Delia Derbyshire

A few years ago I heard a play on Radio 4 called "Blue Veils and Golden Sands" which dramatised the life and work of Delia Derbyshire, so the recent discovery of some of her lost tapes interested me. Derbyshire was a leader in the field of electronic music who crafted sounds from within cascades of tape loops at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, among other places. She is probably best known for her contribution to the Dr Who theme, despite never being formally credited for it.

A Cambridge educated mathematician, Derbyshire fought to work in recording studios at a time when women just didn't do that sort of thing. There's a resonance in that for me. In all my years skirting the fringes of a radio career, back in my dim and distant youth, I could not escape the fact that audio broadcasting was very much a male business. This probably persists even now and thinking about it in the light of my subsequent postgraduate studies I believe that the intimacy of the medium is the key to explaining it. Radio and music get into your personal space in ways that other media cannot. Television and film are watched from afar on screens. There's a separation between the watcher and the watched. Sounds, by contrast, pour directly into our ears. There seems to be no barrier between the still, small voice broadcasting in the dark and our inner monologue. A particular piece of music is only a synapse away from affecting us on a deep emotional level. Sounds can get right inside your head and with almost alarming speed are capable of providing powerful sensory stimulation. In a patriarchal society, is it any wonder that those in influential positions would want to exclude women from participating in creating noise? It would be almost indecent - women should be seen and not heard.

The concept of Delia Derbyshire as a kind of feminist heroine also ties in with another reason why I admire her - her position as an unconventional genius. She seems to have been able to discover ways of working with sounds, even disparate vocal samples and fragments of noise and music, that others could not. She had, if you like, a unique kind of "audio vision". I love the idea of that singular, eccentric brilliance being barely tolerated by the powers that be at the BBC and yet producing work that was capable of winning widespread acclaim - even popularity. Now I know that talent is no respecter of gender boundaries, but I can't help but wonder if there was something of an element of feminine intuition in the way that Derbyshire was able to create music out of electronic pulses of sound. Was her female brain somehow more receptive to the possibility of harmony amidst the mathematical rules and equations of early computer science? Like Barbara McClintock, who took a fresh approach to Biology by studying the "lives" of individual cells and genes in close detail and thus went against the established male scientists in her field, perhaps Derbyshire brought a new way of seeing , or rather hearing, to the predominantly male radiophonic world that took electronic music in directions that it may not otherwise have taken.

It could be argued, of course, that to emphasise a particularly feminine difference in approach to electronica, broadcasting, mathematics or computers is simply to recycle an argument that men have been using for decades to keep women out of these spheres of creation - it's saying that women are different and thus they are incorrect or wrong. So to celebrate difference on a gender level could be opening oneself up to criticism. It might be better, then, to celebrate simply the "Delia Difference" - the pioneering work and continued influence of Delia Derbyshire that is now receiving a renewed interest as more or her recordings are coming to light.

Delia Derbyshire website