Contemporary voice and the sounds of 1920s radio take flight along a London street, in this new piece exploring resonances between early wireless and telepathy. For Nick Ryan’s VoiceLine, a 39-speaker array which stretched 170m along the The Strand, outside the old BBC Marconi building.
A short biography of composer Daphne Oram, co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic workshop and inventor of the Oramics ‘drawn sound’ system. For a reprint of her treatise on sound, electronics and metaphysics.
Centuries before the advent of the phonograph, captured songbirds were trained to sing fashionable melodies in the home. In this documentary for BBC Radio 4, Sarah explores the surprising history of teaching songbirds to sing. Produced by Neil McCarthy.
Through music, poetry, archive and the sound engineer’s toolbox, Sarah Angliss explores our enduring and sometimes deathly fascination with the echo. A Radio 4 documentary produced by Peregrine Andrews and Farshoreline.
Presenting and co-researching this history of sound effects for BBC Radio Archive on 4. The show marks 200 years since Thomas De Quincey wrote On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth, his early consideration of the powerful psychological impact of sound on stage. Produced by Resonance FM.
A tourable, large-scale video triptych of The Machinery, a piece exploring women and mechanised labour, created by Sarah Angliss, Caroline Radcliffe – filmed by video artist John Harrison in 2018. Supported by ACE.
Some reflections on noise and 1920s modernity, as expressed in Eugene O’Neill’s ‘The Hairy Ape’. This includes some archival discoveries about early performances. These notes were made after I’d composed a score for a new production of the play and contributed to the Science Museum research forum ‘Noise, Music and Silence’.
A chapter on musicians’ attitudes towards the first drum machines and samplers, in this book published by the Smithsonian Institution Scholarly Press (2013).
Published online by Wire Magazine (June 2014), Unheimlich Manoeuvres is a short essay on ventriloquism and the uncanny. It’s illustrated with videos of many fine ventriloquists including Ray Alan, Arthur Worsley and the great Terri Rogers.
A short statement on my work with algorithms and robotics, for The Oxford Handbook of Algorithmic Music. Edited by Roger T Dean and Alex McLean, Oxford University Press 2013.
Recreating a 1970s algorthmic dance piece by pen and paper-based systems artist Channa Horwitz
Researching and creating a generative 50-channel soundscape to reanimate the submarine HMS Alliance. Informed by detailed research with veteran submariners.
A paper with performer and theatre historian Caroline Radcliffe on our interpretion of The Machinery. This astounding industrial dance from the early nineteeth century was devised by women working in the Lancashire cotton mills. Wearing clogs, they copied the sounds and actions of the factory machines. In Performance Research.
In this optimistic view of mechanisation for TEDx Brighton (2011), Sarah reveals some surprising connections between two types of dance music, inspired by the relentless beat of the factory machine, which flourished two centuries apart. The earliest was devised by women working in Lancashire cotton mills.
Background notes from Sarah’s TEDx talk Loving the Machine.
Background notes on the Bird Fancyer’s Delight, including a list of music in the show, example tunes for birds and transcripts from treatise on teaching your birds to sing.
A controlled psychological experiment, in the form of two back-to-back concerts. These concerts were highly unusual because some of the music was laced with infrasound (extreme bass sound, below 20Hz in frequency). It took place in the Purcell Room, London, in 2003.
A description of the pure-tone infrasound generator, specially designed for our experiments by the UK National Physical Laboratory. This page includes a critique of the resultant method of creating infrasonic notes for experiments.