Tristram Cary, who died on 24 April, 2008, was a British-Australian composer at the cutting edge of electronic music in the 1940s who went on to a successful career putting music to film and television.

His experience as a radar operator during the Second World War gave him an insight into the world of electronics and he began utilising this emerging technology to create some of the first examples of music for magnetic tape.

He produced the scores for several films, most notably classic Ealing comedy The Ladykillers (1955), and was also responsible for the Daleks' signature music in Doctor Who . But he retained his passion for experimental music and helped develop synthesisers and recording facilities that would be used around the world by some of the most innovative artists of the age.

Tristram Ogilvie Cary was the third child of the Irish author Joyce Cary. He was born in Oxford and it was there he would study, first at Dragon School and later Christ Church College.

His education was interrupted between 1943 and 1946 by the war, but it proved an educational experience in its own right. The electronics training he received from the Royal Navy planted the idea that the bleeps, squeaks and echoes generated by radar systems could be manipulated and - somehow - turned into music.

On returning to Oxford to complete his classical music degree, he set up a home studio and began experimenting with tape loops and circuit boards, exploring the possibility of repetition, distortion and destruction. On the other side of the Atlantic, Louis and Bebe Barron were concurrently working on the same principle. When Mr Cary visited Europe during the course of the next few years he discovered that several other musicians were also delving into the world of electronic composition.

During the 1950s, with a new family to support, he found he needed to take more conventional jobs within the music industry, working in a gramophone shop, teaching evening classes and fulfilling commissions. His break came in the middle of the decade when he was tasked with putting together a score for the classic crime comedy The Ladykillers starring Alec Guinness and Peter Sellers .

His other film credits included Time Without Pity, Town on Trial (both 1957) and two Hammer horror titles. He also put music to several animated films, radio plays and television dramas. He began writing music for Doctor Who in 1963 and is best remembered by sci-fi fans for the Power of the Daleks serial in 1966.

His work composing music to accompany the Daleks - themselves an embodiment of the melding of the natural and technological central to the theory of electronic music - reinvigorated Mr Cary's enthusiasm for the form and the following year he founded the Royal College of Music's first dedicated electronic music studio.

He became a director of Peter Zinovieff's EMS (Electronic Music Studios) Ltd which developed electronic equipment, most notably the EMS VCS 3 synth which was utilised by the likes of Pink Floyd, The Who and Brian Eno. His work with EMS took him to Australia for the first time where he set up a studio at Adelaide University and then began teaching.

His successful career to date provided a comfortable life in his newly adopted home country and he indulged in more ambitious works during the 1980s, including orchestral and chamber pieces, sometimes using tape or the developing CD technology to complement traditional instruments.

As well as taking advantage of modern communication technology to take commissions from around the world well into his 70s, Mr Cary wrote a critical column for The Australian newspaper and lectured internationally. A naturalised citizen of Australia, he was given the Medal of the Order of Australia for services to music in 1991. In 2005 he received the Adelaide Critics Circle 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award.