What is electronic music?

Delia Derbyshire and Doctor Who

Dan Tepfer’s player piano is his composing partner

Music tech at the Voxel Lab

The secret history of the vocoder

Satie’s furniture music

Aeon Video has a monthly newsletter!

Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.

A dispatch from the dawn of the electronic music age

This delightfully retro short from 1969 transports viewers to the advent of the synthesiser era. First broadcast as part of the BBC documentary Workshop: The Same Trade As Mozart, the video provides a tour of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which was established in 1958 to produce sound effects for the BBC, and ultimately became a groundbreaking space for experimental sound and electronic music.

In interviews with members of the workshop, including the electronic music innovator Daphne Oram (1925-2003), composers describe both the fundamentals of these early synthesiser technologies and the array of projects for which they are using them. This includes the inventive, hands-on techniques required to create these novel sounds at the time. Watched today, the clip may prompt reflections on the use of AI in music, viewed by some as a new tool that expands creative possibilities, and by others as a distressingly anti-human development.

For more on the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, watch this video on how the Doctor Who theme music was created.

Before the Beatles dropped acid, a BBC workshop was creating far-out sounds

Meet the jazz pianist who improvises in tandem with a piano that plays itself

Electronic gloves and even potted plants make music in a playground for sound innovation

How the vocoder went from military tech to an instrument of the counterculture

Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer

videoAutomation and robotics

Dance dance automation: music from the factory floor

We publish hard-won knowledge from real people who have grappled deeply with their subjects.

We publish hard-won knowledge from real people who have grappled deeply with their subjects.

Your donation, whatever the size, supports our mission to ask the big questions and deliver fresh, original insights from leading thinkers.

If you value what we do, will you support us?

Your donation, whatever the size, supports our mission to ask the big questions and deliver fresh, original insights from leading thinkers.

If you value what we do, will you support us?

I would like to donate:

Select amount (US dollars):

videoComputing and artificial intelligence

A jazzy 1972 history of the computer, from the designers Charles and Ray Eames

A song of ice, fire and jelly – exploring the physics and history of the trumpet

How would a piano sound on Mars? Embark on an interplanetary sonic journey

Sign up to our newsletter

Updates on everything new at Aeon.

© Aeon Media Group Ltd. 2012-2026. Privacy Policy. Terms of Use.

Aeon is published by registered charity Aeon Media Group Ltd in association with Aeon America, a 501(c)(3) charity.

© Aeon