Credit where credit's due

The previewer of BBC1's stunning thriller The Silence in the Sunday Times Culture section says something along the lines "it's not often that you seek out the name of the sound designer" yet fails to mention who did the extremely fine work on sound.

But they're not alone, the BBC website on the programme fails to list many beyond director and producer.

And the credits roll too fast and are too small to be of much help.

So full marks to Douglas Hensall who lists many of the technical and crafts personal involved.

So I can name names and give credit where credit's due:

Sound Mixing: Karl Merren

Composer: John Lunn

Naming of names

So today's Guardian WeekendMagazine reveals who was responsible for the vuvuzela! It's Freddie Maake.

Experience: I invented the vuvuzela
'At the start of the tournament, I was standing at the top of the arena near the players, listening to the sound and crying tears of joy'

'There has been talk of a ban, but that will never happen while I'm still alive'

I invented the vuvuzela 35 years ago but, of course, it's only since the start of the World Cup that it has become quite so well known globally. Whatever people may say about the sound it makes, it has never been so popular. That makes me proud; I see so many visitors taking vuvuzelas home with them, to Europe, South America and beyond.

I know people have complained in the past. One football squad objected to the noise when they played in South Africa, but I think it's only polite to accept the customs of any country you visit, and this is our culture. Our players expect it and the sound encourages them – it's the sound of our support. Many people say they don't like the noise, but I've been blowing the vuvuzela for decades now and I've never heard of anyone going to hospital or dying because of it.

I do recommend some basic rules when it comes to using it, though – you shouldn't blow one directly into anyone's ear, for example, nor should you ever sound a vuvuzela during a country's national anthem. There has been talk of a ban, but that will never happen while I'm still alive – no government will stop it. The vuvuzela is my baby and I'd happily go to jail for it. Actually, I have been locked up already, for 20 minutes – in 1992, I took my vuvuzela to Zimbabwe, but only after falling foul of the authorities at the airport, who initially insisted I couldn't take it on to the plane.

I have been dedicated to popularising the vuvuzela since 1965, when I was 10. My brother bought me a bicycle to ride to school on. It had a big aluminium hooter with a rubber bulb on the end – I realised if I took off the ball and blew into the horn, it made a more exciting noise. I used to take it along to local football matches played on gravel or in the street and play it to encourage my team.

My horn became better known a few years later when the Kaizer Chiefs football club was born – I never missed a game and I'd always take it along. I used to call it a lempororo, after the area in South Africa where I grew up. Other supporters would ask where I'd got it, but because the lempororo was made of metal, it was considered dangerous and I was banned from taking it into the Orlando Stadium where the Chiefs used to play.

I approached someone who ran a manufacturing company and he made the first plastic version – a yellow one very much like those you see today. We called them Boogieblasts and sold them at games. I changed the name to vuvuzela in 1992, after Nelson Mandela was released and South Africa was allowed to compete internationally again – the name means three things in Zulu: "welcome", "unite" and "celebration."

People assume my invention has made me rich – in fact, big companies have taken the idea and the name, and don't give me a penny. I struggle to feed my nine children. Most of my earnings come from selling an album I made in the 90s that features the vuvuzela, and I've been touting the second volume at the World Cup games. Of course I'd be happier if my invention allowed me to support my family more easily, but I'm not bitter that others are benefiting. I still want to encourage others to enjoy them. When South Africa hosted the 1995 Rugby World Cup, I had vuvuzelas made in all the teams' colours and taught people in the crowd how to play.

In my culture, it's hard to gain recognition when you do something good – not while you're alive, anyway. When I do pass away, I want people to blow vuvuzelas at my funeral. It gives me great joy to know that I created an instrument that has been played by everyone from tiny children to Nelson Mandela. Even now I spend a lot of time thinking of ways to improve it; I want everyone to play the vuvuzela, beyond Africa.

At the start of the tournament, I was standing at the top of the arena near the players, listening to the sound and crying tears of joy. People from all over Africa were there, united by the vuvuzela. As for players saying they can't hear on the pitch because they're drowned out by the noise – well, footballers have never been short of excuses when things go wrong, have they? Whatever happens tomorrow, you'll never hear the winning team complaining.

• As told to Chris Broughton.

