‘Echoes‘ is a song by Pink Floyd including lengthy instrumental passages, sound effects, and musical improvisation. Written in 1970 by all four members of the group (credited as Roger Waters, Richard Wright, Nick Mason, David Gilmour on the original release), ‘Echoes’ provides the extended finale to Pink Floyd’s album ‘Meddle.’ The track has a running time of 23:31 and takes up the entire second side of the vinyl recording.
The composition uses many progressive and unconventional musical effects. The ping sound heard at the beginning of the song was created as the result of an experiment at the very beginning of the Meddle sessions. It was produced through amplifying a grand piano and sending the signal through a Leslie rotating speaker. At six minutes in, a funk progression in the tonic minor begins. Gilmour used the slide for certain sound effects on the studio recording.
A throbbing wind-like sound is created by Waters vibrating the strings of his bass guitar with a steel slide and feeding the signal through a Binson Echorec echo machine. The high pitched electronic ‘screams,’ resembling a distorted seagull song, were discovered by Gilmour when the cables were accidentally reversed to his wah pedal. Nick Mason, noted, ‘Sometimes great effects are the results of this kind of pure serendipity, and we were always prepared to see if something might work on a track. The grounding we’d received from Ron Geesin in going beyond the manual had left its mark.’
The ‘choral’ sounding segment in the middle of the song was created by placing two tape recorders in opposite corners of a room; the main chord tapes of the song were then fed into one recorder and played back while at the same time recording. The other recorder was then also set to play what was being recorded; this created a delay between both recordings, heavily influencing the structure of the chords while at the same time giving it a very ‘wet’ and ‘echoey’ feel.
Harmonic ‘whistles’ can be heard produced by Wright pulling certain drawbars in and out on the Hammond organ. Rook bird calls were added to the music from a tape archive recording (as had been done for some of the band’s earlier songs, including ‘Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun’). The second half of the song where Gilmour plays muted notes on the guitar over Wright’s slowly building organ solo was inspired by the Beach Boys song ‘Good Vibrations.’ The song concludes with a rising Shepard tone, which creates the auditory illusion of a tone that continually ascends or descends in pitch, yet which ultimately seems to get no higher or lower.
The piece had its genesis in a collection of musical experiments written separately by each band member, referred to as ‘Nothing, Parts 1–24.’ Subsequent tapes of work in progress were labelled ‘The Son of Nothing’ and ‘The Return of the Son of Nothing’; the latter title was eventually used to introduce the as-yet unreleased work during its first live performances in early 1971. During this stage of its development, the song’s first verse had yet to be finalized. It originally referred to the meeting of two celestial bodies, but perhaps because of Waters’ increasing concerns that Pink Floyd was being pigeon-holed as a space rock band, the lyrics were rewritten to use underwater imagery instead.
Similar to the Dark Side of the Rainbow effect, some listeners suggest that ‘Echoes’ synchronizes with Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ when played concurrently with the final segment (titled ‘Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite’).
‘Echoes’ was released three years after the film’s production and is 23 minutes and 31 seconds in length, quite similar to the ‘Infinite’ segment. Sound effects in the middle section of the song suggest to some listeners the feeling of travelling through, or flying over, an alien world. The drone vocalizations heard in the final scenes of 2001 seem to match with the discordant bass vibrations in the middle of ‘Echoes’ as well as the choral glissandos of its finale.
The members of the band always denied that the synchronization was intentional. Furthermore, the technology to play back film in a recording studio circa 1971 would have been expensive and difficult for the band to acquire. However, the band had experience with creating film soundtracks by that point, having created the soundtrack to the French art house film ‘More’ in 1969. Roger Waters is sometimes quoted as saying that the band’s failure to contribute music to 2001’s official score was his ‘greatest regret.’
The Daily Omnivore 
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