Morse Code in Tubular Bells (2021)
45 comments
·January 23, 2025kristopolous
tdeck
If anyone is really interested in this kind of thing, I recommend picking up a copy of "The Story of Telecommunications" by George P. Oslin, which is full of obscure communication history details like this.
kristopolous
Guy was in his early 90s when he published that.
I wrote some articles on this stuff, had a short-lived podcast. Still, to this day, the lowest traffic writing and production I've ever done, by at least 2 orders of magnitude, probably 3.
Nobody is interested in it.
tdeck
Is your podcast still online?
kazinator
Another British morse code in music story: in the title theme of the 1980s sitcom "Some Mothers Do 'Ave 'Em", the rhythm of the notes is a deliberate morse code which spells out the title of the show.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Some_Mothers_Do_%27Ave_%27Em#T...
What the Wikipedia page doesn't mention this, but I read long ago that the composer of the tune received only a small one-time payment for it and no royalties, despite the popularity of the show.
yoz
The composer you mention was the most prolific and talented creator of BBC TV show themes: Ronnie Hazlehurst. He usually did arrangement and production of the music as well.
Other famous themes he created: Are You Being Served?; Last of the Summer Wine; The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin; To the Manor Born; Yes, Minister (and Yes, Prime Minister); Blankety Blank; and The Generation Game. See his Wikipedia page for the full list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronnie_Hazlehurst
AFAIK, the main reason that he received no royalties is because BBC programmes generated no income. The BBC's commercial arm, BBC Worldwide, generates revenue through selling and licensing content, but that was created in the 1990s. I don't know whether the royalties situation has changed, but I doubt it.
So Hazlehurst wasn't well paid, nor were the recordings well funded. This is another great example of constraints triggering innovation: the theme for Are You Being Served? memorably uses the sounds of coins and cash registers, which was Hazlehurst's solution to not being able to afford proper percussion.
If you have two spare minutes now, watch Matt Berry's lovely tribute to Ronnie Hazlehurst, from Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Ui1rdhQljU
flobosg
A Canadian morse code in music: The intro of Rush’s “YYZ” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YYZ_(song)#Title_and_compositi...
xanderlewis
See also the theme music of the television version of 'Inspector Morse', though perhaps that's not very surprising.
jdietrich
Offensively pedantic trivia: the theme is supposed to spell out "MORSE", but actually spells "TTORSE", due either to a slight timing error or artistic license.
xanderlewis
No — you're right!
HelloUsername
Also the theme to Mission Impossible. The letters M (⸺ ⸺) and I (– –) in a 5/4 time signature (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mission:_Impossible_(1966_TV_s...)
Jordan_Pelt
...and the opening of the Rush song YYZ.
ryandrake
The article is about a studio device unintentionally picking up Morse code during recording. But that's not the only intersection between Mike Oldfield and Morse code. Oldfield also deliberately (and quite obviously, if you're listening for it) inserted into one of his later albums: a not-so-nice Morse code message[1] to Virgin Records founder Richard Branson, with whom he was at the time fighting over how he was being treated by the label and lack of promotion. At around the 48 minute mark of Amarok, you can hear a synthesizer loudly tap out "F U C K O F F R B" in the recording.
jerf
Looks like Mike Oldfield has it officially up on YouTube: https://youtu.be/rwtfmpeedpA?t=2880
And for your convenience, a Morse code chart for those who wish to follow along: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morse_code#/media/File:Interna...
Given his musical sound in general and the sound of the rest of the album, it is not something I ever would have thought twice about if I heard it without prompting. Neat story.
tdeck
Here's what I hear:
VVV GBR GBR GBR [BT] TL5 T [BT] VVV VVV VVV ...
VVV is often sent when testing your equipment, and I think that's what's happening here.
gorgoiler
The transmission signal path on the first map also looks an awful lot like the album cover for Tubular Bells:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/0/0d/Mike_oldfield...
pjbk
Mike Oldfield has stated that the conditions at the Manor were so precarious at the time, he had to learn to use the tape recorder and mixer almost by himself because the engineer was never there. Since there were so many instruments on the recordings and the mixer was not automated, it took several people doing acrobatics to operate the faders and dials real-time to mix down the tracks for the album. Therefore possibly those Morse code signals were picked up because an instrument was not properly gain staged before being recorded.
LeoPanthera
Given that Tubular Bells is a patchwork of so many different takes, I would suggest that it's a little more likely that the signal was recorded during the final mix down or possibly one of the intermediate bounce stages, since the signal seems to be mostly intact.
pjbk
When you are close to a low frequency radio station anything is possible I guess. I used to live less than one mile away from an AM radio station antenna. That doesn't mix up well if you want to become an electronic engineer or compose your own electronic music. ;-)
The Telecaster guitar and bass used would be my #1 culprit on introducing noise since pickups are virtually antennas. Mike Oldfield even had added an extra high gain single coil BL pickup to his '66 Tele. If you don't gain stage or ground properly the mics that were used for the acoustic instruments, they could have also captured RF noise easily, even if they had a heavy metal housing that acted like shielding. Some Farfisa organs are also noticeable noisy, although I don't know about their EMI or how banged up was the one used for the album that belonged to David Bedford. The electric piano used was a Rhodes, and those were built like a tank. Finally the tracks were overdubbed over and over. This would in all likelihood have attenuated both the audio and noise, but using a mixer or a tape that is susceptible to interference means that you have more chances of capturing noise at some point in the recording. I guess we will never know for sure.
