Howell's musical career began in the late 1960s working with John Ferdinando in various psychedelic folk bands including Agincourt and Ithaca.
His work on Doctor Who began in 1975 when he provided some accompanying incidental music for Revenge of the Cybermen and special sound for Planet of Evil.
Whereas the original arrangement of the theme (written by Ron Grainer) had been realised by Delia Derbyshire (and, originally, assisted by Dick Mills) using musique concrète techniques, Howell arranged Grainer's theme on analogue synthesisers - primarily using a Yamaha CS-80, an ARP Odyssey Mk3 and a Roland Jupiter-4.
Between 1980 and 1985 Howell also provided incidental music for ten stories of Doctor Who, as well as arranging the theme tune for K-9 and Company, composed by Ian Levine and Fiachra Trench.
Aside from Doctor Who, Howell's Radiophonic Workshop work includes an album of original recordings in 1978 entitled Through A Glass Darkly[3] (credited to Peter Howell & The Radiophonic Workshop) and "Greenwich Chorus", a piece which accompanied an episode of Jonathan Miller's popular The Body in Question which was controversial at the time for its use of the vocoder.