Daphne Oram: An Particular person Word of Music, Sound and Electronics

Daphne Oram (1925–2003) was one of many central figures within the improvement of British experimental digital music. Having declined a spot on the Royal School of Music to turn out to be a music balancer on the BBC, she went on to turn out to be the cofounder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram left the BBC in 1959 to pursue industrial work in tv, promoting, movie, and theater, to make her personal music for recording and efficiency, and to proceed her private analysis into sound expertise – a ardour she had had since her childhood in rural Wiltshire. Her house, a former oasthouse in Kent, turned an unorthodox studio and workshop during which, totally on a shoestring funds, she developed her pioneering gear, sounds, and concepts. A major a part of her private analysis was the invention of a machine that supplied a brand new type of sound synthesis – the Oramics machine.
Oram’s contribution to digital music is receiving appreciable consideration from new generations of composers, sound engineers, musicians, musicologists, and music lovers all over the world. Following her demise, the Daphne Oram Belief was established to protect and promote her work, life, and legacy, and an archive created within the Particular Collections Library at Goldsmiths, College of London. One of many Belief’s ambitions has been to publish a brand new version of Oram’s one and solely ebook, ‘An Particular person Word of Music, Sound and Electronics’, which was initially printed in 1972. With assist from the Daphne Oram Archive, the Belief has now been capable of understand this ambition.
‘An Particular person Word’ is each curious and noteworthy. When commissioned to jot down a ebook, she was eager to keep away from it changing into a handbook or how-to information, preferring as a substitute to make use of the chance to muse on the topics of music, sound, and electronics, and the relationships between them. At a time when the world was simply beginning to have interaction with digital music and the expertise was nonetheless primarily within the arms of music studios, universities, and companies, her strategy was each revolutionary and galvanizing, encouraging anybody with an curiosity in music to consider the character, capabilities, and potentialities that the brand new sounds may deliver. And her pondering was not restricted to simply the way forward for the orchestra, synthesizer, pc, and residential studio, however ventured, with nice spirit and wit, into different realms of science, expertise, tradition, and thought. ‘An Particular person Word’ is a playful but compelling manifesto for the daybreak of digital music and for our particular person capability to make use of, expertise, and revel in it.
This re-creation of ‘An Particular person Word’ contains a specifically commissioned introduction from the British composer, performer, roboticist, and sound historian Sarah Angliss.