The BBC Radiophonic Workshop was one of the sound effects units of the BBC, created in 1958 to produce incidental sounds and new music for radio and, later, television. The unit is known for its experimental and pioneering work in electronic music and music technology, as well as its popular scores for programmes such as Doctor Who and Quatermass and the Pit during the 1950s and 1960s.
Delia Ann Derbyshire was an English musician and composer of electronic music. She carried out notable work with the BBC Radiophonic Workshop during the 1960s, including her electronic arrangement of the theme music to the British science-fiction television series Doctor Who. She has been referred to as "the unsung heroine of British electronic music", having influenced musicians including Aphex Twin, the Chemical Brothers and Paul Hartnoll of Orbital.
The VCS 3 is a portable analog synthesizer with a flexible modular voice architecture introduced by Electronic Music Studios (EMS) in 1969.
Electronic Music Studios (EMS) is a synthesizer company formed in Putney, London in 1969 by Peter Zinovieff, Tristram Cary and David Cockerell. It is now based in Ladock, Cornwall.
The Doctor Who theme music is a piece of music written by Australian composer Ron Grainer and realised by Delia Derbyshire at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Created in 1963, it was the first electronic music signature tune for television. It is used as the theme for the science fiction programme Doctor Who, and has been adapted and covered many times.
White Noise are an English experimental electronic music band formed in London in 1968, after American-born David Vorhaus, a classical bass player with a background in physics and electronic engineering, attended a lecture by Delia Derbyshire, a sound scientist at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson, then both former members of electronic music project Unit Delta Plus, joined Vorhaus to form the band.
Peter Howell is a musician and composer. He is best known for his work on Doctor Who as a member of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.
Don Harper was an Australian jazz violinist and composer. During his long and diverse career, both in his native Australia and in the UK, he was a regular on radio and TV music shows, and recorded many albums as a solo performer or as leader of a group. He also composed themes for TV shows including World of Sport and Champion House, as well as incidental music for the 1968 Doctor Who story The Invasion.
BBC Radiophonic Music is the first compilation of music released by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. It featured music by three of the Workshop's most prominent composers, John Baker, David Cain, and Delia Derbyshire. The album was originally released by BBC Radio Enterprises in 1968 to coincide with the Workshop's tenth anniversary and later re-released in 1971 on the BBC Records label.
Out of This World is a 1976 British commercial LP release of atmospheric sounds and effects from the library of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. The album was divided into four sections, each representing a different theme: "Outer Space", "Magic and Fantasy", "Suspense and the Supernatural" and "The Elements".
BBC Radiophonic Workshop – 21 is a compilation by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop to celebrate their 21st anniversary in 1979. It was compiled as an overview of their work both old and new, showcasing the changes in the Workshop as they developed from backroom sound effects suppliers for BBC Radio to full-fledged in-house music composers for the whole of the corporation. It demonstrates the move from the musique concrète and tape-manipulation techniques used in the early days, to the synthesiser works of the 1970s. The first side of the album consisted of material from 1958 to 1971, covering their early work creating jingles, sound-effects and some incidental music. This side includes the first material by Workshop founder Desmond Briscoe to be commercially released, as well as sound effects from The Goon Show, Maddalena Fagandini's interval signal that later became "Time Beat", some of Delia Derbyshire's experimental work and the pilot episode version of the Doctor Who theme music. The second side of the record covered the period between 1971 and 1979, including Richard Yeoman-Clark material from popular BBC series Blake's 7 and Peter Howell's vocoder heavy "Greenwich Chorus" theme for The Body in Question. It was reissued on CD by Silva Screen Records on 22 April 2016.
Doctor Who: The Music is a 1983 compilation of music from the BBC Radiophonic Workshop featuring incidental music from the popular science-fiction television series Doctor Who. The album was the first full-length to feature solely music from the programme. The collection was produced by Workshop member and long-time Doctor Who sound-effects creator Dick Mills. It featured the original Delia Derbyshire arrangement of Ron Grainer's theme tune and music by Malcolm Clarke from the 1972 serial "The Sea Devils", which was only the second to have an incidental score provided completely by the Radiophonic Workshop. Most of the music included came from serials from the previous three years to demonstrate the recent composers' works. For the album, each serial's incidental music was reassembled into short "suites" and although most of the music had been recorded in mono it was, for this compilation, remixed into stereo with sound effects added on to some tracks. The album was re-released in 1992 by Silva Screen records as Earthshock - Classic Music From The BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 1, with bonus tracks including "The Worlds of Doctor Who", a track recorded by Mills as a B-side to Dudley Simpson's 1973 "Moonbase 3" single, which featured a mix of music with sound effects from Planet of the Daleks before following with Simpson's "Master's Theme" and finishing with music from the serial The Mind of Evil. Selections from both this compilation and its follow-up, Doctor Who: The Music II, were also re-used on the 1994 Silva Screen compilation The Best of Doctor Who Volume 1: The Five Doctors.
Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 2: New Beginnings 1970–1980 is the second in a series of compilations of BBC Radiophonic Workshop music from Doctor Who. The album collected various incidental music from the 1970s including, for the first time, the complete Malcolm Clarke score for the 1972 serial The Sea Devils, only the second scored completely by the Radiophonic Workshop. The compilation also featured a few of Dudley Simpson's compositions as realised by Brian Hodgson, some Delia Derbyshire music as featured in Inferno, two Peter Howell demos from 1979 and a selection of Dick Mills' sound effects from the era.
Doctor Who at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop Volume 3: The Leisure Hive is the third in a series of compilations showcasing the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's work on the science-fiction programme Doctor Who. The album focused mainly on the Peter Howell synthesiser score for the 1980 serial The Leisure Hive, which received its first full release here. The compilation also collected some Dick Mills sound effects from the story as well as some effects from other 1980 serials Meglos and Full Circle, whose music would be the subject of the fourth volume in the series. The final track was a new remix of the original Delia Derbyshire version of the show's theme tune by series compiler Mark Ayres.
An Electric Storm is the debut album by electronic music group White Noise. The band recorded the first two tracks with the intention of producing a single only but were then persuaded by Chris Blackwell of Island Records to create an entire album. At this point the group had established the Kaleidophon Studio in a flat in Camden Town, London, and spent a year creating the next four tracks. The last track was put together in one day when Island demanded the completion of the album. Although not very successful on its initial release, the album is now considered an important and influential album in the development of electronic music. Chris Carter of Throbbing Gristle has called it "the most groundbreaking yet completely underrated electronic record of the 20th century".
Peter Zinovieff was a British composer, musician and inventor. In the late 1960s, his company, Electronic Music Studios (EMS), made the VCS3, a synthesizer used by many early progressive rock bands such as Pink Floyd and White Noise, and Krautrock groups as well as more pop-orientated artists, including Todd Rundgren and David Bowie. In later life, he worked primarily as a composer of electronic music.
Doctor Who: Devils' Planets – The Music of Tristram Cary is a compilation of music by Tristram Cary for the television series Doctor Who. It features all the musical contributions Cary did for Doctor Who except for his music for Marco Polo and "The Ballad of the Last Chance Saloon" from The Gunfighters which was left off due to space reasons. The ballad eventually saw commercial release on the TV soundtrack release of that serial. Due to the folding of the BBC Music label, this album was available only for a limited period and now fetches high prices on auction sites such as eBay.
Reginald 'John' Lewis was a Canadian-born British electronic music and experimental composer and musician who worked on multiple projects during the 1970s and 1980s.
Forever Alien is the third studio album by British space rock band Spectrum, a project led by Peter Kember under the pseudonym Sonic Boom. It was released in August 1997 by Space Age Records. After the band's preceding EP Songs for Owsley (1996) moved them away from guitar-oriented music and towards electronic music, Forever Alien furthered this approach considerably, as Kember aimed to create a predominately electronic album that sounded organic and analogue in style. The record is dominated by vintage analogue synthesizers, including the EMS VCS 3 and EMS Synthi AKS. Kember had become fascinated by the synths as he felt they presented him with more musical possibilities than guitars.
Inventions for Radio were a series of four radio broadcasts that first aired on BBC's Third Programme in 1964 and 1965. The broadcasts, titled The Dreams, Amor Dei, The After-Life and The Evenings of Certain Lives, were created by Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Barry Bermange. Each of the individual broadcasts consists of a sound collage of electronic music and effects combined with spliced and remixed dialogue from interviews with everyday people. Each "invention" addressed an individual theme—dreams, the nature and existence of God, life after death, and ageing.
