Doctor Who & The BBC Radiophonic Workshop

This episode is sponsored by Sonos. You know that moment when you hear a song you've loved for years and suddenly you notice something new? A harmony over in the left channel, a faint acoustic guitar, a breath before the chorus. That's what I love about Sonos. Their speakers are designed to connect you to the details that make music feel alive. And whether I'm playing a vinyl record in my kitchen or a modern blockbuster on my home theater system, the sound is rich, immersive, and incredibly clear. If you want studio-quality sound in every room, visit Sonos.com. That's S-O-N-O-S dot com. You're listening to 20,000 Hertz. The stories behind the world's most iconic and fascinating sounds. I'm Dallas Taylor. Here in the U.S., most people have probably never heard of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Even as a sound designer, I had never heard of it until well into my career. But over in the UK, the Radiophonic Workshop was a cultural institution for four decades. It was basically a pioneering sound design department funded by the British government, almost like NASA, but for sound. And it was staffed by a ragtag group of engineers and composers whose entire job was to craft bizarre sounds and music for BBC programs. This includes the amazing sound effects and theme music of Doctor Who, which are still being used today. The workshop's members never got famous, but their work has influenced generations of sound designers and musicians. I'll let supervising producer Casey Emmerling take it from here. In the 1930s and 40s, sound design was in its infancy. In fact, the term sound design didn't even exist yet. Back then, most of the sounds you heard in film, television, and radio plays were pretty concrete. Things like creaking doors, thunderclaps, and glass breaking. But soon enough, creators started wanting more abstract sounds. By the 1950s, science fiction was all the rage, and producers needed futuristic sounds to go with these spaceships and laser guns. Beyond that, they wanted sounds that didn't come from a physical source, but conveyed emotion. If you had a play about somebody having a nervous breakdown, where could you find the sound effect of someone having a nervous breakdown? What does that sound like? It's not a naturalistic sound. Hello, I'm Mark Ayres. I'm a composer, sound designer, producer, remixer, mixer, remastering engineer, whatever. In the early years of sound design, a lot of innovation was driven by radio plays. During the 1950s, people were getting far more experimental with radio drama. And producers at Broadcasting House in London... The home of BBC Radio... ...saw what's happening on the continent in the field of electronic music. So there were two big studios in Europe. One was in Paris. The Paris studio was largely involved with music concrete, which is recordings of found sounds turned into music. So, you know, you can record the sounds of nature or the sounds of bottles being popped and things like that and making music out of those sounds. It's called Music Concret. As you might guess, concrete means concrete. Not like pavement in this case, but like the real concrete world. This is a 1951 piece of Music Concret called Symphony of the Lone Man by composers Pierre Henry and Pierre Schafer. The other studio experimenting with electronic music was in Cologne, Germany. In Cologne, the studio was more involved in creating music out of pure electronic sources. Things like oscillators and noise generators. What you're hearing now is a 1953 piece by composer Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, made purely of sine waves. So they were very different disciplines. But both studios have been set up by broadcasting organizations to experiment with this new musical art. And the BBC realised that these techniques might be useful for what they were making. What the BBC wanted was music and sound for programmes on BBC Radio and Television. So a couple of BBC Radio employees started testing things out. Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe were experimenting with this stuff, and the way they were doing that was, back then, broadcasting shut down at 11 o'clock at night, and they played the national anthem, and the whole country went to bed. and then started up again at sort of six o'clock in the morning with the news. So there was all this time overnight when nobody was using all the gear. So Daphne and Desmond would borrow all the gear from all the studios, wheel it down the corridors, set up an electronic music studio, have fun making sounds, and then try and put it all back where it came from by the time everybody came in the next morning. Around this time, the BBC produced a radio play by the famous Irish playwright Samuel Beckett. It's called All That Fall, and it follows an old woman on her slow, exhausting walk to a train station. But underneath that, it's