Dave Mundy advised us that some time ago a newspaper ran an article about music and how there were some pieces that made the hairs stand up on the back of your head!

Dave Mundy

I have several favourite pieces of music where I just wait for the ‘orgasmic’ moment and they never fail to succeed! Mental orgasm is fantastic but less messy than the other (if you can remember it!). My list contains a climax in “Fingal’s Cave” by Mendelssohn, “Bridge over Troubled Waters” by Simon and Garfunkel (the first bass note after the intro), the somnorific “Symphonic Variations” by Cesar Franck, which lull you to sleep and then wake you up – absolutely fantastic! And loads more which have such a powerful effect on you. Pictures are OK, but music really effects you deep down…

.. .the first two notes of Parry’s “I was glad” from Princess Di’s wedding  (I was the only TV OBs sound person in St. Paul’s for the service), the first two notes of “Candle in the Wind” from Prince Di’s funeral (on the dodgiest group on my OB truck’s sound desk!), the TOTP’s opening sequence in the 1970s (when the whole program was started by me live on grams every week!), the opening titles of “Compact” and “Z Cars”, when the red lights were flashing in the studio just before going LIVE on air to millions of people, you can’t beat it!

Bernie Newnham

Do you remember when you were working in Studio E and when the red lights flashed at two minutes it somehow clicked on the talkback – click, click…click, click?  As a new young oik given an "easy" camera to operate which would often turn out to be rather more when new news came in, that used to scare me.That bass note in “Bridge over Troubled Waters” – I’ve used it lots of times as a way of finding out how good is the system I’m listening to. I realise it is in no way scientific, but I know it should come over pretty solid so when fiddling, that’s something I play.

Dave Plowman

I know what you mean – but that bass note in BOTW is actually pretty high up the frequency range of a bass.

A real test for the bottom end of speakers is a large pipe organ. Something like a good recording with decent organ of the Saint-Saëns organ symphony (Symphony No. 3 in C minor, Op. 78,  completed by Camille  Saint-Saëns in 1886).

Graeme Wall

“Thus Spake Zarathustra” is useful too (aka 2001).

Keith Wicks

I’m much more scientific – I use a little mains hum. I don’t know the frequencies of the notes in the Saint-Saëns Organ Symphony, but I do know the frequency of the mains. And I find it alarming how much the loudness at 50 Hz varies with the pressure of my headphones against my ears. But less alarming than my cheaper headphones, which I’ve found cannot reproduce 50 Hz!

By the way, the lowest organ note has a frequency of only 8.18 Hz, and there is a subcontrabass clarinet that goes a full octave lower (not many people know that!). More musical frequencies at:
http://www.contrabass.com/pages/frequency.html.

Back to Tingle time …

Peter Cook

The interludes from “Peter Grimes” (Ben Britten) do it for me. Having spent many days immersed in the music, working on the opera at the Maltings, the setting was authentic and atmospheric; that the composer was there, as well as the singer for whom the lead part was written, added to the addictive effect the music had. Also Tchaikovsky’s 6th Symphony has many tingle moments – for instance the transition from pp at the end of the 1st movement to the crashing start of the 2nd. I once had 4 different vinyl recordings so fond was I of the Pathetique!! But top of my list has to be the angelic high note from a treble in the Allegri Miserere, which being repeated, builds waves of tingle.

Roger Bunce

If I really need to straighten out my knotted nervous system, I sit in a darkened room, in a big comfy armchair, empty my brain, and play Vaughn-William’s "Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis" as loud as the neighbours could cope with. It washes over me and through me, lifts me up like an ocean swell as it reaches its climax, then slides me gently down again. . . . Who the hell needs drugs? . . .

Pachebel’s "Canon" is almost as good for a quicker fix. Or if you want something that really tears at your heart-strings, and jerks your tears, it has to be Samuel Barber’s "Adagio for Strings" – although that has become slightly over-familiar since 9/11. Albinoni’s "Adagio" is pretty good in second place.

For resonant bass notes leading you into a rollicking gallop, try John Barry’s "Ski Chase" from "On Her Majesty’s Secret Service".

But for the music that really turns me on, just stand near the Dodgem Track at any fairground and listen to those distorted 1950s Rocker classics! Who needs proper loudspeakers? Why do we scorn great music just because it has a chorus like, "Da Doo Ron Ron Ron, Da Doo Ron Ron"?

Dick Blencowe

Two TV themes from the past that hit a tingle. The high trumpet notes on "Dynasty" and the theme for "The Day of the Triffids" with John Duttine and Emma Relph (which I worked on in the early nineteen-eighties) always sent a shudder up the spine.

Pat Heigham

The opening chords from the film "South Pacific". I saw it in my local fleapit cinema in Ryde – the first house to display Cinemascope in the I.O.W! I decided then that I wanted to work on a big-screen musical. I joined BBC who taught me most things, then managed the ‘dream’ with “Fiddler on the Roof”. "South Pacific" still does it for me, off Blu-Ray into a Panasonic Hi-Def projector, on a 9′ screen.  (Not as big as Pinewood’s Theatre 7, but I did have a play with the cinema in the National Film and Television School).