Delia had qualifications in mathematics and music, quite unusual!

@@lundsweden Unusual maybe, but fundamental, as music uses a lot of calculations! Time, duration, frequency, amplitude, fractions and all sorts I could not begin to mention because I was always useless at maths. think of what it takes to calculate how long a segment of tape in a loop needed to be to create those amazing rhythms and for those loops to stay synchronised. Maths could be made fun by introducing music into lessons! This to my mind is why music is important in a child's education, and should be encouraged more, to see broader applications and broaden the mind to possibilities.

Couldn't agree more

@@LucyOLastic Yes indeed, in fact Music is Mathematics !

Check out Raymond Scott' for some earlier electronic music.

Shes using pre-existing equipment set up nearly a decade prior.

@@jamesdanton9033 but it's being used in a way that was very different than how most people would.

@@TransistorBased I don't disagree...but that's all musical instruments. Jimi Hendrix didn't have the same sound as Eric Clapton or John Carpenter but they all use guitars and in some cases even the same guitars.

Reminds me how the inventor of the first computer programmer was a woman- Ada Lovelace in the 1840’s.

​@@sonofhibbs4425ADA Lovelace was hired to translate some documents and then went off and did her own thing and wrote a program for a computer that never existed and was never tested. It should have been a stark warning for what programmers would get up to.

He saw the future

@@liannettmendez6393he?

Most modern music styles were invented way earlier than people commonly think. For instance, Terry Riley was doing post-rock in the mid-60s.

And the composers for Forbidden Planet's 'electronic tonalities'.

I guess most of the people who are into that are of the generation that remember 80's a lot more. That's why often artists from that era are far more recognizable. It's a shame she isn't known more honestly, but I think it's good this video is uploaded here and at the very least some people know of her and by this video staying up more and more people will learn.

She wasn't black

Because everyone, regardless of stature in their field, will be forgotten.

Same reason most people, men or women are not plastered everywhere

Because she didn't compose it?

​@@tachikomakusanagi3744 Because, she was a woman

​@@tachikomakusanagi3744 Ron Grainer, when he heard Delia Derbyshire's arrangement of his theme, was so blown away that he fought (and lost) a battle with the BBC to get Delia a co-writer credit. The BBC refused on the grounds that they wanted the members of the Radiophonic Workshop to be anonymous.

@@SamuelBlack84 If you want to give her credit today, all you have to do is identify her as a trans lesbian woman of color and she will get all the recognition she never wanted.

​@@andrewmclaughlin2701you appear to have written something similar to this under several comments. This is what we call an unhealthy obsession. Get some help pal.

Another part of the shameful story of how computers were often seen as a women's field until they became the quick path to fame and fortune instead of seeming like routine work, at which point the boys' club took over forever (so far).

If you create something as an employee of a company, the IP belongs to the company not you. The most you can expect is to be named in the credits, which wasn't common practice for engineers back in the 1960s. Working on computers wasn't considered creative work then, it was considered engineering.

@@Dr.Quarex I would disagree. Computing is a female-dominated industry when it comes to computer work, hence why at my school only the girls were allowed to do computing and boys could only do engineering etc.

If Ms. Derbyshire is to be recognized today, it will have to be as a trans woman of color just to be fair and inclusive.

@@andrewmclaughlin2701 uh why can't we just recognise her as she is?

Huh?​@@andrewmclaughlin2701

@@dannawaldman3175 Consider that she was part of a team, the description even says she worked alongside Dick Mills to engineer sounds to "realised Ron Grainer's famous Doctor Who Theme". So the song was produced/composed by Ron Grainer and engineered by Delia Derbyshire and Dick Mills. The problem lies in the rewriting of history to put on a pedestal any female involvement, instead of giving credit for each persons part. The same thing happened in 2019, with Katie Bouman being given credit on many news sites, for the first picture of a black hole, but many became aware of a github page which the developers used to coordinate the team project, and her role becomes more obvious as the sideshow to some of the others on the project.