about her psychological journey and her fear of aging and decline. Beckett wanted the sound to help convey these emotions, and that gave Desmond Briscoe a chance to use these techniques on a high-profile production. Here's a clip from the play. She's coming! She's at the level crossing! All that fall was immediately recognized as something new and exciting. But if Desmond and Daphne were going to produce more work like this, they couldn't do it in the middle of the night with borrowed equipment. It was very quickly realized that that was no way to run a business. So there was a couple of free rooms at the Maida Vale Recording Studio, which is the big BBC music recording studio in northwest London. And in 1958, they were given these two rooms. And as they always said, the key to the redundant stores department. Any bits of gear that nobody else wanted, they could have to experiment and make electronic music with. And that's how the department started. They called it the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. They're basically two words for the same thing, radio and phonic. Phonic is of sound, and they were just put together because it sounded like an interesting name, radiophonic. At first, the workshop was just Desmond, Daphne, and a few engineers. But gradually, people started trickling in. They got their staff from mainly studio managers in BBC Radio. So people who really knew how to create sound, how to cut sound, edit tape, etc., how to get the best recordings. And they were after people who had mathematical, engineering, and or music background. It was a smart group of people working in uncharted territory. No one was an expert. But as Desmond would often say, because we're not experts, we don't know what we shouldn't be able to do. Of course they weren't experts because it wasn't a field that existed. They were creating a whole new field of the commercial use of electronic sounds and music. The commercial aspect is what set them apart from the studios in France and Germany. The Continental Studios were making art music. They weren't making applied music. Everything that the workshop did was applied. It was to serve another person's vision. To bring those visions to life, they'd start with recordings of everyday objects. Coins, bells, wooden blocks, radiators, anything that made a sound. They also used oscillators and other equipment to make electronic sounds. Then they'd take that tape and manipulate it in all kinds of ways. They could slow it down to lower the pitch, or speed it up to raise it. They could flip it backwards to reverse it, or splice it into a loop so it repeated endlessly. They could run two tapes slightly out of sync to make a doubling effect, or feed the signal back on itself to make a trailing echo. Sometimes, they'd chop the tape into pieces that were only a few millimeters long, And other times, they'd have loops of tape that were 40 or 50 feet long running down the hallway to another machine. Using these techniques, they could make all kinds of strange music and eerie soundscapes. One of their first big commissions was a television production called Quatermass in the Pit, which was an early science fiction series. The show is about the discovery of an ancient buried spaceship that unleashes an evil psychic energy on the people of London. They made some wonderful, some rumbling, ghostly sounds for that Once the BBC realised what the workshop could do They quickly started getting lots and lots of commissions To do weird and wacky sounds and music for radio and television One was for a comedy series called The Goon Show It was for a character named Major Bloodnock who loved curry And every time, you know, he had a curry You'd get the sound of Major Bloodnock's stomach which was his digestive system working. It's a comedy sound effect. During this time, there were lots of local BBC radio stations popping up, and each station needed a unique identifying jingle, which the workshop was happy to provide. This tune was made by workshop composer David Cain for Radio Sheffield Here David in the BBC documentary Alchemists of Sound I had to talk on the telephone with the radio director up there And I said, well, I'll tell you what, send me a canteen of cutlery and we'll do it with that. And I recorded them. And those were the basis for Radio Sheffield. The tunes played on the tines of the fork. The bass lines on the knife. And the rhythm was the spoons. And some of these strange sounds were made specifically for kids. Their biggest client, the biggest work they did for the BBC was for schools programs, educational programs. Across the UK, teachers would tune in to BBC television or BBC radio while their students watched and listened. And that's how Mark first heard these sounds growing up in the 1960s. For instance, there was one program that revolved around a magic carpet. It was a program which was designed to be played in schools to