Science Museum, London: the potential of broadcast

We paid a visit to London’s Science Museum in search of sounds – and we found them in its Broadcast Zone – an interactive gallery charting the beginnings of global broadcast.

In this field recording you can hear snippets of early radio, Morse code and other communications as we tour the gallery.

The reimagined version takes the sounds from the origins of global broadcasting as its basis. In the early 20th century, technologies we now perceive as archaic were seen as an almost unbelievably advanced future – the Science Museum’s broadcast zone conveys some of the wonder of the newly-connected world.

As such, we’ve brought together sounds that signify science fiction – big, buzzing waves of synths – to package up sounds from the early history of broadcast communication. As the voice in the recording says, “this is something with tremendous potential”.

City version:

Memory version: