Recreating the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

#1

Post by lobbly » Sat, May 13, 2023, 5:12 AM UTC

Recreating the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop
webaudio.prototyping.bbc.co.uk

Re: Recreating the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

#2

Post by jim-jim-jim » Sat, May 13, 2023, 7:04 AM UTC

Thanks for posting this. It's hard to navigate on my phone, so I'll just comment here to remind myself to visit later.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=jetzY-W78gg

First heard this a few years ago from a Delia Derbyshire biopic with Caroline Catz and Cosey Fanni Tutti.

Re: Recreating the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

#3

Post by CharlesW » Sat, May 13, 2023, 7:00 PM UTC

jim-jim-jim wrote: post #2

Thanks for posting this. It's hard to navigate on my phone, so I'll just comment here to remind myself to visit later. https://youtube.com/watch?v=jetzY-W78gg First heard this a few years ago from a Delia Derbyshire biopic with Caroline Catz and Cosey Fanni Tutti.

> It's hard to navigate on my phone, so I'll just comment here to remind myself to visit later.

Hacker News has a "Favorite" feature that's good for this.

Re: Recreating the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

#4

Post by Animats » Sat, May 13, 2023, 7:57 PM UTC

Unfortunately, it's prevented from working in Firefox by Firefox's anti-default-audio feature. The trouble is, the thing creates an audio context on page load, not when you click the on button. Firefox won't let a page create an audio context without user interaction.

Re: Recreating the sounds of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

#5

Post by alnis » Sat, May 13, 2023, 9:57 PM UTC

Very cool! This might be a good time to mention a JavaScript emulation I made of the EMS Synthi A, which was also present at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop (well, the closely-related EMS VCS3 was) and contributed, among other things, to some SFX for Doctor Who: https://github.com/AlexNisnevich/synthi-js

This was a project from 6-7 years ago and I had to rely on a third-party library for the web audio bits. If I re-did it today, I'd definitely do it all in native Web Audio.