fire kids' imaginations and get them moving and acting and so we all had to sit in small groups around the classroom or the playground or wherever we were listening to the program and then pretend to be on a magic carpet and you would rock around as the carpet swooped low over mountains etc and there was a sound effect, a radiophonic workshop score to accompany this which of course sounded just like a magic carpet to us. You know, it was electronic sound. It was the sound of the wind, white noise. It was all this kind of stuff, and it was pure imagination. The workshop's music could also be quite groovy. This is a track called Festival Time by workshop composer John Baker. Who was this amazing jazz musician who made electronic music swing. He could actually cut tape so it syncopated. Just an incredible talent. But not everyone loved what the workshop came up with. For instance, in the 1950s, BBC Television used this music to introduce the 2 o'clock news. It's called Television March by composer Eric Coates. But in 1960, they swapped it out for this radiophonic arrangement by Desmond Briscoe. Afterwards, one viewer wrote in saying, What is this noise supposed to be that precedes the two o'clock television news? It sounds like a nightmare in a railway train. While another viewer said, Please use your influence to stop that dreadful introduction to BBC TV programs, Or does the background music intend it should be taken for a lunatic asylum? A lot of the sounds and music coming out of the workshop were pretty artsy and avant-garde, especially for something like the intro jingle going into the news. So why do you think the BBC was willing to use these kind of experimental sounds so broadly during that period? Quite simply because it was a BBC department who could produce it above the line, as it were. They were there, they might as well do the work. It was cheaper to get the Radiophonic Workshop to make a jingle than it was to employ a more conventional composer who would then have to hire a studio and hire a band and a mixer. But also, because it was avant-garde, because it was new, because this was a new way of doing stuff, which was impressionistic in a way which perhaps conventional music wasn't. One of the workshop's most impressionistic composers was a woman named Delia Derbyshire. Delia was brought up in Coventry during the Second World War. She'd been fascinated by the sound that the bombs made as they dropped on Coventry during the war. She found music in those sounds. She found music in the sound of the people walking on the cobbled streets. So she was fascinated by sound. She'd gone to Cambridge. She'd studied mathematics and music. She was exactly the kind of person that the workshop needed. One of Delia's favorite sounds at the time came from a green metallic lampshade. This type of lampshade was apparently common in industrial buildings back then. And so they were hanging all the way down the corridors at Maida Bell Studios. And I suspect that Delia accidentally bashed one as she was wandering down the corridor, realized it made this wonderful sound full of all these harmonics. So she nicked it, and this lampshade stayed next to her desk, and she sampled it every which way. You know, she recorded it, and she filtered it, and she recorded it while pulling the fader up so it had a soft attack, and she had a heart attack version, she reversed it, she bowed it. Tapped it with all sorts of different sticks. And it became this library of lampshade sounds. Delia used her sampled lampshade in this track, which is called Blue Veils and Golden Sands. It was made for a documentary about the Tuareg people, a nomadic tribe in the Sahara Desert. Here's Delia describing the piece in a 1997 interview with BBC Radio Scotland. I tried to convey the distance of the horizon and the heat hames. And then there's this very high, slow, reedy sound. That indicates like the strand of camels seen as a distance wandering across the desert. Delia also scored an episode of a sci-fi series called Out of the Unknown. It involved a group of robots who start worshipping the power converter on a space station. And this song is the robot's chant. The track is called, uh, ZOO-Zee, ZOO-Zee, ooh, ooh, ooh. Here's Delia on Radio Scotland again. It is difficult to pronounce because it's made from backwards chanting. I think if you play it forwards, it would say something like, praise to the master, his wisdom and his reason. And I just chose the best bits and z-u-z, z-u-z. His whiz, his whiz. it's that backwards. And I must say that the ooh, ooh, ooh is electronic. But Delia's most famous piece was the theme song for a different TV show, which would eventually become one of the most iconic and long-running sci-fi series of all time. That's coming up after the break. For business owners, January is the time of year when we look at the messier parts of our business and think there has to be a better way. