Daphne Oram: Portrait of an electronic music pioneer (2008) | Hacker News Reader

Daphne Oram: Portrait of an electronic music pioneer (2008)

theguardian.com

45 pointsflannery8 comments

For those who are interested in those early days of electronic music, the roles Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire played in the BBC Radiophonic Workshop's history, and their respective lasting contributions to electronic music, are fascinating. This is a good starting point.

https://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr08/articles/radiophonic....

> however hard you look into the history of electronic music, there is one name you'll struggle to find – that of Daphne Oram.

Maybe I live in some kind of Oramic-centric bubble, but I'm pretty sure she's better known than most of the other non-rockstar names mentioned. Her name gets 58,000 hits on google, and last time I went to the London Science Museum there were bits of her kit displayed there. She's not a household name, but I think the article's claims of her obscurity are exaggerated.

The Internet gave her cult status, so she's much less obscure now than she was in the 80s and 90s, when the only people who had heard of her were extreme synth nerds.

The Science Museum exhibit would never have happened without that revival in interest.

She's still very obscure though. Most people who use sequencer automation don't have any idea who she was.

Raymond Scott is probably more well known, particularly because of having been sampled by Dilla. Oram and certainly also Delia Derbyshire deserve all their due... I can't imagine how exciting it must have been to be creating these sounds that no one had heard before.

The BBC Radiophonic Workshop is more influential than they're ever given credit for, even now that the story is somewhat well known. And they were at the time too... If you're looking for 'pop' musicians who were influenced by those experiments in early electronics, check An Electric Storm by White Noise (band that featured Delia and Brian from BBC RWS), as well as United States of America's self-titled 1968 record. Both radical and timeless.

I own and love both those records! Both radical, timeless and a bit saucy.

Not so pioneering, but Broadcast did some awesome stuff in a similar vein in the '00s, eg. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Og7m71xuFbA

“My father said that when I was 7 years old I was predicting that one day I would have a marvelous machine that would make any sound I wanted”

http://jumblequeen.tumblr.com/post/68644500028/daphne-oram-a...

https://vimeo.com/21675394

There's a good compilation of her work on Bandcamp:

https://daphneoram.bandcamp.com/releases

And on ubu : http://www.ubu.com/sound/oram.html . Also a lot of Delia Derbyshire's work : http://www.ubu.com/sound/derbyshire.html

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