Near-constant beeps and bloops and other electronic tones harass our 21st-century ears, so the Doctor Who theme might not blow you away. But the Workshop was founded in 1958 -- well before synthesizers were effectively available. Making electronic sounds was possible, but it took lots of time and lots of work. Making them sound good took even more. Tape loops were a Workshop signature years before the Beatles were praised as visionaries for using them on "Tomorrow Never Knows." A loop for today's musician is a repeating snippet of digitally stored sound triggered by a keystroke. For the Workshop's members, it was literally a loop of tape. Some loops circled the Workshop's studio; one stretched down the hallway to the receptionist's desk.

The Doctor Who theme took days of cutting and splicing individual notes. In his book Strange Sounds, Mark Brend notes that without multitrack recorders, the final mix was achieved by putting all the tracks on separate machines. With the tapes cued up exactly, the "play" buttons were deployed with a "one, two, three, go!" It took a few tries. Although the music was written by Ron Grainer, an outside composer hired by the BBC, it was Workshop member Delia Derbyshire who masterminded the otherworldly production. Upon hearing it, a very impressed Grainer barely recognized it as his composition. Due to BBC policies at the time, Grainer -- against his objections -- is still officially credited as the sole writer.

Equally inclined to music and mathematics, Derbyshire grew up during the war in the heavily bombed city of Coventry. "My love for abstract music came from the air raid sirens ... that was electronic music," she once said. That influence is heard most explicitly in her "Music of Spheres" (below).

For those raised on Doctor Who and other BBC programming, the Workshop created a soundscape that made the once harsh and alien sounds of electronic tones not just familiar but beautiful. It's not much of a stretch to assume that the Radiophonic Workshop had a lot to do with why the best synth-pop bands of the 1980s came out of the U.K.

Housed in a former roller skating rink that provided few resources, the Workshop relied on a DIY ingenuity. The members, of varying levels of musical training, scrounged up oscillators from other BBC offices, tuned them to different pitches and connected them to an octave's worth of keys ripped from an old piano. They rigged up their own instruments, such as a wooden plank outfitted with a single string and two pickups. The sounds of silverware being jostled, a metal lampshade struck, or water poured from a cider jug were recorded and then slowed down, sped up or reversed until a jaunty tune emerged. Doing away with traditional instruments, composing was no longer just arranging notes; the Workshop built from scratch the very sounds of those notes. Take, for example, the description embedded below of creating the music for the reading letters portion of Woman's Hour.