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O, the smarter way to run your business communications. With Quo, your entire team can handle calls and texts from one shared number, meaning no more missed messages or disconnected conversations. Everyone sees the full conversation thread, so you all have the context to make sure that customer feels cared for. And Quo's AI tools can generate summaries and highlight next steps so nothing gets lost. That's part of why Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews. Make this the year where no opportunity and no customer slips away. Try Quo for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash 20k. That's qo.com slash two zero k. Quo. No missed calls. No missed customers. Congratulations to Roger Benson for getting last episode's mystery sound right. Those squeaks and squeals came from an otter. Otters are much more vocal than you might expect, making a wide variety of calls to express excitement or distress, as a warning, a mating call, and more. Captive otters will even vocalize to beg for attention or treats from humans. And here's this episode's mystery sound. If you know that sound, submit your guess at the web address mystery.20k.org. Anyone who guesses it right will be entered to win a super soft 20,000 hertz t-shirt. In the early 60s, the BBC greenlit a new sci-fi series called Doctor Who. It was about a being known as the Doctor. who travels through space and time defending the innocent and fighting against evil. The producer of Doctor Who was named Verity Lampert. She wanted the show to have a unique sound. And while it was being developed, the BBC happened to make a documentary about an experimental French band. Called Les Structures Sonores. Musical structures, musical sculptures. Shaq Lasry and his colleagues, they made metallic and glass sculptures, which had a musical purpose. So they were sculptures which could be played. And they'd done concerts and made a couple of records. While working on Doctor Who Verity Lampert saw this documentary She thought that would be ideal sound for her science fiction program Unfortunately, she couldn't afford to book the band. So she then decided what she would really want was a theme tune produced by the Radiophonic Workshop, which would sound a bit like a structure sonore. The theme was first dreamt up by BBC composer Ron Grainer. Now, Ron wasn't actually a member of the workshop, but he had worked with them on the music for a documentary about steam engines. Which had a rhythm track created by Brian Hodgson at the Radiophonic Workshop, which was all sort of pulsing white noise and metallic clanks to sound like an engine. They'd made a tape loop of that rhythm, and then Ron had recorded an orchestral piece over the top of that rhythm. So he was well known to the workshop. Verity showed Ron the Doctor Who title sequence, which is kind of a black-and-white tunnel of trippy, swirly shapes. Next, Ron went off to his private beach in Portugal to write the score, which would then be produced by the Radiophonic Workshop. As Delia told Radio Scotland... He came back with the score with abstract things on, like, wind clouds and sweeps and, oh, wind bubble. are all sort of beautiful descriptions, but with a carefully worked out rhythm. And so I got to work and put it all together. The bass line is a stretched string and all the sounds she made out of that one single recording. So you record a single plug of a string. Make a tape loop so it goes round and round and round, playing over and over again. You vary the speed of that tape playback to get all the different pictures you want and record all those pitches on another piece of tape. And then you divide them all up and label them. So you've got, you know, a whole box full of Ds and a box full of Es and a box full of Gs. But she was even cleverer than that. She recorded them all at different volume levels. So she'd had, you know, a loud D and a quiet D. So she could cut these all together and make a bass line out of literally cutting all these different notes together in the right order and at the right lengths and using the right dynamics. It was ridiculous. The theme starts with that bass line. Next, there's some hissing white noise for those wind clouds and wind bubbles. Then there's the iconic melody. The melody, a lot of people say, oh, there was a theremin on the Doctor Who theme. There wasn't a theremin on the Doctor Who theme, but there wasn't a synthesizer either. So she had a test tone oscillator. It was a device for literally creating very high quality tones. It's designed for calibrating audio equipment. In other words, it's not an instrument. But she would play it. There's a dial on the front of it, so she would literally turn the dial on the front of the... Well, the Doctor Who theme was her performing on a test tone oscillator. It's bizarre. That's how it was made. In her interview