Category Archives: Audio Adventures

Audio Adventures in Science, Pseudioscience and Nonsense with Tim Pickup.

Audio Adventures: L’historie du Schaeffer

The bibliography of Pierre Schaeffer as presented in musique conrete form by Tim Pickup. This show is not worth missing, despite it being in a language i hardly understand. I wrote a quick introduction and translated it into French, then back into English to help maintain confusion:

the audio bibliography of the collection of tim of the stone schaeffer. presents at a music the concrete excursion on the father of the conrete of musiqe itself, schaeffer. wonderfuly hones it made and presented.

Well, either way, Pierre Schaeffer is a very important composer for the 20th century. He is one of the first composers to study recorded sounds as instruments themselves. His works were an inspiration to a generation of composers that were getting a little tired of do re mi.

Audio Adventures: Barney’s Guitar Effects Pedals

Tim Pickup takes the week off and hands the show over to his friend Barney who takes us on a grand tour of his homemade guitar effects pedals. If you enjoyed Tim’s previous show on the 555 Timer, then you’ll love this show which takes DIY audio electronics to the next level. With a little insight, and some schematics, you’ll never pay a hefty price for an effect pedal again!

Audio Adventures: Voyager Interstellar Outreach Recordings

As you go about your alien day on your far off alien world doing your strange extra-terrestrial things you look up to the many suns in the sky and wonder; is there life out there somewhere? In this installment of the ever-popular and interesting edition of Audio Adventures Tim Pickup puts us in that position, taking us through highlights of the Voyager Interstellar Outreach Program. Launched in 1977 the two Voyager spacecrafts held a golden record – an audio greeting from the planet Earth including cryptic instructions for alien lifeforms to play the record. Sit back, listen and imagine that you are the alien tasked with sorting out these strange new sounds from a little blue planet across the universe.

Audio Adventures: Ice Cream Van Music

Tim Pickup explores the low-fi world of Ice-Cream van chimes; the crudely synthesized ditties that herald the arival of the van full of frozen treats. Today’s show features a wide variety of anoying tunes, plus the perplexing legalities of the use of ice-cream chimes in public.

Ice Cream Van

You might also be interested in this history of ice-cream van melodies courtesy of The Music Thing.

Audio Adventures: Fruit Machine Music

This week Tim Pickup explores the variety of noises, bleeps and melodies produced by the fruit machine.

Audio Adventures: Um

Speech disfluencies are parts of speech which are not generally recognized as purposeful or containing formal meaning, usually expressed as pauses such as uh or er, but also extending to repairs (“He was wearing bla—uh, blue pants”), and articulation problems such as stuttering. Use is normally looked down upon in mass media such as news reports or films, but they occur regularly in everyday conversation – Wikipedia
This episode is a celebration of umming and ahhing, the bits between the words in our everyday language.

Audio Adventures: SID Music

An investigation into the sonic possiblities of the SID chip; that famous synthesizer used in the Commodore 64 and other 80’s 8-bit micro-computers.

Audio Adventures: The Golden Age of Video-Arcade death

Death through inaction: Tim pickup emulates a number of 80’s arcade games and records the noise of doing absolutely nothing other than inserting an emulated 10p. Frenzied beeping.