Your wobbulator kit instructions

About the wobbulator

The wobbulator was the nickname for a piece of engineering equipment in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It was a beat frequency oscillator manufactured by the Danish engineering and electronics company Brüel and Kjaer. The machine was designed to assess the acoustics of spaces and studios and designed for electrical engineers to be able to test equipment. However, the inventive and ever resourceful BBC Radiophonic Workshop members uncovered its creative musical potential and turned it into a musical instrument.

It was essentially a basic synthesiser with 1 oscillator, which meant you could select a frequency and then manipulate the modulation of said frequency. It was what we would probably now call an LFO – a low frequency oscillator. As the school children guessed from the name, it was a machine that allowed you to wobble frequencies and therefore produce a myriad of sounds. Delia used the wobbulator to produce some of the low frequency sounds accompanying the melody and the rumbling ‘wind bubble’ at the end of the theme tune. 

We hoped it would be fun for you to be able to make your own wobbulator and so creative technologist Nina Richards has built us a bespoke DIY solderless circuit kit that you can assemble and experiment with. Nina did this by adapting the useful open source code provided by the BBC web audio protoyping project, using a Raspberry Pico micocontroller device and a number of toggle switches and potentiometers. We hope you enjoy exploring the sonorities and please feel free to tag us if you share any experiments online!