Electronic Sound Magazine Issue 72 Retour à l'édition précédente

We’re going in search of Daphne Oram in this month’s Electronic Sound. We’re taking a road trip from the hallowed turf of the BBC Maida Vale studios to the leafy rural environs of Kent, then back again to London to see the Mini-Oramics machine in action.
There’s no doubt about it, Daphne Oram was in possession of a brilliant mind. As a young girl, she envisioned a machine that would enable her to create new music, one she could literally draw sound with. It was an extraordinary idea for a child in the 1930s to have. It’s no wonder she was enraptured when she discovered Francis Bacon’s 1626 novel ‘New Atlantis’. She must have felt she was connecting with a like mind across the ages as she read his description of a utopian world where people beavered away in “sound-houses” to create beautiful and hitherto unimaginable music.

Daphne Oram devoted her life to that very ideal, firstly at the BBC as a junior engineer, where she came up with a 30-minute piece for orchestra and electronics called ‘Still Point’ in 1949. Over the next few years, she became a studio manager and successfully campaigned for the corporation to establish the electronic music studio we all know and love as the BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

But that wasn’t enough for Oram. The sound machine beckoned and she built her own sound-house in a converted oast house in Kent in order to bring it into reality. She proved the concept and her cranky working prototype must have been a wonder to behold back in the early 1960s. If her Oramics technology had made it into schools and universities as she had hoped, believing it would be an invaluable creative and teaching tool, who knows what direction electronic music might have taken.