How did electronic music become an unremarkable, commonplace, part of our sound world? For any 1950s proponent of the experiments of Karlheinz Stockhausen or Pierre Schaeffer, this turn of events would seem remarkable, as their heroes grappled with the new tape recorders and laboratory equipment to produce, with great effort, kinds of music that, far from being everyday, often sounded spooky and other-worldly. Louis Niebur's excellent new book can provide part of the answer, at least for the British context, because it shows how electronic sounds became institutionalized within the sonic palette of BBC radio and television by means of the Corporation's ‘special sound’ department, the Radiophonic Workshop.

The book is the first scholarly book-length treatment of the subject, and largely supersedes the twenty-fifth anniversary celebration volume co-authored by Desmond Briscoe, the Workshop's director. Niebur, a musicologist, has produced an account that can comfortably sit alongside an STS-based work on electronic music, such as Trevor Pinch and Frank Trocco's book on Robert Moog's synthesizers, Analogue Days (2004). He draws on specially undertaken and published interviews with key participants, as well as a treasure trove of written material from the BBC Written Archives Centre, and original programmes.

Originating in his doctoral thesis, the book has the virtues, but lacks the drawbacks, of a dissertation as it complements a highly readable narrative arc – from the Workshop's prehistory, via its 1958 opening, to its closure in 1998 – with flashes of compelling micro-analysis of specific compositions. For example, in the book's final chapter he shows how Paddy Kingsland deployed a ‘Master theme’ and a ‘Watcher theme’ in Logopolis, Tom Baker's last series as Doctor Who. Doctor Who could be an almighty mantrap for any scholar of this field seeking to produce a rounded account of their subject. It is to Niebur's credit that he does not succumb to this, treating Delia Derbyshire's original realization of Ron Grainer's melody only in relation to the Workshop's broader history, and devoting as much attention to Derbyshire's unsuccessful rescoring in 1973 and Peter Howell's more successful 1980 attempt. Otherwise, the long running sci-fi series features at an appropriate concentration in the texture of the overall account.

The opening chapter was, for this reader, particularly fascinating. Niebur relates how two enthusiastic junior staff members at the BBC, Daphne Oram from Music, and Desmond Briscoe from Drama, pressed their employers to establish a studio for ‘special sound’, a territory incorporating both sound effects and music. They were impressed by what was being achieved by Schaeffer in musique concrête and by Stockhausen with electronic sounds and wished to bring these sonic resources to British radio. Much of the output in the early years was broadcast on the Third Programme; this was an in-between form sharing some of the quality of sound treatments and music – ‘radiophonics’ – that converted radio plays into sound artworks. Early examples included Samuel Beckett's All that Fall (1957). Niebur is very good when extending Michel Chion's ideas of acousmatic sound (where, in films, a sound is not connected to a visible source) to the meanings that listeners could be expected to attach to new sounds in radio broadcasts. In the early years, the sound palette tended to stress the other-worldly and eerie, except where it was extended to comic sound effects for The Goons.

Limited by the range of available equipment, producers at the Workshop in the 1960s became virtuoso manipulators of tiny pieces of audio tape, recording natural sounds and test oscillators, looping them and playing back at different pitches to create a wide range of signature tunes and incidental music. Throughout the book, Niebur shows the relationship between technology, funding, administrative arrangements and the music produced by the Workshop. For example, in a chapter on ‘The coming of the synthesizers’, he shows the changes that began with the purchase of the Electronic Music Studios VCS3, their first synthesizer, in 1970. The move away from the ‘make-do-and-mend’ world of tape splicing to the use of commercially available musical instruments was part of the Workshop's transition into a workaday ‘music factory’ serving the television and radio production departments, and a transition to less ‘spooky’ and more tonal musical forms than in the early years. Local issues of management are well conveyed, for example by his discussion of the 1977 return of Brian Hodgson, an early alumnus, to serve as the studio's ‘organiser’, for the first time securing adequate funding for equipment. The larger BBC context is exemplified by his discussion of the Workshop's failure to thrive under the ‘producer choice’ policy introduced by John Birt, under which programme makers could turn to the services of the many outside electronic musicians who, Niebur argues, had benefitted from the normalization of electronic music for which the studio was in some measure responsible.

An accompanying website gives access to fifteen audio and eighteen video clips. The interface works well, and the examples are instructive. Presumably it was impractical to include a wider range of examples, but any interested reader can supplement this small selection with readily available CD compilations and DVDs.

This book will now become the first, and highly valuable, recourse for understanding how this British institution sustained itself in the delivery of ‘special sound’ into British homes for forty years. It cannot be the last word on many of the details. It remains, for example, to grasp in detail how viewers and listeners actually responded to what must at first have seemed very alien sound textures, as this is predominantly a production, rather than a reception, history. This does not detract from Niebur's achievement, but shows how he has opened up the subject to still further academic study.