As the co-founder and first manager of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, Desmond Briscoe was responsible for many of the first artificially produced sounds — music and special effects — on UK radio and TV.

When the BBC set up its electrophonic effects committee in 1956 he and his colleagues began to experiment with the techniques of such composers as Pierre Schaeffer, whose “musique concrète” was made using natural sounds recorded on magnetic tape, cut together and manipulated in a way that resembles modern sampling.

It was a completely new way of working. “Once you’ve got sound on tape it becomes an object”, Briscoe said, “— you can handle it, cut it up, stretch it, play it backwards. You have the means to tailor sound to the length and mood of a programme. You have the beginnings of something exciting.”

He soon became involved with the composition of impressionistic music and effects for The Disagreeable Oyster by Giles Cooper and a Frederick Bradnum poem; and in 1957 he produced what turned out to be a landmark composition: dialogue. music and sound effects for Samuel Beckett’s first radio play, All That Fall.

The Radiophonic Workshop was opened the following year, equipped with the BBC’s first tape recorders, a mixing desk from the Royal Albert Hall, a collection of musical instruments and, among other objects, bottles, brushes, saucepan lids and watering cans. Briscoe was joined by two colleagues, Daphne Oram and the engineer Richard “Dickie” Bird, and for the first few years they worked primarily on radio. Briscoe became the workshop’s manager in 1960.

Demand for its sounds was increasing steadily — reviews of the period make special reference to the “weird” and “fascinating” noises — and by 1967 there were three specially equipped studios. Briscoe looked for an innate creativity in his employees: “throw an idea at them and they should hear a sound in their head to match”. As technology improved, formal music education became less important.

They used recorded sounds, and later electronic sounds (which had been pioneered in Germany by Karlheinz Stockhausen). What Briscoe called a “direct appeal” could be created by using traditional elements — melody, harmony or rhythm. But it was also possible to create unearthly sounds and banish the element of predictability; musique concrète therefore lent itself particularly well to creating an unsettling atmosphere.

The workshop was made famous by the Doctor Who theme tune, created in two weeks in 1963 using oscillator swoops and tape splices by Delia Derbyshire (now something of a cult figure) from a score by Ron Grainger. Among Briscoe’s greatest successes was his music for the science fiction programme Quatermass and the Pit (1958).

Harry Desmond Briscoe was born in Birkenhead in 1925, the son of a telephone engineer. He developed an interest in music in his teens, taking up the drums and conducting a band. At the age of 16 he got a job as a junior programme assistant with the BBC in Manchester.

During the war he served first in the Guards and then in the Education Corps, becoming a music adviser in London; and in 1946 he went to India to work teaching the troops. He returned to London, and the BBC, in 1948. Working in the drama department, he initially controlled the balance of instruments in music and prepared sound effects.

In the 1970s the workshop was contributing to about 250 programmes a year, its commissions including electronic demonstrations for Open University broadcasts, jingles, signature tunes and special effects. It also produced its own programmes, including a rock opera, Rockoco (1979), and several albums.

Briscoe no longer had much time for composition, but managed to make a number of features, including A Wall Walks Slowly (1976), in which he evoked the Cumbrian landscape using the voices of local people and the poet Norman Nicholson, and for which Briscoe won three awards from the Society of Radio Authors.

Briscoe retired in 1983. The workshop was eventually closed in 1998.

Briscoe’s wife, Gwyn, and his daughter predeceased him. He is survived by his son.

Desmond Briscoe, composer, sound engineer and studio manager, was born on June 21, 1925. He died on December 7, 2006, aged 81