Shocking Sounds

I've never really looked at the Clip Joint section of the Film & Muisc supplement of the Guardian. However, this week's selection from AJ Bee was rather tasty - they're all on the theme of horror sounds, and as well as the reader's thoughts there are actual clips to watch and listen to

AJ writes:
When it comes to cinema, sound is often sight's neglected sister. Yet all things aural feed our mood, while an absence of sound leaves scenes cold. This is why sound is a key tool of the filmmaker with a desire to genuinely affect their audience. Fingernails screeching down a blackboard signalled an ominous presence in Jaws, while the industrial grind of Eraserhead pummels the viewer into a paranoid wreck.

The darker side of cinema is often home to the most creative use of audio. For those who can't afford CGI, the experienced sound engineer proves invaluable. Who would have thought that The Exorcist's head-turning scene was made especially dread-drenched by the creak of a leather wallet? These skilfully added acoustics may be a backdrop for the movie, or part of the plot itself. They are a secret narrator in our minds, skilfully and invisibly steering our emotions. Often misused by studio hacks to shock the viewer into supposed terror through volume (or possibly just to keep us awake) sound is still, for good or for ill, a central element of the scary cinematic experience.

1) Alan Bates opens his mouth, destroys a shepherd and damages John Hurt's eardrums in The Shout.
2) Bernard Herrmann's shrieking strings in Psycho terrify us into thinking we've witnessed violence that we haven't.
3) In Requiem for a Dream sound conjures up one woman's paranoid psychosis (plus the most dangerous fridge outside Ghostbusters)
4) David Lynch uses sound in Eraserhead to gradually wear down the viewer, leaving us a gibbering mess.
5) A cocktail of surreal, layered sound and image make the 1977 comedy horror Hausu an unforgettable experience

David Fanshawe RIP

Travelling back on the train to Chichester from a visit to the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust [WWT]'s 26 hectace Wetland Centre in Arundel, I pick up a copy of The Times and find an obituary for the composer and explorer, David Fanshawe.


The accompanying picture shows him holding a pair of Sennehiser MD421 microphones for a location recording. The large diaphragm, dynamic element handles high sound pressure levels, making it a natural for miking brass and drums [especially toms], although it is rarely seen nowadays.

I first discovered David in the early 1980s through the wonderous African Sanctus, an unorthodox setting of the Latin Mass harmonised with traditional African music recorded by the composer on his now legendary journeys up the River Nile (1969-73). The taped music from Egypt, Sudan, Uganda and Kenya is heard in counterpoint with the live chorus, soprano soloist and instrumental ensemble.


As The Times has a paywall, there is an obituary on the Independent website.

David Fanshawe: Composer and explorer best known for 'African Sanctus'

On accepting an honorary degree as a Doctor of Music at the University of Bristol last November, the composer and explorer David Fanshawe described his "life's missions": "to celebrate the universal language of music; to record for posterity endangered World Music, threatened with extinction; to seek inspiration for my own compositions – thus uniting musical worlds apart."

His best-known and most influential work was African Sanctus (Philips, 1975), which fused a choral mass with field recordings of traditional music he had made on extensive travels in Africa between 1969 and 1975, and won him an Ivor Novello Award. That year, the project was also the subject of his only published book, and a BBC TV documentary.

When co-editing the first edition of The Rough Guide to World Music (1994), the writer and film-maker Simon Broughton wrote a chapter based largely on an interview with Fanshawe about his later work in the Pacific. He described Fanshawe's legacy: "His importance was in pioneering enthusiasm for other musical cultures and using them in a new way of composing – seeing the BBC film about African Sanctus was without doubt one of the things that made me realise how much amazing music there is in the world."

David Fanshawe was born in Paignton during an air raid. He was educated at St George's School, Windsor and Stowe, where he struggled with mild dyslexia but showed promise in film, music and drama. On leaving school in 1959 he landed a job at a small film company in Wimbledon, Merton Park Productions, but soon set off on the first of his travels, to Europe in 1962.
In 1965 he won a Foundation Scholarship to study under John Lambert at the Royal College of Music, and in 1966, produced his first significant work the 17-minute orchestral piece Requiem for the Children of Aberfan. The same year he also began exploring the Middle East, which led him to compose Salaams (1970) a work based on rhythms he had learnt from pearl divers in Bahrain.

Between 1969 and 1975 he travelled widely in North and East Africa, partly funded by the Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust and a Churchill Fellowship. This resulted in around 600 field recordings of the indigenous musicians he met and gained the trust of, some of whose work went into the creation of African Sanctus.

