Brian Hodgson

Brian Hodgson
Born	1938 (age 78–79) Liverpool
Occupation	composer

Brian Hodgson (born 1938) is a British television composer and sound technician. Born in Liverpool in 1938, Hodgson joined the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1962 where he became the original sound effects creator for the science fiction programme Doctor Who. His main claims to fame are the sound of the TARDIS (which he created by running the back door key to his mother's house along a bass string of a gutted piano, then electronically treating the recording) and the famous voices of the Daleks, which he created by distorting the actors' voices and feeding them through a device called a ring modulator. He continued to produce effects for the programme until 1972 when he left the Workshop, leaving Dick Mills to produce effects for the remainder of the show's run.

Earlier, in 1966, with fellow workshop musician Delia Derbyshire and EMS founder Peter Zinovieff, he helped set up Unit Delta Plus, an organisation which they intended to use to create and promote electronic music. Based in a studio in Zinovieff's townhouse in Putney, they exhibited their music at a few experimental and electronic music festivals, including The Million Volt Light and Sound Rave at which The Beatles' "Carnival of Light" had its only public playing. After a troubled performance at the Royal College of Art, in 1967, the unit disbanded.

Also in the late sixties, Hodgson and Derbyshire, along with fellow musician David Vorhaus, set up the Kaleidophon studio in Camden Town. The studio produced electronic music for various London theatres and, in 1968, the three used it to produce their first album as the band White Noise. Although later albums were essentially solo Vorhaus albums, the debut, An Electric Storm featured collaborations with Hodgson and Derbyshire and is now considered an important and influential album in the development of electronic music.

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