with BBC Radio Scotland, Delia described bringing this theme to life. It was a magic experience. because I couldn't see from the music how it was going to sound. And it was just Ron's brilliant oral imagination because when he heard the results, oh, it was really tickling pink. Along with the theme music, the workshop was also responsible for Doctor Who's sound effects, like the TARDIS, which is the Doctor's time machine slash spaceship. It was made by Brian Hodgson, and he had to come up with the sound of a time machine materializing and dematerializing in different points in time and space. and how do you do that? Where do you start with that? What he did was he actually recorded the sound of him scraping his mother's front door key up and down the bass strings of an old piano. That was the basic sound. It was then looped, it was slowed down, sped up, it was reversed. He wanted to create a sound that felt like it was going away and coming towards you all at the same time. and with a bit of white noise and a rising electronic tone added to it, that is the sound of a TARDIS. Brian Hodgson also did the vocal processing for the Daleks, a race of evil robotic aliens. You will move ahead of us and follow my directions. To create that effect, he boosted the mid-range of the actors' voices, and then ran them through a device called a ring modulator. Ring modulation involves two audio signals. One is whatever you're feeding into it. In this case, a voice. The second signal you set manually. For the Daleks, Brian used a sine wave around 30 hertz. The ring modulator takes these signals and outputs two new ones. One is the sum of the two frequencies, and the other is the difference. Mix some of the original back in, and you get something metallic and grating, which was perfect for these cruel cyborgs. Your legs are paralyzed. You will recover shortly, unless you force us to use our weapons again. Within its first year, Doctor Who exploded into a runaway hit, and crafting the show's sounds and music became one of the workshop's primary duties. Millions of people were transported by these sounds, including a young Mark Ayers. I was a fan, was watching Doctor Who in the early 1970s, and I just fell in love with the sound of the show. I was fascinated by, you know, that people could have a job making these sounds. But there were big changes coming for the workshop, starting with the arrival of synthesizers. The problem with synthesizers is, I say the problem with synthesizers, there was nothing wrong with synthesizers when they started. One of the first synths that the workshop got was the EMS VCS3, which stands for Voltage Controlled Studio. It had a joystick and lots of knobs, but what it did not have was a piano keyboard. It was literally just a box which could produce electronic sounds. And the idea was that you would make a sound, you record it to tape, and then you'd treat it like any other music concrete source. It was never intended as a performance instrument, as a musical instrument in its own right. But then the famous Moog synthesizer, which did have a keyboard, made its way from the States to the UK. So that came in and somebody said, well, let's put a keyboard on the BCS-3. So suddenly everything that Delia and, well, particularly Delia, were trying to get away from, trying to get away from the equal temperate scale, trying to create music which was made of pure sound, suddenly people were saying, well, you can play tunes on it, can you? Oh, brilliant, let's have a tune. And Delia wasn't too keen on that. And she wasn't too keen on the fact that electronic music suddenly became, as far as a lot of people were concerned, very easy. You know, you just play the tune on the keyboard. For Delia and a few radiophonic purists, a synthesizer that played the 12-note Western scale was the opposite of what the workshop was all about. The joy of creating music out of pure sounds, music which literally wasn't performed but was made, was sculpted, that's what Delia loved. And she felt it was a backward step. Once that genie was out of the bottle, they couldn't put it back in. You look at the history of the Radiophonic Workshop, and it is very true that over a period of just a couple of years, taped music went pretty much out the window, and everything became synthesized. To her credit, Delia did give synthesizers a shot. In the early 70s, she, Brian Hodgkin, and another workshop member remade the Doctor Who theme on a modular synthesizer. and she hated it and it's not very good. The show's producers agreed. They tried putting it on a couple of episodes but then decided to swap it back before they aired. Amusingly, a couple of the first versions of the episodes escaped to Australia because someone sent the wrong tapes. So some episodes of Doctor Who went out in Australia with the new theme on. The shift towards more traditional, synthesized music was part of a broader change in