While based in London between trips during the 1970s, he also pursued a successful parallel career composing scores for over 30 films and television programmes, including Tarka the Otter, When the Boat Comes In, Three Men in a Boat, England their England and Softly, Softly. However, the travel bug bit again in 1978, when he began to explore the Pacific region. By 1981, with his then wife Judith and their two young children, Fanshawe relocated to Fiji, which he used as a base for his travels. Back in London and divorced by the middle of the decade, he remarried and resettled in Australia, from which he continued his journeys through Melanesia, Micronesia and Polynesia. He eventually made around 2,000 recordings.

The family returned to the UK in 1992, settling in Wiltshire, where Fanshawe established his archives and continued to compose. From the mid-1990s on, a number of his field recordings were released on the ARC, Saydisc and Nonesuch labels.

Aside from African Sanctus, Fanshawe's work has been the subject of three other documentaries: Arabian Fantasy (1976), Musical Mariner (1987) and Tropical Beat (1995). Significant later compositions include Fanfare to Planet Earth, Millennium March and Pacific Song – a movement for choir, flute and drums, inspired by Tongan music – the only completed part of his planned Pacific Odyssey.
Jon Lusk
David Arthur Fanshawe, composer and explorer: born Paignton, Devon 19 April 1942; married firstly Judith Croasdell Grant (one son, one daughter), secondly Jane Bishop (one daughter); died Swindon 5 July 2010.

Acoustic bass uuitar

One of many joys of the Cafe Aman concert was that the line-up had an acoustic bass guitar, an instrument that is almost anonymous. Since I first met the ABG some 25 years ago, I come across it perhaps 6 or 7 times in the interim.

The acoustic bass guitar (also called ABG or acoustic bass) is a bass instrument with a hollow wooden body similar to, though usually somewhat larger than a steel-string acoustic guitar. Like the traditional electric bass guitar and the double bass, the acoustic bass guitar commonly has four strings, which are normally tuned E-A-D-G, an octave below the lowest four strings of the 6-string guitar, which is the same tuning pitch as an electric bass guitar.

Ashley Hutchings was the first player I came across in the mid-1980s when the Albion Band played for Leicester Haymarket's production of Lark Rise [the National Theatre version by Keuth Dewhurst], and All Things Considered, the support band for Lisa Knapp at Bracknell when I toured with Lisa over a year ago was the last.

So many thanks to Nick Cohen making a good evening great.

Tinnitus at the Cafe Aman

Last night I was mixing the sound for Martha Lewis' Cafe Aman at St. John's Chapel as part of this year's Chichester Festivities.

At the interval a gentleman came up to me and asked if it needed to be so loud - he was complaining that he was over 50 [as am I] and when you get to that age you get various afflictions such as the tinnitus that he was suffering from. So he was telling me to turn it down for the second half or he wouldn't be going back in.

While I do appreciate his discomfort, I spend my professional life working with sound and so would certainly do nothing to damage my own [or others] hearing.

In this case, the sound DID have to be at that level. Any quieter and the out-front sound would be compromised by the level of the on-stage monitors used by the performers, which in the smallish chapel were louder than I would have hoped.

A quick straw poll of some people I knew confirmed that they were not distressed by the sound levels [indeed, they complimented on the quality of the sound] and the stewards had no other complaints.

Our solution...my sound assistant had a pair of noise-reducing earplugs which he lent to the man. [I don't give up my own everpresent personal Etymotic ER-20 plugs - which reduce the sound by 20dB at all frequnecies - for nobody]. A happy customer after the concert.

But it begs the question: would he ask for the lighting to be turned down if he had a sight problem that was exacerbated by strong light. No, he would probably wear tinted glasses. Why is sound any different? I hope he takes up our visit Specsavers and purchase his own set.

Milky Way

Composite image of the universe with the Milky Way looming large in the foreground, from the European Space Agency's Planck telescope. Click on the magnifying glass to enlarge. Photograph: Esa

Giant clouds of interstellar gas and dust light up this panoramic view of the sky recorded by the European Space Agency's Planck telescope.

The space telescope was launched in May last year on a mission to survey the "cosmic microwave background" – ancient light left over from the big bang.

The bright streak across the middle of the picture is our own galaxy, the Milky Way, viewed edge-on. The intense light comes not from stars but from the radiation released by the dust and gas clouds that stretch between them.

