Who's There?

Anyone of a certain age will have fallen under the sonic spell of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop at one time or another. As eccentrically 'British' as it was radically avantgarde, the Workshop explored initially the borderlands between musique concrète and nascent synthetic sound generation techniques; usually employing all manner of electronic test equipment that would have been normally employed in a purely technical role: oscillators, filters and so on; techniques that have seen a recent rebirth with the likes of Hainbach in Germany.

Latterly, the Workshop embraced the emerging technologies of electronic sound synthesis coming out of the US in the late sixties and seventies; they themselves playing a central role in developing some significant technical strands of the genre itself; the EMS VCS3 and Synthi 100 the most well-known examples of a rather different approach to electronic synthesis. The VCS3 was made particularly prominent by Brian Eno's use of it in the early Roxy Music performances on Top of the Pops in the seventies.

The history and characters involved in the development of the Workshop is rich, fascinating and beyond the scope of a short note like this: the people involved in the project over the relatively short period of its tenure at the Beeb were true innovators. I'll try and write something in more depth about them in a future post, but I'm a bit preoccupied with getting our little cottage business up and running of late.

One key figure I will mention here, as she was the person behind what is for my generation an iconic theme tune; engrained in popular culture: the Doctor Who theme; written by and credited to Ron Grainer, which was realised electronically in the Workshop by Delia Derbyshire. I will write more about her and the other major contributors that created such audio magic in that very singular and quirky back room of the very British institution that at that time, was the BBC.