The Sound Collage That Opened Dark Side of the Moon: 'Speak to Me'

“Speak to Me” isn’t a song in any traditional sense — it’s a mosaic of tape loops, reversed sounds, and spoken-word fragments that introduces Dark Side of the Moon without a single chord progression. Nick Mason got the writing credit because he assembled the piece from bits of later tracks (the opening cash register from “Money,” the helicopter from “On the Run,” the organ from “The Great Gig in the Sky”), but the iconic heartbeat that starts and ends the album was Roger Waters’ idea. He wanted something that felt like a pulse — a literal life rhythm — to bookend the record.

The spoken words come from interviews Waters conducted with tour crew and random people in the studio. He asked questions about madness, violence, and death