String and Tins compose and sound design for BBC Radio Three 70 th Anniversary campaign through Partizan.

Award winning sound design studio String and Tins collaborated with Partizan to expertly

craft the innovative anniversary campaign showcasing the increasingly diverse sonic nature

of Radio 3's output. "When Director Chris Cairns approached us to help prepare for the

BBC Radio 3’s 70th birthday celebrations we were naturally honoured…When he then

described the incredible series of ideas he had, from having us write a piece of music and

sound design to accompany a striking poetry recital by Alice Oswald, destroying a string

quartet with power tools to a one-shot idea of following Soweto Kinch and his crew

improvising a jazz piece on a ‘La Haine’ style housing estate party, we were excited to say

the least!” says sound designer and composer Alex Bingham. “We have had awesome

creative and technical input from everyone involved and huge thanks to Chris for giving us

such trust and free reign with the soundtrack."

For the Alice Oswald poem Chris Cairns gave Alex Bingham the brief to write a piece of

music and sound design that followed the emotional journey of the beautiful ‘Rain’ poem.

The storyboards, words and images were so striking that the piece kind of wrote itself.

Alex went away and built a sound guide highlighting the textures and mood of the film with

acoustic, synthesised instruments and sound effects. He fed this into the creative team and

together they found a shape to underpin the emotion and imagery of the poem.

Producing the music was an explorative process and loads of fun; tuned glass and taps,

spectral filtered radio elements, destroyed bit-crushed tubas, scratchy frantic dissonant

violins distorted to an inch of their life and roaring feed backed organs to create a wall of

sound.

A very satisfying process indeed.