5 things to know about Daphne Oram, the visionary pioneer in electronic music

Daphne Oram (1925–2003) was one of Britain’s most important early electronic composers. Oram trained first as a pianist and composer and turned down a place at the Royal College of Music to work at the BBC, where late-night tape experiments and hands-on work with microphones and oscillators drew her from conventional composition into pioneering electronic sound.

In 1958 she co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a studio set up to create sound effects and electronic scores for radio and TV. On the wall she pinned a passage from Francis Bacon’s 17th-century utopia New Atlantis about imaginary sound-houses where scientists manipulate echoes, invent new instruments and transmit sound “in strange lines and distances”.

Bacon’s sound houses are often read now as a prophetic sketch of the modern electronic music studio.

The Workshop would famously go on to produce the Doctor Who theme, but Oram’s time there was brief. Less than a year after its opening she left, frustrated by bureaucracy and the institution’s small, utilitarian vision for what electronic sound could be.

Despite her key influence on electronic composition, Oram’s name still isn’t as mainstream as some of the ideas and technologies she helped to normalise.

This December marks her centenary, and her archive is sparking new works, releases and performances, proving her ideas are still alive and still adventurous. Here are five things you should know about this visionary woman.

1. She grew up in a household where séances were the norm

Oram’s parents were involved in the spiritualist movement and hosted séances in the family home. The idea of disembodied sound as a portal to another world was something she grew up with.

It was a household where unseen forces, signals and voices from “elsewhere” were taken seriously.

This backdrop makes Oram’s later fascination with invisible vibrations and electronic sound feel strangely inevitable.

2. She invented her own instrument, Oramics

After leaving the BBC, Oram set up Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition at her home, the delightfully named Tower Folly. Here she began building her own machine: the Oramics system.

Using strips of 35mm film, she drew shapes that controlled pitch, volume, timbre and envelope. These were then translated into sound by photo-electric cells and oscillators.

Oram was not the first to experiment with this kind of “drawn sound” system.

But Oramics was distinctive in its ambition and in the way it centred the composer’s hand, eye and imagination, humanising electronic sound.

The partially restored Oramics machine is now held by the Science Museum in London.

3. She believed electronic sound could help us imagine different futures

In her 1972 book, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, Oram wrote:

Do you think it is the role of music always to reflect the life of the day? I think it is much more than that […] I think it should not only reflect the life of the day but show the possibilities for the future.

This captures the forward looking orientation that characterised much of Oram’s writing.

Oram consistently returned to Bacon’s “soundhouses” as a guiding metaphor for imagining technological and social progress through sound. Her ambitious 1960 manifesto, Atlantis Anew, reinterprets Bacon’s utopian vision to propose an expanded role for sound in society: from rehabilitating criminals and healing the sick to facilitating communication with the non-human world.

4. Still Point imagined live electronic processing decades before DJ culture

In 1948, at just 23, Oram wrote Still Point, a piece for two orchestras, turntables and real-time electronic processing.

Still Point was shelved and effectively lost for years, before it finally premiered at the BBC Proms in 2018.

Still Point is regarded as one of the first works to call for live electronic processing of an acoustic ensemble. It was startlingly ahead of its time in its treatment of sound as something spatial and architectural, not just musical.

Oram scores the piece for two orchestras: one “dry”, shielded with acoustic baffles, and one “wet”, more exposed and resonant. During performance their sound is picked up, routed through turntables, amplified and fed into echo, so the orchestras are effectively reshaped in real time as moving, malleable sonic objects.

It’s incredible to think of the kind of imagination required to conceive of this when DJing as we know it today didn’t coalesce until the late 1960s.

The piece was originally submitted for the inaugural Prix Italia in 1950, but was turned down on the basis that the work could only be judged as a “straight score” and the adjudicators wouldn’t understand the “acoustic variants and pre-recording techniques” it used.

5. She foresaw a more inclusive future, and it’s arriving via her own archive

In 1994, Oram published an essay titled Looking Back … To See Ahead, in which she reflects on women’s roles in music.

She’s direct about how women were sidelined in studios and institutions, but surprisingly upbeat. She suggests the rise of personal computers and home recording could allow women to bypass gatekeepers and work independently of exclusionary, male-dominated studio cultures.

That prediction is now playing out. The Oram Awards were set up in 2017 to support women and gender-diverse artists working in sound. For her centenary, they’ve partnered with nonclassical and the Daphne Oram Trust on vari/ations, Ode to Oram, a compilation where contemporary electronic artists create new work from samples of Oram’s tapes.

It’s hard to imagine a better way to honour someone who thought so deeply about sound, futurity and access: a new generation using her archive not as a museum piece, but as raw material for the worlds they want to hear next.