Haunted Science: The BBC Radiophonic Workshop and the lost futures of hauntological music
- Submitting institution
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The University of Westminster
- Unit of assessment
- 32 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
- Output identifier
- qzv9w
- Type
- D - Journal article
- DOI
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10.1386/scene_00012_1
- Title of journal
- Scene
- Article number
- -
- First page
- 107
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 2
- ISSN
- 2044-3714
- Open access status
- Not compliant
- Month of publication
- May
- Year of publication
- 2020
- URL
-
-
- Supplementary information
-
-
- Request cross-referral to
- -
- Output has been delayed by COVID-19
- No
- COVID-19 affected output statement
- -
- Forensic science
- No
- Criminology
- No
- Interdisciplinary
- No
- Number of additional authors
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0
- Research group(s)
-
-
- Proposed double-weighted
- No
- Reserve for an output with double weighting
- No
- Additional information
- This article addresses contemporary electronic music’s remediation of the sound and music of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The Workshop’s idiosyncratic output, which encompassed soundtracks and sound design for radio and television productions, articulated a British national optimism for social regeneration through electronic experimentation. This optimism achieved its summit in the period characterised by public service broadcasting, state planning and benevolent social engineering culminating in the late 1970s.
This article is pertinent to studies of popular music and sonic cultures, but also has implications for media cultures more generally. Christodoulou developed the analysis from a paper given at the interdisciplinary Researcher Network Conference at the University of Westminster. Responses to the paper focused on the sonic and visual signifiers associated with the Workshop’s productions, such as the use of analogue media, public information films, and science fiction programming, from the period in which the BBC dominated British media culture. Christodoulou further pursues this line of research by questioning the continued relevance of the future as an idealised telos in the British cultural imagination, even when experimentation itself continues to be celebrated in electronic music.
The article adopts Mark Fisher’s term ‘hauntology’ to examine the peculiar sense of nostalgia evoked by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for a hopeful, if uncanny, technological future. By analysing the often digitally produced music that remediates distinctively pre-digital Radiophonic sounds, this article also contrasts contemporary hauntological music that imagines past futures from the perspective of the present, with electronic dance music from the 1980s and 90s, such as techno and drum ‘n’ bass, that, until recently, had been considered at the vanguard of sonic futurism.
- Author contribution statement
- -
- Non-English
- No
- English abstract
- -
