‘We’re projecting into the future’: sounds of BBC Radiophonic Workshop made available for public use

Daphne Oram, right, one of the founders of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Photograph: BBC Studios

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.

Now, the Workshop’s considerable archive of equipment is being recreated in new software, allowing anyone to evoke the same array of analogue sound that its pioneering engineers once did.