One major name in early electronic music was Daphne Oram - she co-founded the seminal BBC Radiophonic Workshop (Doctor Who soundtracks and a lot of film scoring) and developed a system of creating sounds and compositions using drawings. She had designed a music synthesizer where the notes were entered on a strip of translucent film which was run through a scanner and sensors would program the synth to produce the sounds. Her vision for the full machine was thwarted by the technology of the time and it was never fully realized during her lifetime.
From The University of London - Goldsmiths:
Student builds Daphne Oram’s unfinished ‘Mini-Oramics’
A Goldsmiths, University of London researcher has built a music synthesiser and sequencer designed – but never realised - by electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram more than 40 years ago.
PhD student Tom Richards has spent the last three years poring over an unfinished project by Daphne Oram (1925 – 2003), one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music.
Oram was the co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, and is credited with the invention of a new form of ‘drawn sound’ synthesis – Oramics, which was recently the subject of the ‘Oramics to Electronica’ exhibition at the Science Museum.
And the machine in question:
Dr Mick Grierson, director of Goldsmiths’ Daphne Oram Archive, and Tim Boon head of research at the Science Museum, invited Tom Richards to do a practice led PhD on the subject of Oramics. Tom decided to re-imagine and then build Mini-Oramics.
“The rules were simple. I had to imagine I was building the machine in 1973, interpreting Daphne Oram’s plans and using only the technologies that existed at that time.”
Tom is now working with six contemporary composers, giving each of them a few days to play with the Mini-Oramics machine.
One of the composers, London-based sound artist Ain Bailey has recently been working with the MiniOramics synthesiser. “It’s a fantastic instrument. I’m not a formally-trained musician, so it’s been great to work with an instrument where I can create the sounds graphically,” she said.
Very cool! Some more on Daphne Oram
Not really my style of music (more into melodic ambient) but Daphne was a major figure too often overlooked in music today. Nice touch that Tom is inviting other people to use the synthesizer - developing some new fresh voices.
Leave a comment