Daphne Oram

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Daphne Oram was born in 1925 in Devizes, Wiltshire, and died in 2003. She was a British composer and electronic musician, one of the first in Britain to make electronic sound. In 1942 she was offered a place at the Royal College of Music, but she chose a job as a studio engineer at the BBC. There she experimented with tape recorders: she cut, spliced and looped sound, and played it slower, faster and backwards. In this way she was one of the first in the United Kingdom to work in musique concrète.

Music and breakthrough

In the 1950s she pressed the BBC to build electronic music facilities. She was a co-founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Her uncredited music for the 1961 film The Innocents was one of the first electronic soundtracks. After leaving the BBC in 1959 she founded the Oramics Studios in Kent. There, with the engineer Graham Wrench, she developed Oramics, a technique in which sound is drawn on 35-millimetre film, which photocells convert into sound. She was the first woman to set up her own electronic music studio independently and to design and build an electronic instrument.

Influence

In 1971 her book An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics appeared. Still Point, a piece for turntables, double orchestra and microphones, was only performed seventy years later. Her archive is held at Goldsmiths in London. Albums such as Pop Tryouts from 2015 show that her work is still being discovered. Oram is regarded as a pioneer of electronic music.

Listening

Discography

Studio albums

• 2014Sound Houses
• 2015Pop Tryouts
• 2025vari/ations - Ode to Oram