Delia Derbyshire

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delia_Derbyshire

Kind of an amazing woman, Delia Derbyshire was an electronic music pioneer. Check out some videos of her on youtube and then discuss...

Decca Records was pretty famous for turning down acts which later became huge or otherwise important and Delia Derbyshire was one of these. She was turned down for an engineer job in 1959 for being a woman.

What if she had gone instead to Parlophone and they accepted her as an engineer? It eventually became an enormous label and was known for allowing its bigger acts to experiment. Surely electronic music would have skyrocketed further if her methods had been utilized in some of their bigger artist's more experimental records?

The question is this:

Electronic beats/backing for tracks by live bands becomes commonplace for bands by the end of the sixties, what are the effects on music in the seventies and beyond if electronic music comes this far this early?

There are no right or wrong answers. Your opinion only.

And go!
 
This could be interesting, though sampling had been used by Spike Jones (in his comedic "Cocktails for Two") and Timothy Leary (in his "You Can Be Anyone This Time Around"). It would certainly expand the horizons of electronica. Could the UK be this TL's Germany?
 
This could be interesting, though sampling had been used by Spike Jones (in his comedic "Cocktails for Two") and Timothy Leary (in his "You Can Be Anyone This Time Around"). It would certainly expand the horizons of electronica. Could the UK be this TL's Germany?

That's kind of what I'm going for. Not only that, but the inclusion of unique electronic metronomes behind live drum tracks by the mid sixties and electronic sound effects used musically by the end of the decade means a "rave"-esque scene by the early seventies... I'm trying to find any word other than "wow."

There would be artists that really ran with this ITTL. The name "Bowie" springs to mind. What are your thoughts on this?
 
I'm in awe of Delia Derbyshire for her performance of the original theme of Dr Who. I just have to wonder how mind-blowing it was to hear that on the television, in 1963.
 
I'm in awe of Delia Derbyshire for her performance of the original theme of Dr Who. I just have to wonder how mind-blowing it was to hear that on the television, in 1963.

That sounds like a good excuse to put this up! ;)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wW6VV8nIwMs

As said above Delia Derbyshire was a true genius, each individual note of the Doctor Who theme had to generated individually before being physically spliced together. Doctor Who's TV debut happened long before I was born but from what I gather the reaction to the theme was indeed mind blowing! No one had ever heard anything like it before, I really dislike the current version as it's too overblown, Derbyshire's theme works so well because it's so minimalist and didn't need an orchestral arrangement to back it up!
 
Most of what I know about Delia Derbyshire, and the early days of Dr Who in general, is from the documentaries in the extra features of Who DVDs.

For some bureaucratic reason, she goes uncredited in the credits of the episodes. This is one reason it's good we pay some tributes to her, to make up for that.

The Tardis sound (which we were told last season is the sound of the Doctor failing to disengage the parking brake!:p) was supposed to represent the sound of it emerging from or entering time travel--so the initial key-on-piano-string sound, which was of course also processed a lot of other ways, was played simultaneously forward and backward, the two tracks being merged into one, to symbolize that it could be moving either direction in time!

And that video of the opening as seen in the earliest episodes, where the stark lettering "Dr Who" emerges from an abstract flowing of light--they did a similar trick to get it. They turned a TV camera on a display of the words, flipped around and superimposed to get that symmetrical mirrored jumble, and then switched the display monitor over to the camera's own output--video feedback! (Today it's easy enough for anyone to do this, if they have any kind of video camera--back then TV cameras were not so easy to play with!) Taping the result, we get the swirly chaos emerging from the logo, then they shut down the screen so the light centered on its center. Then they played the tape backwards.

The reason they flipped the words over themselves like that was that this trick only worked well on symmetrical images. There was some thought from the beginning, so the documentaries said, that it would be the Doctor's face that emerged from the chaos (i.e. in real life filming, that served as the source image for the video feedback) but apparently this didn't work out so well, so they went with a minimal and purely symmetrical source image instead.

Really it was all a lot of very clever tricks to assemble imagery that must have seemed stunningly futuristic and otherworldly, and certainly still does today!
 
I need to relisten to the biographical play about her that I have on CD "Blue Veils and Golden Sands"...

I've never heard of that, but thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out.

Really, the whole point of this is to introduce electronic repetition for beats and earlier mainstream electronic sound effects to popular music, allowing it to effect musical history.

Any more thoughts on this?
 
I've never heard of that, but thanks for the recommendation. I'll check it out.

Really, the whole point of this is to introduce electronic repetition for beats and earlier mainstream electronic sound effects to popular music, allowing it to effect musical history.

Any more thoughts on this?

So, something like the Silver Apples?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silver_Apples

They were an early electronic act, heavy on the beat.. they never really made much of an impact until they were 'rediscovered' in the 1990s.

Clip 1 - 'I have Known Love'
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYRE-kXPoXg&feature=related

Clip 2 - 'Program' - including an early stab at sampling.. well, using the tuning knob on a radio where a guitar solo would usually be!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1knVQEkEElM


Is this the sort of thing you were picturing?
 
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