​@@user-tz9wk2rj2d Dear "Dredd" Dredd? No disrespect intended, this makes me giggle. Were all the other scary names taken? But, I digress. "The problem lies in the rewriting of history to put on a pedestal any female...etc." FYI, it's 2024, not 1924. This is the status quo, every day, garden variety answer to any points that highlight the crushing ubiquity of dogmatic and misogynist socio-cultural and historical bias against women's achievements and contributions in fields where male-only participation, dominance, and expertise are assumed to be the rule. So, yes, let's put Delia Derbyshire on a Pedestal! To be clear, while it is true that the tune for the theme for Doctor Who was written by Ron Grainer, it is the only one of his works that was realised by another person, in this case being Delia Derbyshire. This situation is unique. It was her brilliance that created the sound associated with Doctor who for the next seventeen years. Her original arrangement served as the Doctor Who main theme from 1963 to 1980. The theme was reworked over the years, to her horror, because the only version that had her approval was the original. But being the creator of art doesn't also give any control over its use if you are an anonymous "female employee" of the BBC, and your name is not Ron. There are sources stating that Grainer attempted to credit her as co-composer, but was prevented by the BBC bureaucracy because they preferred that members of the workshop remain anonymous. She was not credited on-screen for her work until Doctor Who's 50th anniversary special, The Day of the Doctor. This is history, and I would say worth, if not putting on a pedestal, than surely mentioning at least once in half a century. As tedious as it is for me to say one more time, I will put on my Historian's hat to repeat that when only a few voices are used to speak for human historical documentation, those are the only voices acknowledged, whether it's who won the second world war, the history of weaving and ale making, or the discovery of the helical shape of DNA. BTW that was Rosalind Franklin. There is an old "joke" still circulating in x-ray crystallographic circles that the only things discovered by Nobel "winners" Crick and Watson were Rosalind Franklin's notes. But again, I digress. There are few historians who can successfully argue that History has not been and still isn't written by the editors, the bible being a good case in point, with an honourable mention to holocaust denier David Irving, not that it puts any crimp in their efforts to do so. When those editors derive from the same social, political, economic, racial/national, and gender origins and and are powerful enough to use their assumed authority and expertise to enforce limitations on disseminated knowledge we end up being told to believe, under threat of death if necessary, that the world is flat, "Iike your head"; Bugs Bunny, one of my most cherished cultural icons and truth speakers. The time for reacting to the increasing uncovering of the weight of historical bias proof by putting fingers in ears and yelling, "NONONONONO" is past, gone, and collecting dust in boxes of old university term papers, regardless of where it is applied. Is it putting Hedy Lamarr on a pedestal to identify her as the genius behind frequency hopping circuitry first used on WW2 torpedoes and later for mobile phone technology? Is it putting Grace Hopper on a pedestal for crediting her for creating the world’s first compiler in 1952, enabling programmers to enter code for the first time in words rather than numbers. How about Gladys West, a Black mathematician who worked for NASA as a "human computer", and who calculated the exact shape of the earth, creating the geodetic model that became the basis of our Global Positioning System (GPS) in use today? Then there is Lise Meitner, born in 1878, who was initially overlooked for her contribution to the discovery of nuclear fission, and whose theory it was that actually explained the process. BTW, Her male colleague, Otto Hahn, received the Nobel for the discovery he made with Meitner and her nephew, Otto Frisch. In the arts, there is Alice Ida Antoinette Guy-Blaché, a French pioneer film director who was one of the first filmmakers to make a narrative fiction film, as well as the first woman to direct a film. American film director and actress Helen Gardner was the first film actor to found a production company. Like Derbyshire, Wendy Carlos (b. 1939) is an early modular synthesizer pioneer and electronic music composer. She helped Robert Moog develop his namesake synths. Daphne Blake Oram, a British composer and electronic musician, was one of the first British composers to produce electronic sound, and was an early practitioner of musique concrète in the UK. As a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, she was central to the development of British electronic music. If we have to live in a world where only those on pedestals are recognised and celebrated for their achievements, it's far past time that we started putting more of the right people on them. And now, I vote for avocados and mayo all around.

Like when I realised that ‘The Beatles’ is a pun.

@@AtheistOrphan The clue was in the spelling!

@@johnp515 - Exactly!🤔

Apparently the organ sounds on 'for the benefit of mr kite' were a tape recording cut into pieces, thrown up in the air to mix them up and rejoined by a splicing block (as in the clip). Then played on a reel to reel tape machine.

Look up "Musique Concrete"

..and far better than anything you will ever have your computer come up with.

@@spaggtrait1608 No.

For future readers, no just means he has no idea what he’s talking about and casually commenting based on 0 experience

@@hulksmash8159 you're very, very wrong.

@@hulksmash8159 do you need to be a cunt about it?

I just love the Dr Who theme! I get that feeling down my spine that tells me something exciting is going to happen! p.s. I am nearly 81, and it just grabbed me when I first heard it, and has gone on doing that ever since!

So 60's hahaha

And she can get the exact timing from pressing the play button at the right time, which would need the tape being ready with the sound at the play head.

PHILIPS broadcast-quality tape-recorders!! Combined with this lady's remarkable creative talents, of course!

