Delia Derbyshire pioneered electronic music

Electronic music pioneer Delia Derbyshire, perhaps best known for creating the haunting theme music for Doctor Who based on Ron Grainer’s original composition, would’ve been 80 today, she died in July 2001. Derbyshire’s work at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop laid the foundations for modern experimental recording and sound manipulation techniques, she sampled and re-sampled with tape, used delays, sequencing, loops, minimalism, the lot.

Quite extraordinary experimentalist and technologist, a trailblazer who even managed to turn the Greenwich pips into a piece of music, long before highly repetitive musical figures and sequences had been employed by Pink Floyd, Mike Oldfield, Steve Hillage, and later the hiphop generation.