic,
the ability to actually interact with sound
in real time began to be possible.
The complete freedom to define
any kind of world you wanted.
[Warm, fluttering tones]
[Organ-like notes begin]
[Fluttering tones fade]
[A single, spinning pitch emerges]
[Organ-like notes flutter]
[A low, moving bass tone emerges]
[It widens into a splash of sound]
[Bass tone fades]
[Penetrating electric tones sustain and overlap]
[Bass tone reemerges briefly]
[Organ-like fluttering continues]
[Dissonant splash of tones]
[Overlapping electric tones form a friendly melody]
Computers back then were the enemy of the counterculture.
Computers belonged to the banks and the military
and the insurance companies.
Computer music was the utter dehumanisation of music
rather than, to some few of us,
the liberation of it.
- Do you mean to tell me that you haven't heard it?
- No, I haven't heard it. I haven't heard it.
Here, play it.
- [Woman]: It's really terrific, Suzie.
Wait 'til you hear it.
- [Man]: Excuse me, ladies.
I have a special request.
[Upbeat, alternating electronic beeping tones]
- Laurie Spiegel was a ukulele player
among other things.
She had a sense of music that is based in folk idioms,
and Appalachian Grove
is one of the earliest computer music pieces
that anyone would want to listen to [laughs]
more than once.
But to think that it was all done
by punching holes in cards and running them
through the Bell Labs computer is quite astonishing.
[Upbeat, alternating electronic beeping tones continue]
- [Laurie]: Technology is just,
it's a natural extension of man.
Man has always played with tools.
Man has always developed tools,
and it is a tool.
The machine doesn't write the music.
You tell the machine what to do,
and the machine is an extension of you.
[Phone dialing sounds]
Bell Labs was a great, great institution.
Everything changed after the AT&T divestiture happened.
Bell Labs became product-oriented
instead of pure research.
[Faint phone conversations and dialing]
After I left there, I was absolutely desolate.
I had lost my main creative medium.
- [Male Interviewer]: Laurie Spiegel,
you have a very fascinating new product,
a software program, which you created...
- Yeah. - ...called Music Mouse.
Can you tell us a little bit about that?
- This is actually a program which turns the Macintosh
into an instrument which you play,
and unlike traditional instruments,
on the other hand, it uses the logic
of the computer supportively to musical expression.
[Uplifting piano music]
[Melody rises and falls with the horizontal line]
[Piano chords follow the vertical lines]
I needed an instrument.
I wanted something which was entirely under my own control
that didn't have to be marketable
or it didn't involve funding.
It was just something entirely mine.
[Melody and chords ascend]
It's the first time I've done something
essentially for myself
that I'm just really making available
to anybody who wants it,
and I hope a lot of people really get
a lot of good music out of it.
Everybody who's using it seems to be doing
something slightly different.
So I'll be interested, you know,
keeping my ears open for whatever you do.
Mouse ears.
[Chords ascend then rapidly descend]
[Sustained notes form a warm blanket of sound]
[A new piece begins with dissonant, moving notes]
- She wasn't satisfied with
the given constraints of what she was working with.
So she decided to make her own software.
She just embodies this idea of agency.
[The piece continues]
[Each note has both lower tone and a higher, harsh tone]
- Her work was very much in the lineage
with the work of Daphne Oram
because of her engineering
of a new language for producing sounds,
and the support system for other people
to invent new soundscapes.
[Irregular melody]
- [Female Interviewer]: What's the most exciting thing
about the field for you?
- Well, this is a time at which many people feel
that there are a lot of dead ends in music,
that there isn't a lot more to do.
This is actually...
I see this and through the technology,
I experience this as quite the opposite.
This is a period in which we realise we've only just begun
to scratch the surface of what's possible musically.
[Energetic, alternating, percussive tones]
- [Female Narrator]: Through technology,
voices are amplified, silence is broken,
spaces are shared.
The music in our head
can finally be heard by others.
[Pigeons cooing]
[Sparrows chirping]
[Wings flapping]
- [Laurie]: We were, in a way,
trying to make a bit of a revolution,
but I don't think we would have put it
in such grandiose terms.
We were trying to put music back in touch with itself.
