Daphne Oram

Career Work at the BBC In 1942, Oram was offered a place at the Royal College of Music, but instead took up a position as a Junior Studio Engineer and "music balancer" at the BBC. One of her job responsibilities was "shadowing" live concerts with a pre-recorded version so the broadcast would go on if interrupted by "enemy action". Other job duties included creating sound effects for radio shows and mixing broadcast levels. During this period she became aware of developments in electronic sound and began experimenting with tape recorders, often staying after hours to work late into the night. She recorded sounds on to tape, and then cut, spliced and looped, slowed them down, sped up, and played them backwards. Rejected by the BBC and never performed during Oram's lifetime, Still Point remained unheard for 70 years; on 24 June 2016 composer Shiva Feshareki and the London Contemporary Orchestra performed it for the first time. Following the discovery of the finalised score, the premiere of the revised version of Still Point was performed at the BBC Proms in London on 23 July 2018 by Feshareki and James Bulley with the LCO.

In the 1950s, Oram was promoted to a music studio manager at the BBC. Following a trip to the RTF studios in Paris, she began to campaign for the BBC to provide electronic music facilities, utilizing electronic music and musique concrète techniques, for use in its programming. After hearing some of the work produced by her contemporaries, and unhappy with the BBC's continued refusal to push electronic composition into the foreground of their activities, she decided to resign from the Radiophonic Workshop less than one year after it had opened, hoping to develop her techniques further on her own. Film Oram provided the prominent electronic sounds for the soundtrack of Dr. No (1962) from her six-minute work Atoms in Space, but she was not credited in the film. These sounds were also used in the following two James Bond films. Oram also manipulated Johnny Hawksworth's soundtrack for Snow (1963), a short documentary by Geoffrey Jones; after the success of Snow, she worked with Jones again on Rail (1967).

Oramics

Immediately after leaving the BBC in 1959, Oram established the Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition in Tower Folly, a converted oast house at Fairseat, Kent, near Wrotham. is a graphical sound technique that involves drawing directly onto 35mm film. Shapes and designs for various parameters of sound etched into the film strips are read by photo-electric cells and transformed into sounds. According to Oram, "Every nuance, every subtlety of phrasing, every tone gradation or pitch inflection must be possible just by a change in the written form."

In February 1962, Oram was awarded a grant of £3,550 from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation to support the development of the Oramics system; a second Gulbenkian grant of £1,000 was awarded in 1965. Oram's first composition using the Oramics machine, entitled "Contrasts Essonic", was recorded in 1963. As the Oramics project evolved, Oram's focus turned to the subtle nuances and interactions between sonic parameters, and she applied her research to the nonlinear behavior of the human ear and to perception of the brain's apprehension of the world. She used Oramics to study vibrational phenomena, divided into "commercial Oramics" and "mystical Oramics", and the Oramics machine became used more for research than composition. In her notes, Oram defined Oramics as "the study of sound and its relationship to life." She wished to continue her "mystical Oramics" research, but a lack of funding prevented this project from being fully realized. In the book, Oram characterised her one of her musical machines as a control system that computed the resulting feedback, reflecting the influence of cybernetics, although Oram's commitment to the composer's authorial control set her at odds with the canon of self-generating computer music.

In the late 1970s, Oram began a second book, which survives in manuscript, titled The Sound of the Past – A Resonating Speculation. In this manuscript, she speculates on archaeological acoustics, and presents a theory suggesting that Neolithic chambered cairns and ancient sites such as Stonehenge and the Great Pyramid of Giza were used as acoustic resonators. She said that her research suggested that the people of these eras may have possessed acute knowledge about the properties of sound in long-distance communication. The launch of the archive was celebrated with a symposium and a series of concerts at the Southbank Centre. This included a concert of newly reworked versions of material from the collection by People Like Us.

In 2007, a two-CD compilation of her music, entitled Oramics, was released.

In 2008, a BBC Radio 3 documentary on Oram's life was broadcast as part of the Sunday Feature strand, entitled Wee Have Also Sound-Houses.

Legacy Oram's work at the Radiophonic Workshop also helped pave the way for Delia Derbyshire, who arrived at the BBC in 1960 and realised the original Doctor Who theme music from a score composed by Ron Grainer in 1963.

Click tribute

In its first show of 2012, the BBC television technology programme Click featured a piece about Daphne Oram, mainly prompted by the three-part Oramics Machine being on display at the Science Museum, London during a year-long exhibition on the history of electronic music. The programme showed the machine being installed in a large display cabinet, and described how it was no longer possible to play due to its fragile state. However, an interactive, virtual version of the machine has been created, which allows visitors to create their own compositions. The programme showed archive footage of Oram describing the process of what became Oramics, also showing her 'drawing' the music, then playing her machine. The piece described Oram as an 'unsung hero' of electronic music.

Daphne Oram's Wonderful World of Sound Daphne Oram's Wonderful World of Sound is a play that detailed Oram's life and career. It was presented by Blood of the Young and Tron Theatre. The play premiered in Glasgow on 9 May 2017 and toured around Scotland from May 2017 to June 2017. The play was written by Isobel McArthur and directed by Paul Brotherston. It was live-scored by Anneke Kampman, a Scottish electronic sound artist.

The Oram Awards The annual Oram Awards was launched by the PRS Foundation and the New BBC Radiophonic Workshop to celebrate "emerging artists in the fields of music, sound and related technologies in honour of Daphne Oram, and other pioneering women in music and sound."

BBC masterbrand sonic

The 2022 BBC masterbrand sonic, created by Zelig Sound was internally known as "Daphne"

Discography "Electronic Sound Patterns" (1962), single, also included on Listen, Move and Dance Volume 1 from same year with work from Vera Gray Oramics (2007), compilation on Paradigm Discs "Spaceship UK: The Untold Story of the British Space Programme" (2010), promotional 7" split single with Belbury Poly Private Dreams and Public Nightmares (2011), remix album by Andrea Parker and Daz Quayle on Aperture The Oram Tapes: Volume 1 (2011), compilation on Young Americans Sound Houses (2014), remix album by Walls Pop Tryouts (2015), mini album on cassette and download on Was Ist Das?

Publication

Second edition, 2016, Anomie Publishing Third edition, 2020, The Daphne Oram Trust and Anomie Publishing