Daphne Oram: An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics

Daphne Oram helped spark a modern electronic music era through pioneering sound technology and fearless experimentation.

Daphne Oram (1925–2003) was one of the central figures in the development of British experimental electronic music. Having declined a place at the Royal College of Music to become a music balancer at the BBC, she went on to become the cofounder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram left the BBC in 1959 to pursue commercial work in television, advertising, film, and theater, to make her own music for recording and performance, and to continue her personal research into sound technology – a passion she had had since her childhood in rural Wiltshire. Her home, a former oasthouse in Kent, became an unorthodox studio and workshop in which, mostly on a shoestring budget, she developed her pioneering equipment, sounds, and ideas. A significant part of her personal research was the invention of a machine that offered a new form of sound synthesis – the Oramics machine.
Oram’s contribution to electronic music is receiving considerable attention from new generations of composers, sound engineers, musicians, musicologists, and music lovers around the world. Following her death, the Daphne Oram Trust was established to preserve and promote her work, life, and legacy, and an archive created in the Special Collections Library at Goldsmiths, University of London. One of the Trust’s ambitions has been to publish a new edition of Oram’s one and only book, ‘An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics’, which was originally published in 1972. With support from the Daphne Oram Archive, the Trust has now been able to realize this ambition.
‘An Individual Note’ is both curious and remarkable. When commissioned to write a book, she was keen to avoid it becoming a manual or how-to guide, preferring instead to use the opportunity to muse on the subjects of music, sound, and electronics, and the relationships between them. At a time when the world was just starting to engage with electronic music and the technology was still primarily in the hands of music studios, universities, and corporations, her approach was both innovative and inspiring, encouraging anyone with an interest in music to think about the nature, capabilities, and possibilities that the new sounds could bring. And her thinking was not limited to just the future of the orchestra, synthesizer, computer, and home studio, but ventured, with great spirit and wit, into other realms of science, technology, culture, and thought. ‘An Individual Note’ is a playful yet compelling manifesto for the dawn of electronic music and for our individual capacity to use, experience, and enjoy it.
This new edition of ‘An Individual Note’ features a specially commissioned introduction from the British composer, performer, roboticist, and sound historian Sarah Angliss.

Daphne Oram (1925–2003) was a key figure in the development of British experimental electronic music. Having started as a music balancer at the BBC, she later become the co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram left in 1959 to pursue commercial work in television, advertising, film and theater, to make her own music, and continue her research into sound technology. Her home, a former oasthouse in Kent, became an unorthodox studio where she developed pioneering equipment, sounds, and ideas, most famously her Oramics machine – an audio-visual synthesizer offering its own chapter in the history of sound synthesis.

A composer, roboticist, and sound historian, Sarah Angliss is known for her narratively rich electroacoustic music and for her live performance which mixes theremin and ancient instruments with electronics, laptop, and her musical automata. Though her work, Angliss explores the uncanny properties of technology, revealing resonances between European folklore and early notions of electricity and sound. Angliss also creates sound and music for theater, most recently for The Old Vic, Young Vic, and National Theatre (UK). Awarded a Jerwood Opera Writing Fellowship from Aldeburgh Music, she’s currently composing an electroacoustic chamber opera about the life and death of Charles Byrne.

Matt Price is a publisher, editor and writer based in London. His writing has been featured in magazines such as Art Monthly, ArtReview, frieze and Flash Art, and he is a regular contributor to Art Quarterly. He has edited titles for international trade publishers including Rizzoli, Hatje Cantz and Thames & Hudson, and was project editor of Phaidon’s flagship international anthologies of contemporary painting and drawing Vitamin P2 and Vitamin D2.