TOMORROW'S SOUNDS

They were the urbane boffins behind the futuristic noises of iconic television shows. Now, as their greatest recordings are released in a public archive, surviving members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop reveal the secrets behind their music mastery

- EXCLUSIVE By Dominic Bliss

THEY called it "The BBC department for making bonkers noises", and when you listen to the weird and wonderful sounds created for radio and TV shows such as Doctor Who, Blue Peter, Tomorrow's World, The Goon Show and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, you realise why. Those responsi-ble were called the BBC Radiophonic Workshop a group of rather esoteric musi-cians first launched in the late 1950s, before losing and gaining various members over the ensuing decades.

By the time they finally disbanded in 1998, they had produced theme tunes, film scores, jingles, background music and sound effects for thousands of different BBC pro-grammes, from sci-fi and drama to docu-mentaries and schools' programmes.

Early synthesisers were their main instru-ments, but they were also groundbreaking in what's known as tape looping (cutting and splicing sections of tape) and their use of everyday objects to create unusual noises. Most famously, they recorded the haunting theme tune for the Doctor Who series, as well as sound effects for Daleks, Cybermen and the Tardis.

Anyone who grew up in the Sixties, Seventies or Eighties will remember their weird and wonderful sounds. The work-shop had a huge influence on future musi-cians, with The Beatles, Pink Floyd, Hans Zimmer and multiple electronic acts such as Brian Eno and Orbital citing them as inspirational.

Now, all their greatest work has been col-lated into a digital archive that can be pur-chased and downloaded from the internet.

"It's an absolute treasure box of incredi-ble sound," says Paul Thomson, from Spitfire Audio, the music technology com-pany that collaborated with the BBC on the archive. "This is the genesis of electronic music right here."