So much so you can hear the camera.

That actually reminds me of being at infants school and my earliest memories of music lessons where we were taught to tap the time or the rhythm along with the music we were hearing. I guess old habits die hard as I still do it to this day.

@@SpeccyMan though probably not with weird time signatures like that :) I'd definitely have to tap it out to keep track

With that gorgeous bloody accent!!! Absolutely!

That upper class accent just isn’t heard today. Punctuate instead of ‘punc-chwate that we hear today.

She wasn't upper class ... She came from a middle class working family & lived in a basic terraced house in Northampton .

​@@andersdottir1111upper? Tf.

Unfortunately, that programme was made by an independent production company, so we wouldn't have the rights to post it. But that's not to say it won't come back on the BBC iPlayer at some point. In the meantime, you might enjoy this: www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m000w6tr/arena-delia-derbyshire-the-myths-and-the-legendary-tapes which is still on the BBC iPlayer for a couple of months.

@@BBCArchive Thank you!

I've never seen a DJ being able to clap to 11/8 meter, let alone layer another polymetric rhythmic figure on top of it and correct it in real time.. She's a musician before anything else and freakishly talented i might add

Mmm! My all-time favourite Doctor!

Also Ron Grainer who is listed as the composer of the title theme in the credits.

Sampling wasn't actually "decades ahead of its time" -- you just didn't know it was an old technique. People have been doing it for a long time: the musique concrète movement was sampling in the 1940s.

@beef business Not entirely; 30 IPS _was_ used for the best broadcast-quality and studio recordings at times (I think the original steel strip machine might have been even faster, but that's an earlier generation); binary divisions were done, so you got 15, 7½, 3¾, 1 7/8 (what cassettes ran at), even 15/16 (not unknown on little "portable" machines that has 3" reels or smaller, but never considered hifi); in the days when reel-to-reel was the bees' knees for home hifi, I think a serious enthusiast would use 7½ IPS. (Not much higher for practical reasons of length: a lot of even high-end domestic machines only took 7" reels.) I don't think Delia and co. were using 30 IPS - if you really want to work it out, you can time some of the machines shown in the clip! (As she says, ¼" tape was the norm [cassettes used half that], so you can roughly scale things from that; you don't need to be that accurate, as they'd have been using one of the standard speeds - I suspect 15 or 7½.)

What a clever line! Added to my quotes file (with attribution to you).

The Late Great Delia Derbyshire

My heroin

@@sjacrane My cocaine 🙂

Make sure you search for the Perrey and Kingsley version and not the Beastie Boys album with the same name!

Some people say Walter Carlos was really good on his first album, but I've never heard it.

@@customsongmaker The only other synth player I've heard who approached that level was Rick Wakeman -- though there might well be others I haven't heard; I'm not one who spends ever waking hour searching for and listening to music, never mind specialized sorts of music.

Thehe RCA Vacum tuube synthesizer made in 1955, there was alot of experiments with creating electronic sounds then (most of them not very well known). There were alot of experiments before the sixties, but I would still stay that Delia was a genius.

Don't you forget Kraftwerk! Also the creators of hip hop, electric drums, first to use computer graphics in a music video, and so much more!

I'd forgetten about Maddalena! It struck me at one time that to work there, it helped if your forename and surname had the same number of syllables … 🙂

Yes but what's so impressive about this is that unlike today where everyone uses guide lines by selecting a genre to adhere to, they were working outside of genre. It was eclectic & heterogeneous.

She didn't build the workshop

@@customsongmaker theyre not saying she made the workshop but the world's first house music 😁

@@violetnouveau2064 what do you think they were doing with the workshop before she showed up?

@@customsongmaker Well, maybe in an abstract sense... she _was_ the workshop! 🤣

She could have a career in ASMR nowadays

If she were still around, she would probably be dead.

She didn't pioneer any of the tech, the lab was already there and other people showed her how to use it

There wasn't a documentary-making crew in the workshop at the time 🙂! Even if it hadn't taken the many hours (days?) it would have actually taken, remember that for any documentary to have survived rather than just gone out live, it would have to have been made on film: the BBC didn't have much if any video-recording equipment then (well, I'm not sure when VERA appeared, but that was really just a novelty). And the making of the theme - although a big job - was just part of the everyday work of the Workshop, so wouldn't have been considered something worth filming. (In fact if they broke any rules while doing so, which pioneers often do, they'd probably not want that fact recording!)

..... and Wendy! ;-) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wendy_Carlos

Thanks for the name of the piece she was actually making here.

Well, only some of the channels! Also, look at the _size_ of a graphic equaliser in those days!