Gerhard was not only the first important British composer to adopt electronic music techniques; it seems probable that he was, by a few months, the creator of the first British score to involve tape. From 1954 to 1959 his electronic music consisted of nearly a dozen works of incidental music for theatre, radio, and film, initially to provide special effects as an extension of the possibilities of a chamber ensemble—such as piano sounds played backwards (e.g. in the radio play A Leak in the Universe, 1955). By 1958 he had assembled sufficient equipment to make up a very small studio, apparently little more than a couple of tape recorders, at his home in Cambridge. It remained very small until his death in 1970.