The Music and Sound of Doctor Who

The Doctor Who theme is the most famous piece of electronic music most people have heard, and when it was made in 1963 the synthesiser had not been invented. Everything in it was assembled by hand.

Written by one person, made by another

Ron Grainer wrote the theme. What he handed to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop was a page of manuscript with descriptions on it — "wind bubble", "cloud" — rather than an orchestration, because no orchestra was going to play it.

Delia Derbyshire realised it. Each note was produced by a valve test oscillator, recorded to tape, and then cut to the right length with a razor blade and spliced into a loop; the swooping bassline came from a plucked string recorded and manipulated on tape. There was no multitrack recorder, so the layers were built by running several tape machines in sync by hand and re-recording the result. The whole thing took weeks.

Grainer, hearing it, asked whether he had really written that and tried to give Derbyshire half the royalties. The BBC would not allow it: Workshop staff were employees and were not credited on screen.

The Radiophonic Workshop

The Workshop existed from 1958 to 1998 to make sound for BBC programmes, and it operated under a constraint that turned out to be productive — it had almost no budget and had to build most of its equipment. What came out of it shaped British electronic music far beyond television.

The theme has been re-recorded many times since — by Peter Howell in 1980, by Delia Derbyshire's own arrangement in various guises, and orchestrally from 2005 — but the 1963 original is the one people hear in their heads.

The modern series

From 2005 the score moved to a full orchestra, with Murray Gold writing for the National Orchestra of Wales across more than a decade, followed by Segun Akinola and then Gold again. This is conventionally notated music, which is why sheet music for the modern era exists at all where the 1963 theme largely does not.

What you can play

• The theme is published in arrangements for piano, easy piano, guitar and various ensembles. It is in copyright — Grainer died in 1981 — so free versions circulating online are not licensed.
• Murray Gold's themes, particularly I Am the Doctor and the Doctor's various character themes, are published in official piano and instrumental collections.
• The original 1963 realisation cannot meaningfully be printed. It is a tape composition; the score would be a set of instructions for building it.

What our index holds is under Ron Grainer, and film and television music generally sits under soundtracks.