Note this is a good follow up to
this post on The Alchemists of Sound.
via sine in
this electro-music.com thread:
"The wooden boxy thing in the front of the picture with the round dail is the workshops wobbulator, the plexi thing on thop of that is the crystal palace, something we woud call a scanner these days."
via Brainstormer in the same thread:
"I've read about one of these devices in a few BBC Radiophonic Workshop related articles. I'm wondering if it would be possible to construct something as unique as this to be used in a modular synthesizer?
I can find very little concise technical information regarding these devices, only application info, so it may be a null discussion point. Unless someone here has a more in-depth knowledge of them?
Here's a few articles that mention the wobbulator:
Quote:
Early on, the Workshop acquired a wobbulator, originally designed for engineering tests but also very useful as a source of raw material. This created a tone whose pitch was continuously varied by a second oscillator, thus providing sweeping waves of sound.
http://whitefiles.org/rws/r02.htmQuote:
The chief inventor, David Young, came up with contraptions like ‘the Wobbulator’ and ‘the Crystal Palace’ to produce brand-new sound textures, and nothing could ever have been done without the ‘Donotfiddlewith’, a delicate tape-tensioning device made out of Meccano and labelled in felt-tip with an anti-tamper warning.
http://www.timeout.com/london/music/features/4493/Fifty_years_of_the_BBC_Radiophonic_Workshop.html
Quote:
But the 'Ooh-ooh-ooh' isn't me… that's wobbulator, pure wobbulator. That's a piece of test equipment that does wave sweeps.
http://www.delia-derbyshire.org/interview_surface.phpQuote:
The melody notes were also recorded individually, and at half-speed to achieve the desired pitch, while the hiss and windbubble effects were created by carefully filtering white noise through a wobbulator.
http://www.millenniumeffect.co.uk/audio/index2.htmlQuote:
They also had a couple of high-quality equalisers (again, test equipment - equalisers, or "tone controls", were not that easy to come by at the time) and a few other gadgets including a "wobbulator" (a low frequency oscillator) and a white noise generator.
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/Mark_ayres/DWTheme.htmQuote:
Wobbulating The World
In the early '60s, synthesizers simply did not exist. Producer Joe Meek was using the monophonic, valve-operated Clavioline but the Radiophonic Workshop, oddly enough, never had one. What they did have, though, was all the test oscillators that they could beg, borrow or steal from other BBC departments. A method was devised for controlling 12 oscillators at a time, triggering them from a tiny home-built keyboard of recycled piano keys. Each oscillator could be independently tuned by means of a range switch and a chunky Bakelite frequency knob.
There was also the versatile 'wobbulator', a sine-wave oscillator that could be frequency modulated. It consisted of a very large metal box, with a few switches and one very large knob in the middle that could sweep the entire frequency range in one revolution. They were used in the BBC for 'calibrating reverb times in studios' apparently. And as far as the Workshop's electronic sound sources went, that was it!
Yet, curiously, it is the work produced in those early years that the Radiophonic Workshop's reputation still hangs on. The Doctor Who theme was first recorded in 1963, and still there are fans who insist that the original is the best of many versions made over the years. What's more, some of the sound effects made for the first series of Doctor Who are still being used! When the newly revamped Doctor Who appeared in 2005, hardcore fans recognised the original effects and wrote to Brian Hodgson: "How nice to hear the old original Dalek Control Room again, after all these years!"
Brian's 'Tardis' sound, dating from 1963, is also still used. "I spent a long time in planning the Tardis sound," says Brian. "I wanted a sound that seemed to be travelling in two directions at once; coming and going at the same time." The sound was actually made from the bare strings of a piano that had been dismantled. Brian scraped along some bass strings with his mum's front-door key, then set about processing the recordings, as he describes it, "with a lot of reverse feedback". (By this, I assume he means that tape echo was added, then the tape reversed so that it played backwards.) Eventually, Brian played the finished results to Dick Mills and Desmond Briscoe; at their insistence he added a slowly rising note, played on the wobbulator.
http://musicandculture.blogspot.com/2008_03_01_archive.html
