One of the most famous among the mostly anonymous group of composers of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop is Delia Derbyshire, most famous for her realization of the Dr Who theme, composed by Ron Grainer. In the 1960's electronic music was mostly done by tape manipulation as the sound sources themselves were mostly either real acoustic sources (as in musique concrete) or simple oscillators that had fairly basic functions.

Sounds were concocted by varying the play direction and speed and copying, cutting and pasting numerous short strips of magnetic tape together into whole compositions. The work was laborious an it often took weeks to produce a few minutes of music.

Alongside BBC, Delia Derbyshire also worked with a group called White Noise, founded by BBC colleagues David Vorhaus and Brian Hodgson, which released their only album as a group in 1969 (Vorhaus is still publishing music under the moniker). The album included two songs with Derbyshire's contributions: Love Without Sound and Firebird. The songs are eerie but catchy adventures into then uncharted territories of music that have later been developed further by numerous contemporary artists such as Broadcast, Stereolab and Múm to name but a few.

In 2010 the songs still sound surprisingly fresh and unique. Unlike most of the early electronic music which, let's face it, mostly sounds like mere sound effects and space noise (yes, I know that the space is, in fact, silent).

You can listen to the White Noise's debut album An Electric Storm in Spotify and find a whole bunch of interesting Delia Derbyshire videos at YouTube.