Anyway, it adds to the mystique of the record.
toast0
> When you are close to a low frequency radio station anything is possible I guess. I used to live less than one mile away from an AM radio station antenna. That doesn't mix up well if you want to become an electronic engineer or compose your own electronic music. ;-)
My college has an FM radio station, and the broadcast antenna is (or was) on the roof of one of the dorms. Any sort of speaker would play the station faintly. A block away, in the engineering classrooms, we could easily see the station's waveform on our oscilliscopes probing wall power, just superimposed on the 60 Hz sine wave.
hvs
"VVV" in Morse code means "attention, incoming message".
Cool to see amateur radio and fldigi in a Hacker News article.
xanderlewis
Yep. I've seen it used in place of 'CQ' when testing propagation conditions to avoid other stations coming back and attempting a contact. It always reminds me of the Doctor Who theme: ...- ...- ...-
7402
In ham radio practice, it means "Testing." It's used as a kind of filler and is properly followed By "DE" (from) and one's call sign.
kmoser
> I used a lossless FLAC copy of the CD album from 2003 to see this. It’s quite possible a lot of this would be missing from lossy copies, such as MP3s, though I haven’t tested that.
Aren't music CDs already compressed using lossy compression? A FLAC copy of that uncompressed CD would be one generation away from the original, whereas an MP3 of the rip would be two generation removed from the original (i.e. still lossy, only more so)?
kazinator
No, compact disc audio is not compressed. It is raw 16-bit samples at a 44.1 kHz rate.
However I think compact disc audio is allowed to suffer some degradation from errors.
It takes well over 700 MB to store 70 minutes of CD audio. When the same disc is used for data, which has to be reliable, the capacity drops to 650 MB.
null
dylan604
I guess I have to turn in my movie buff card, as I had always just assumed that this music was something composed specifically just for the movie.
spc476
And it's only the first minute or so of the album was used in the movie. In context the entire track (all 25m30s of it) is not scary at all. Clever use of editing.
dylan604
yeah, i can understand why the album was not very popular on its own. everything I just read about it tracks with what I hear.
kazinator
> Tubular Bells was famously recorded at The Manor Studio
I think that's referenced in the 1983 Black Sabbath song "Trashed".
It really was a meeting
The bottle took a beating
The ladies of The Manor <---
Watched me climb into my car and
I was going down the track about a hundred and five
They had the stop-watch rolling
I had the headlights blazing I was really alive
And yet my mind was blowing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Born_Again_(Black_Sabbath_albu...
I was listening to this decades ago, and saw the note on the cover that the album was recorded at The Manor, so I put that together.
LeoPanthera
Morse code is also deliberately in another Mike Oldfield album, Amarok. (Yes, the KDE music player is named after it.)
Oldfield was locked into a predatory Virgin Records contract written by Richard Branson (Tubular Bells was the first ever Virgin Records release) and he was increasingly irritated that Virgin was not promoting his albums.
He hid a message in Amarok and offered £1000 of his own money to anyone who could find it. The message is "FUCK OFF RB" in morse code.
Apparently, no-one claimed the prize.
The potentially earliest written model of a telegraph actually involved bells as well. After the anonymous author (C.M) first suggestion of small pieces of paper with letters written on them jumping up, via static electricity to tiny electrified balls as the sender manually electrifies the wires, one for each letter, and then waits a bit to allow the slips of paper to flutter back down one by one as the remote observer diligently records what letters hit their balls in what order, he suggests the following, from Scots Magazine, 1753:
"If anybody should think this way tiresome, let him, instead of the balls, suspend a range of bells from the roof, equal in number to the letters the alphabet, gradually decreasing in size from the bell A to Z; and from the horizontal wires let there be another set reaching to the several bells; from the horizontal wire A to the bell A, another from the horizontal wire B to the bell B, etc. Then let him who begins the discourse bring the wires in contact with the barrel, as before; and the electric spark, breaking on bells of different size, will inform his correspondent by the sound what wires have been touched: and thus, by some practice, they may come to understand the language of the chimes in whole words, without being put to the trouble of noting down every letter."
The first documented successful message by wire was 20 years later although there was no independent observer. It took about 55 years from the time of this article until one was publicly demonstrated.
Many people claimed they were working on it, such as in this 1773 love letter by Genevan Physician named Louis Odier:
"I shall amuse you, perhaps, in telling you that I have in my head certain experiments by which to enter into conversation with the emperor of Mogol, or of China, the English, the French, or any other people of Europe, in a way that, without inconveniencing yourself, you may intercommunicate all that you wish, at a distance of four or five thousand leagues in less than half an hour! Will that suffice you for glory. There is nothing more real. Whatever be the course of those experiments, they must necessarily lead to some grand discovery; but I have not the courage to undertake them this winter."
Communication at a distance was "time machine"/"fountain of youth" technology up until the 1800s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sympathetic_alphabet was a mystical occult version from the 1600s.