Daphne Oram, pioneer of electronic music and natural user interfaces
London, the year 1942. Daphne Oram, a talented pianist, organist and composer aged 18, rejects a position at the Royal College of Music for a job at the BBC as a junior studio engineer and “music equalizer”.
A few years later she discovered the advances in synthetic sound. In 1946 the BBC had just acquired some tape recorders that were used in a punctual way for opera recordings, and she could not resist experimenting on its own with these new devices: she used to collect all the available tape recorders and dismantled them in a studio, working often in it until late hours. She recorded sounds in the tapes, cutting them and making loops, playing by lowering and increasing the speed of reproduction, playing them backward… Returning all the tape recorders in place when dawn.
Daphne Oram had a clear vision of the creative potential of the machines:
“Just as the camera and the film have exploded the ideas of time and space to tell stories, surely the microphone and the tape could do what same with music“
While experimenting with these new technologies, she is also dedicated to composing music, creating emblematic pieces such as Still Point, the first composition in history that combines classical orchestra with electronic sounds. However, it was never performed live, the BBC itself rejected it and remained hidden for 70 years, until June 24th, 2016, when the Contemporary Orchestra of London played Still Point live for the first time
It did not take long to become a studio director, and in 1958 she and her colleague Desmond Briscoe, convinced the BBC to create the Radiophonic Workshop, one of the first specialized studies in sound effects, atmospheres and background music. Her work here was seminal, laying the foundation of techniques for the creation of electronic music, and collaborating in the creation of emblematic themes such as the Doctor Who TV series.
But Daphne went too fast for the time, in all the senses, her male companions considered her “a very difficult person, willful and obstinate, very bad attributes for a woman”. So 1959 he leaves the BBC to set up his own studio-laboratory in a barn in Kent County, where he develops his own technique to create electronic sounds: Oramics.
Oramics is a completely disruptive device even today, it is like a missing link in electronic music instruments. Daphne had knowledge of optical recording and how it was used for movie projectors, and she wanted to control her system by drawing directly on film strips. The Oramics technique consists of drawing waves in 35mm photographic films, these drawings were read by photoelectric cells that in turn gets an electric charge, controlling the frequency, timbre, amplitude and duration of the sound. The machine was monophonic, could only play one sound at a time, so if you wanted to add variables to the sound, such as tone or echo, you had to use several tapes in parallel.
The flexibility and control over the nuances of sound were unparalleled in the analog synthesizers of the time. In addition, the interface was completely intuitive and natural (NUI), there was a direct relationship between the graphic image and the audio signal, it was enough to play experimenting with the shapes of the waves to create sounds. Daphne came to debug the technique in her head so much that she could visually imagine the sounds she wanted to reproduce.
Unfortunately, Oramics had a very short journey, although it was used in the 60s in several films and plays, its practical use was replaced once the voltage control technology was introduced in the synthesizers, however, it inspired developments later in software.
Daphne Oram also left writings on electronic music and studio techniques, her main work An Individual Note of Music, Sound and electronics, is a very special and rare book, one could say that it is like an electronic manual from a philosophical-mystical perspective.
The idea of a “graphic music” system obsessed Oram throughout her life. Despite his great contributions, she was an anonymous character in life. His legacy and recognition began to come to light after her death in 2003.
Her perspective on electronic music, not as something mechanical and soulless, but as something potentially organic and imperfect (like any other music), is very humanistic and democratic.
Oramics gestural interface allowed anyone to compose their music experimentally and intuitively. Her work, although it could sound naive from a current perspective, invites us to flee from cynicism and pragmatism, encouraging us to create creative and accessible tools.
Bibliography
- Crab S. Oramics’ Daphne Oram. UK, 1959.
- Holzer D. (2010). A brief history of optical synthesis.
- Reza S. (2009). El lado femenino del sonido.
- Wilson G. (2003). Daphne Oram, the unsung pioneer of techno.
- Williams H. (2017). The woman who could ‘draw’ music.
This piece was originally written in Spanish at Guindo’s blog:
“Daphne Oram, pionera de la música electronica y las interfaces naturales”