[Relaxed, low-pitched electronic groove]
[Buttons clicking]
- [Suzanne whispering]: Okay, and this has to go here.
This is here.
This is...
[Buttons clicking rapidly]
[Robotic beeping]
There were really no role models for female composers
when I studied music.
Overall, we are incrementally getting more visibility,
but it's two steps forward and one step back.
And to this day it kind of irks me
that when I turn on my favorite radio station,
it's just the male parade.
[Low tones move over an orchestra of electronic sounds]
[Sounds get choppier, resembling radio tuning]
[Low drone with a sustained pitch]
- [Laurie]: It is odd that electronic music,
it's generally considered a man's field.
Women have been so formative in it.
[Low drone continues]
- [Pauline]: There has to be
a complete change of consciousness
throughout the musical field,
where they could begin to teach music that's written
by women, as well as men, as well as of all colours,
and it would effect a great change.
Listening is the basis of creativity and culture.
How you're listening is and how you develop a culture.
And how a community of people listen
is what creates their culture.
[Overtones layer over the low drone]
[Eliane speaking French]
[Overtones swell over the low drone]
[Drone continues]
- It's quite reassuring to realise that
I wasn't the only woman making strange electronic music.
- What relates all of these women
is this DIY thing.
And DIY is interesting because it doesn't mean that
you've explicitly, voluntarily chosen to do it yourself.
It's that there are certain barriers in place
that don't allow you to do anything.
If you don't have the visual or the knowledge
of there being any people in the area of work
that you're interested in that are similar to you,
then you don't think that it's possible for you.
[Low drone swells slightly]
- There is something psychological
that happens when you can see yourself in the people
who are being celebrated.
[Drone gets softer]
[Air whooshing subtly]
[Drone softens]
[Drone fades away]
[Air blowing]
[Pleasant electronic chords]
[Echoey, ethereal singing] ♪ Your eyes are set on stun ♪
♪ You are hotter than the sun ♪
♪ I love to see you shine ♪
♪ Because you really blow my mind ♪
♪ Your heart beats like a drum ♪
♪ It hammers when you're gone ♪
♪ The terms with you and me are up ♪
♪ Set us free ♪
[Relaxed drum beat]
♪ Synthesise me ♪
♪ Hypnotise me ♪
♪ Humanise me ♪
♪ Energise me ♪
♪ Synthesise me ♪
♪ Hypnotise me ♪
♪ Humanise me ♪
♪ Energise me ♪
[Uplifting flute-like melody begins]
♪ Your eyes are set on stun ♪
♪ You are hotter than the sun ♪
♪ I love to see you shine ♪
♪ Because you really blow my mind ♪
♪ Your heart beats like a drum ♪
♪ It hammers when you're gone ♪
♪ The terms with you and me are up ♪
♪ Set us free ♪
♪ Synthesise me ♪
♪ Hypnotise me ♪
♪ Humanise me ♪
♪ Energise me ♪
♪ Synthesise me ♪
♪ Hypnotise me ♪
♪ Humanise me ♪
♪ Energise me ♪
[Uplifting flute-like melody repeats]
♪ I've seen the rings of Saturn ♪
♪ And the craters on the moon ♪
♪ Oceans of Venus in the middle of June ♪
♪ Mirrors of Mercury and Mars' electric skies ♪
♪ Pearls of Neptune in Jupiter's eyes ♪
♪ I heard the old man who plays the lake ♪
♪ Amazing things will make you want to shake ♪
[Sound spins rapidly then slows and becomes deeper]
♪ A strange planet a zillion lightyears away ♪
♪ Through a black hole across the Milky Way ♪
[Upbeat synthesiser and percussion music]
♪ Synthesise me ♪
♪ Hypnotise me ♪
♪ Humanise me ♪
♪ Energise me ♪
♪ Synthesise me ♪
♪ Hypnotise me ♪
♪ Humanise me ♪
♪ Energise me ♪
♪ Don't patronise me ♪
♪ Don't glamorise me ♪
♪ Don't paralyse me ♪
♪ You can't surprise me ♪
♪ Harmonise me ♪
♪ Mesmerise me ♪
♪ Solarise me ♪
♪ Synchronise me ♪
♪ Synthesise me ♪
[Ethereal spinning sound ascends]
[Spinning sound descends and fades]