Special Sound

Special Sound book cover

Special Sound: The Creation and Legacy of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is a 2010 book by Louis Niebur of the University of Texas.

It is deeply researched from interviews conducted from 2002 to 2008, extensive study of the BBC's library of internal memos and contains a wealth of references to books and newspaper articles as well as the author's own detailed analysis of the structure of Delia's piece Amor Dei.

It sustains that the main causes of the difficulty that Delia encountered at the Workshop were the rivalry by the BBC Music Department and the poor quality of the equipment that she had to use.

• Author: Louis Niebur
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, New York
• Pages: 272
• ISBN: 9780195368406 and 8413
• Published: 4 November 2010

Errata

p.98: It says that, after being turned down by Decca in 1959 she “toured with a stage production of Julius Caesar, providing offstage electronic sound effects” and cites the Surface interview. The correct citation is the Soundhouse interview

pp.134-135: It says that the Radiophonic Workshop in Concert event was held in the Royal Albert Hall, whereas all other sources say it was at the Royal Festival Hall.

Availability

• It can be bought from OUP in the USA and elsewhere.
• Some pages can be read on Google books
• Extracts are included in the pages for Amor Dei and Rorate Coeli.

External links

• The book's official page on the Oxford University Press US web site
• Reviewed by The Times higher Education Supplement, by makemag.com
• There is an accompanying password-protected web site with audio makeups from Amor Dei. The username is Music2 and the password Book4416 (thankyou, Google books!)