The broadcasts, titled The Dreams, Amor Dei, The After-Life and The Evenings of Certain Lives, were created by Delia Derbyshire of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and Barry Bermange.
Each of the individual broadcasts consists of a sound collage of electronic music and effects combined with spliced and remixed dialogue from interviews with everyday people.
Despite her role in composing the soundscapes, mixing, and editing the work, Derbyshire's contributions to Inventions for Radio were rarely acknowledged, instead being credited to Bermange and the Radiophonic Workshop.
The first Invention for Radio was described as a "programme of actuality speech and electronic sound" and was tentatively titled Mid-Century Attitudes: Dreaming.
The structure of the programme was envisioned as pairing spoken dialogue with musical phrases, using moments of silence for framing, in a piece that would become "more fragmented and contrapuntal towards the climax".
[2] In addition to mixing and editing dialogue from the interviews, Derbyshire composed the musical interludes and shaped the compositions into a cohesive whole.
[3] The compositions she devised were a juxtaposition of oscillator-generated sounds, creating chords that were both dissonant and disturbing, with an effect described as "unsettling, dreamlike, and mesmerizing.
The Dreams also scored lower on the BBC's appreciation index than previous radio ballads and productions by the Radiophonic Workshop.
The third movement approaches the topic from an atheistic perspective and the fourth starts with sentiments of pity and frustration directed towards non-believers before shifting its focus to prayer.
The radio broadcast met with some unfavourable reviews from listeners, with one person relating that "the accents, the phraseology, the stumblings, the dropped “g” and the disjointed replies were most displeasing."
The programmes were broadcast during a time in British radio history when socio-economic diversity and working-class voices in particular received little on-air representation and were often clichéd.
Many of the complaints about the broadcast centred on the voices and opinions of the interviewees, perhaps owing in part to the elitist attitudes of the Third Programme's audience.