The Found Sounds and Recording Techniques Behind The Dark Side of the Moon

The most famous bit of field recording on the album didn’t come from a tape machine at all — it was a literal cash register. Engineer Alan Parsons took a brass cash register into the studio, rang it up, then ripped a receipt. The ting was played through a quadrophonic panner so it whirls around your head. That same session gave them the coin-shaking and paper-tearing sounds that open “Money.”

The ticking clocks that start “Time” were recorded in an antique clock shop in London. Parsons and the band visited the shop with a Nagra portable recorder (the same kind used by film sound crews) and captured a variety of mechanical clocks. They then edited the best ticks together, synced them to the song’s tempo, and processed some with echo to make them ring. The alarm bells and chimes that follow were from an old Big Ben clockwork alarm, layered over the Rick Wright organ intro.

For the spoken-word snippets, Pink Floyd used a system of note cards held up in the studio — they’d ask a series of questions about madness and death, and random people in the Abbey Road corridors would read from the cards. The famous “I’ve always been mad” line came from one of these passersby, a woman named Clare Torry, though she wasn’t the speaker of that particular phrase (that was the band’s roadie Roger “The Hat” Manifold). The real voice was captured with a Neumann U67 microphone into a Studer J37 tape machine, then doubled using Artificial Double Tracking (ADT) to give it that strange, floating quality.