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.”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