the workshop. Its job became more and more to provide music for programs, whereas it started off much more as a sound design department. It became much more of a music department, and it became a bit of a factory. Amid these changes, Delia quit the workshop and basically left sound and music behind. She shone very brightly for a relatively short period of time, for about 10 years, and then unfortunately, you know, the shorter and shorter deadlines and greater demands, it got to her and she had to get out. Around this time, Brian Hodgson and John Baker also left the workshop, and new members came in. But while they kept pumping out music, the workshop was falling behind technologically. By the end of the 70s, it had had the same gear for years. It was very old-fashioned. Every other department at the BBC had probably got all the latest tape machines. The Radiofonic Workshop was still using, you know, people's cast-offs. But in 1977, Brian Hodgen returned and took over as the workshop organizer. He campaigned for a budget, which meant they could update all the gear. And from then on, really, it was at the forefront of electronic music technology. In 1978, the BBC debuted a radio series of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which actually came out before the famous novel. The show sci sound effects were made by the Radiophonic Workshop Here the sound of the universe ending which in the story is something that people can safely watch from inside the restaurant at the end of the universe In 1980, workshop composer Peter Howell made a new synthesized version of the Doctor Who theme. I think it was felt that after 17 years, the program just needed something new. For part of the melody, Peter Howell used a vocal. It's a device that you connect something to, like a synthesizer. As you play the keys, you speak into a microphone so that your voice shapes the notes. Here's Peter demonstrating on a BBC special from back then. In 1984, workshop composer Elizabeth Parker scored a nature documentary series called The Living Planet. Her pieces blended synthesized music with atmospheric sound design. Here she is describing an episode called Jungles to the BBC. It's dawn in the jungle, so you've got the animals calling to each other in the distance. And just the dripping of the leaves, I wanted to pervade the music. To achieve that feeling of wetness, I took a raindrop sound off the synthesizer, and then I used a flute sound. In fact, the flute was actually myself blowing across a bottle, which achieves a very, very wet sort of note. Throughout this time, Mark's love for the radiophonic workshop was only growing. He studied music and electronics at university and even applied for a job at the workshop. He didn't get it, but he did meet with workshop founder Desmond Briscoe, who is really encouraging. And over the years, he became friends with many of the workshop's members. And then in the late 1980s, I found myself working as a freelance composer and rather brilliantly was commissioned as a freelance composer to work on Doctor Who. Here's a piece Mark made for a season 26 Doctor Who serial called Ghostlight. Unfortunately, that was the last season of the original Doctor Who before the show went on indefinite hiatus. And things were also going downhill for the Radiophonic Workshop. As gear became cheaper and more accessible, work like this could be done by individuals rather than entire teams. And the BBC started looking for ways to cut costs. The BBC at the time had a director general called John Burt. And John Burt introduced a policy called producer choice, which meant that any producer within the BBC, rather than just using BBC service departments, could, if they wished and were able to find that service cheaper outside the BBC, could use that external service and it would save the BBC money. It was ridiculous because it didn't save the BBC money because everything that was inside the BBC was paid for within the BBC. The only way it worked is the economists sat down and put a price on every internal service. So they would say that, for instance, getting a set built at the BBC set department, what it costs us in staff costs is, you know, £10,000. If you can get it done for £8,000 outside the BBC, that is saving the BBC money. But of course it wasn't, because you still had the set departments sitting there. So rather than $10,000 of magic money going from your left pocket to your right pocket, $8,000 was leaving the BBC. And the Radiophonic Workshop was largely a victim of that. Gradually, the BBC started outsourcing more and more of its sound and music work. Meanwhile, the workshop's budget got smaller and smaller, until Elizabeth Parker was the only composer left. Then, in 1998, after 40 years of existence, the Radiophonic Workshop was officially shut down. And they weren't the only ones to go. Most BBC departments closed down. The costume department went, the