YouTube video on the making of the Doctor Who theme music!

Check out this totally awesome video: An interview with the guy who recorded the theme music for the Doctor Who show! You get to watch him twiddling the knobs on his utterly gnarly 1970s synthesizer, reproducing the swoopy, buzzy opening tones — and chatting with the documentary host about the nuances of ring modulators and how they impacted the crafting of the Dalek’s vocal inflections.

I could sit around watching stuff like this until I die. It reminded me of the discussion that erupted back when I blogged about Coagula, a little app that translates images into synth-like sounds; when translated a picture of my face into a noise, my friend Eric Weissengruber pointed out that “your face sounds like the beginning of the old Doctor Who theme.” It also reminds me that I’ve always wanted one of these suckers for my guitar …

(Thanks to Music Thing for this one!)


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Bio:

I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.

Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!

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Recent Entries

A long German word for “noticing when ads are being customized based on your surfing history”

Gay squid sex

“El Ajedrecista” — an analog chess-playing computer from 1912

Hacking the Model T

“How did you find my site?” and Vannevar Bush’s memex

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a bunch of stuff

May 20, 2011 » 02:28 PM

From Christopher Kennedy’s very droll book “Neitzsche’s Horse”.

July 28, 2010 » 07:35 AM
“Wr” - S

July 06, 2010 » 10:05 AM

My Xbox broke, and I was trying to Google some possible technical solutions, when I noticed that Google appears to be encouraging me to make a typo. I suppose it’s possible that Google’s algorithms know that typing “wont” instead of “won’t” would produce better results.

June 29, 2010 » 05:00 PM

On the other hand, when I tried the test for multitasking, I was pretty abysmal. I performed worse than people who identify themselves as heavy multitaskers, and those who identify as low multitaskers.

June 29, 2010 » 04:58 PM

I finally got around to trying out the interactive “test your distractability and multitasking” page at the New York Times, which they put up alongside their story earlier this month about how computer distractions are eroding our lives. 

According to the test, I guess I have good focus — I’m not very distractable! 

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Collision Detection: A Blog by Clive Thompson