‘We're projecting into the future': sounds of BBC Radiophonic Workshop made available for public use

The Guardian

19-02-2025

With its banks of bafflingly complex equipment, and staff members that were among the most progressive musical minds in the UK, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a laboratory of 20th-century sound that produced endless futuristic effects for use in TV and radio – most memorably, the ghostly wail of the Doctor Who theme.
Now, the Workshop's considerable archive of equipment is being recreated in new software, allowing anyone to evoke the same array of analogue sound that its pioneering engineers once did.
The BBC Radiophonic Workshop's archivist Mark Ayres has collaborated with BBC Studios and Spitfire Audio, a company that provides libraries of sampled sound for music producers to work with. Added to their library is a collection of the Workshop's machinery, allowing users to, in effect, control the modular synthesisers, tape machines, vocoders and other equipment that was originally used as far back as the 1950s.
There is also a library of sounds from the original Workshop tapes, plus newly recorded sounds by the – now fairly aged – members of the Workshop.
'I'm the youngest member of the core Radiophonic Workshop – and I'm 64,' said Ayres. 'We're not going to be around for ever. It was really important to leave a creative tool, inspired by our work, for other people to use going forward. I hope we've made an instrument that will inspire future generations.'
'We're not just looking back at what the members were doing way back when,' added Harry Wilson, Spitfire Audio's head of recording. 'We're projecting a strand of their work into the future and saying: if the Workshop was engaged with a similar process now, what would it sound like?'
The Workshop may be best known for the Doctor Who theme, but it also created music and sound effects for other sci-fi shows such as Quatermass and the Pit, Blake's 7 and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Other cornerstone BBC shows such as Blue Peter and Tomorrow's World were also beneficiaries of the Workshop's creativity.
The Workshop was originally created in 1958, tasked with adding an extra dimension to plays and other shows on Radio 3. Co-founders Daphne Oram and Desmond Briscoe were brilliant and high-minded, inspired by musique concrète – the style that asserted that raw, tape-recorded sound could be a kind of music. Before long a highly experimental, even fantastical means of composition was afoot, with lampshades being bashed to produce percussion, and long tape loops being carried along BBC corridors.
'There was freedom to do what you wanted and everyone was determined to do new things with sound,' one composer, Paddy Kingsland, has said. 'It was dusty and pokey, underfunded and peculiar, but I bet there were very few places that wonderful in the world.'
Numerous Workshop staff became acclaimed composers in their own right, particularly the female alumni, including Oram, Delia Derbyshire and Glynis Jones.
The Workshop ran until 1998, though its staff have since combined to form the Radiophonic Workshop, performing the unit's material live. In 2012, the BBC and Arts Council England created a new version of the Workshop to run online, headed up by the musician Matthew Herbert.
During the 1960s, bands such as Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones' Brian Jones popped in to have their minds expanded by the Workshop's experimental spirit, and numerous artists have been influenced by it. The naive yet eerie music the Workshop made for children's programming seemed to seep into the subconscious of a generation of leftfield musicians, from Boards of Canada to Broadcast and the artists on the Ghost Box label.
The Human League and Heaven 17 musician Martyn Ware, who later collaborated with the Workshop's members, has said: 'When we started out with our two basic keyboards bought on hire purchase, the Radiophonic Workshop represented a kind of dreamland, this magical place where any sound could be made.'
Oscar-winning film composer Hans Zimmer is also an admirer. After purchasing the BBC's Maida Vale studios, where the Workshop was based, he has overseen the creation of a new synthesiser called the Radiophonic. Announced in 2024 and created by AJH Synth, it is designed to combine various analogue synths into a 'one-of-a-kind, everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-style super-synth', Zimmer has said.
The newly available software will cost £149, and is available from 19 February, though it will have an introductory price of £119 until 17 March.