set design department went, graphics went. Slowly, the BBC became just a broadcaster, not, you know, a classic production studio. As the workshop was ending, Mark was contacted by several of its former members. Saying, look, the Radiophonic workshop is shutting down. We're all being made redundant. There's all this stuff which needs cataloging, and we're not going to be there to do it. It needs someone to come in and sort it out. It needs someone who actually knows what this is all about, who knows the history and is enthusiastic about keeping it. So Mark spent the next couple of years tracking down, cataloging, and organizing the thousands of tapes that the workshop had produced. I've done that ever since, so I look after the archive and I look after the library. Because there's never been an official archivist, I carry on as the unofficial archivist, so if they want to know anything, they call me. I believe this stuff to be important, which is why I am very heavily involved in its preservation and its celebration. While the workshop was over, there was a new chapter ahead for Doctor Who. In 2005, after 16 years off the air, the BBC decided to revive it, and Mark was brought on as a consultant for the show's sound. I gave them basically a large library of all the sound, for instance, for the TARDIS, for the Daleks, for the Sidemen, all that kind of thing. The sound designers wove these classic sound effects into the new series, which is still running today. And most of those sounds, amazingly, are still the sounds that were made 60 years ago. It's still the same sound of the TARDIS as recorded by Brian in 1962. Where's he going? Everywhere. And underneath the new arrangement of the theme tune, there is still Delia's bass line and Delia's melody line. And I think that's quite incredible. It's 60 years and those sounds still sound modern. The legacy of the Radiophonic Workshop goes far beyond Doctor Who. Its members were pioneers in both sound design and sampling, decades before those concepts became widespread. They also proved that these experimental sounds could have mainstream appeal. Electronic music became very much a part of the media landscape in the UK from the late 1950s because we were subjected to it in everything from, you know, not just Doctor Who on a Saturday night, but current affairs programs with their jingles to documentaries with their incident music to drama series and schools radio and television programs. This stuff that was coming out of the workshop was just everywhere. It's part of our DNA. Today, you can hear echoes of the workshop all over the place, from sci-fi films and TV shows to all kinds of electronic and sample-based music. And lucky for us, we no longer need a room full of tape machines to craft our own incredible sounds. As the Radiophonic Workshop and Music Concrete Pioneers in the 40s, 50s and 60s discovered, we are surrounded by things which are not conventionally music, but which are music. And just go out there and discover, experiment, make. You know, you've got more technology on your mobile phone now than the Radiophonic Workshop had in its entire history. So there's no excuse for not getting out there and having fun. 20,000 Hertz is produced out of my sound agency, DeFacto Sound. To learn more, follow DeFacto Sound on Instagram or visit DeFactoSound.com. This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling. With help from Grace East. It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt. and Colin DeVarney. With original music by Wesley Slover. Thanks to our guest, Mark Ayers. Mark is actually in a band called the Radiophonic Workshop with several of its former members. They're less active now, but Mark says they hope to do one final show before they call it quits. You can find their Instagram and band camp links in the show notes. Finally, think of a person in your life who would dig the story of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It could be a musician who loves synthesizers or a super fan of Doctor Who. Then tap the share button on this episode and send it to them. I'm Dallas Taylor. Thanks for listening. Okay, one last thing. As a small indie show, you might think that we happily accept any advertiser that wants to book with us. But I actually turned down lots of advertisers that I don't feel are a good fit. So if you hear me endorse something, it means I sincerely believe it's valuable. With that in mind, get 20% off the fantastic audio splitting tool LaLaLi at LALAL.AI using promo code 20K. Get streamlined, shareable business communications with Quo and get 20% off your first six months at QUO.com slash 20K. Simplify your weekday meal planning with tasty meals from HelloFresh. Get 10 free meals plus a free Zwilling knife at HelloFresh.com slash TTH10FM. Make those business dreams a reality with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial at Shopify.com slash 20K. Thanks.