"We are opening the door to an El Dorado where scientists can seek the nuggets that will lead to deeper understanding of how our universe came to be and how it works now. The image itself and its remarkable quality is a tribute to the engineers who built and have operated Planck," said David Southwood, director of science and robotic exploration at the European Space Agency (Esa).

The blue and white wisps that reach above and below our own galaxy are streamers of cold dust that trace out the "galactic web" where new stars are born.

The speckles at the top and bottom of the image are caused by microwave background radiation, the remnants of the first light that appeared 380,000 years after the big bang flung the universe into being 13.7bn years ago.

The Planck telescope observes the sky in nine wavelengths from the microwave to the vary-far-infrared region of the spectrum. This image is a composite of pictures taken at several different wavelengths.

The pictures beamed back by Planck will give astronomers insights into the structure of the universe and hopefully shed light on dark energy, which is believed to drive the expansion of the universe, and dark matter, the invisible substance that seems to cling to galaxies.

"This image is just a glimpse of what Planck will ultimately see," said Jan Tauber, Planck project scientist at Esa.

Ten of the Best - Pianos

I tour as sound engineer with pianocircus. We usually have to play on digital keyboards [currently the Yamaha CP33 stage piano] but occasionally they get to play on - and I get to mike up - 6 grand pianos. As such, I've become a Steinway spotter - collecting serial numbers of pianos we use.

In a series I rarely look at in the Guardian Review, John Mullan in "Ten of the Best" today looks at the use of pianos in literature.

Emma by Jane Austen
It bruises Emma that Jane Fairfax is so very good at playing the piano (if only she had practised a little more). Jane's prowess at the keyboard becomes central to the plot. Who could be the donor of the expensive instrument that is delivered to Miss Bates's house, where Jane is staying? It must surely be a male admirer. Well, yes, but Emma's deductions lead her very astray.

Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray
Amelia and Becky – the good girl and the bad girl – both play the piano, but look at their different styles! After her husband's death, Amelia "spends long evening hours, touching . . . melancholy harmonies on the keys, and weeping over them in silence". Becky, meanwhile, entrances the wife of the man she is seducing with the bogus "tenderness" of her renditions of Mozart.

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Jane can play the piano, of course – but Blanche Ingram, her rival for the attentions of Mr Rochester, can really play. She sits proudly at the piano, "spreading out her snowy robes in queenly amplitude" and beginning "a brilliant prelude; talking meantime". But this is showing off, and dooms her.

Daniel Deronda by George Eliot
The scary German piano maestro Herr Klesmer (based on Franz Liszt) has "an imperious magic in his fingers that seemed to send a nerve-thrill through ivory key and wooden hammer". His romance with heiress Catherine Arrowpoint is conducted via the instrument, which he teaches her to play brilliantly.

The Portrait of a Lady by Henry James
Entering the huge drawing room at Gardencourt unseen, Isabel Archer finds an elegant woman at the piano. "She was playing something of Schubert's . . . and she touched the piano with a discretion of her own. It showed skill, it showed feeling". It is the mysterious Madame Merle, her gifts as a pianist a sign of her sexual powers.

The Awakening by Kate Chopin
The piano awakens Edna Pontellier's dormant passions. "The very passions themselves were aroused within her soul, swaying it, lashing it, as the waves daily beat upon her splendid body. She trembled, she was choking, and the tears blinded her." Adulterous love is only a step away.

Piano by DH Lawrence
A woman sings at the piano, and the poet is carried back to his childhood, when he sat "under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings / And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings". The music reduces him to tears for the past.

The Piano Players by Anthony Burgess
An accomplished musician himself, Burgess fills this novel with piano music. Ellen Henshaw, an elderly former prostitute, looks back on her own efforts to learn the instrument. Her father, a brilliant player, improvised accompaniments to silent films at the cinema. The disastrous climax of his career is a 30-day non-stop piano marathon.

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek
Erika is a middle-aged piano teacher at a Vienna conservatory. She still lives with her mother, who wanted Erika to be a concert pianist and forced her to practise. The piano inevitably becomes the focus of Erika's sadomasochistic affair with a teenage student, to whom she gives some very steamy lessons.

The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk
Thomas has become a househusband and, when his wife goes off to run some university department or other, he fulfils a long-held ambition: to become really good at the piano. Pausing from practice to do the odd school run, he escapes from the turmoil of mid-life dread into the harmonies of the keyboard. Except, of course, that it will prove to be no escape at all . . .