Tristram Cary was a versatile and prolific composer of music in a variety of genres who reached a wide audience through his inventive, electronic scores for early episodes of Doctor Who, many featuring the Doctor’s most iconic and deadly adversaries, the Daleks. Although the incidental music was collectively credited to the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, it was in fact Cary who scored the first Dalek episode, The Dead Planet, in 1963, and his eerie sinusoidal inventions perfectly captured not only the bleak landscape of the eponymous Skaro, but also helped to imprint the deadly menace of its most famous residents on to the national psyche.

During the Doctor’s incarnations as William Hartnell and Patrick Troughton, Cary proceeded to enhance several stories, including two further dalek series: an ambitious 12-parter, The Daleks’ Masterplan, in 1965, and the more modest The Power of the Daleks in 1967. Many episodes were destroyed in an ensuing BBC cull of archive tapes, but the surviving material has recently been restored and issued on DVD and the entire soundtracks for both series are available on CD.

Cary was as skilful in marshalling conventional instrumental forces to dramatic ends as in creating them electronically from scratch, and the fully orchestrated, high-modernist gothica with which he enriched two films of the Hammer Horror canon, Quatermass and the Pit in 1967 and Blood from the Mummy’s Tomb in 1971, are as notable as much for their restraint as for their composer’s characteristically sensitive ear for novel textures and the brief but telling gesture.

These qualities were evident too in the concert works he wrote from the 1960s onwards, often featuring tape either on its own or alongside live instruments. Among those he considered to be the most important were Continuum for tape (1969), Peccata Mundi for chorus, orchestra and

tape (1972), Contours and Densities at First Hill for orchestra (1976), The Songs Inside for wind quintet (1977), Nonet (1979), Trellises (1984), I Am Here a theatrical monologue for soprano and tape (1980), and Sevens for computerised piano and strings (1991).

Tristram Cary was born into something of a bohemian family. His father was the eminent novelist Joyce Cary and his mother, Gertrude, a gifted pianist and cellist. Cary’s education, which included piano and oboe lessons, was facilitated by a scholarship to Westminster School and a classics exhibition to Oxford, but was interrupted by wartime service as a radar specialist in the Royal Navy. The academic hiatus proved a blessing in disguise, however, for it gave him the basic grounding in physics which was crucial to his emergence as the godfather of British electronic music.

On his return to Oxford the family’s plans for him to become a doctor were soon abandoned and having acquired his BA he enrolled at Trinity College of Music, where he studied composition, piano, horn, viola and conducting. After graduating he was involved in a multiplicity of activities, including teaching and a stint in a gramophone shop, as well as composing and developing the still fledgeling art of electronic music.

A professional breakthrough came in 1955 when, at short notice, he supplied the music for the Ealing comedy classic The Ladykillers, which featured Alec Guinness. Three years later Cary began a score for another Guinness showcase, an adaptation of his father’s novel The Horse’s Mouth. In the event, he was replaced after only a day by Kenneth V. Jones.

By this time Cary had already begun to assemble his own studio in the living room of the family home. It included a disc lathe, a primitive tape recorder, oscillators and mixing equipment and was known in the family as “the machine”.

One of the longest established private studios in the world, it led a peripatetic existence, beginning in Marylebone, moving to Earls Court, Chelsea, Fressingfield and, with Cary’s permanent relocation to Australia in 1974, ended up at the University of Adelaide.

The 1960s were a particularly creative time for Cary. In addition to his BBC work, he began programming regular electronic music concerts, founded the electronic music studio at the Royal College of Music, provided the soundscapes for the British Pavilion of Expo 67 and, with Peter Zinovieff and David Cockerel, designed and marketed the Voltage Controlled Studio Mark 3, known as the VCS3, one of the most successful synthesizers to be produced and a serious rival to the more familiar Moog. It was used by Roxy Music, Brian Eno and on Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon.

In Australia Cary worked first at Melbourne University on the giant Synthi 100 EMS synthesizer before settling for a decade at the University of Adelaide, where he served as Dean of Music. He retired in 1986 to concentrate on freelance projects and a book, The Illustrated Compendium of Musical Technology, published by Faber & Faber in 1992.

He married Dorse Jukes in 1951, and they were divorced in 1980. He married Jane Delin in 2003 and she survives him, with two sons and a daughter from his first marriage.

Tristram Cary, composer, was born on May 14, 1925. He died on April 23, 2008, aged 82