If you are in London don’t miss this exhibit and this concert.

Daphne Oram, pioneering electronic musician and composer extraordinaire, was indeed a force of nature which all of us sound – obsessed gear/ music maniacs can lovingly admire.

Daphne Oram and her Oramics machine. Via obsolete.com

From establishing the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958 with fellow electronic musician and BBC colleague Desmond Briscoe to her brilliant “Oramics” technique, Oram was a woman of many achievements.

Here’s more about Oramics via obsolete.com:

“…The technique of Oramics was developed by Daphne Oram, an electronic composer working at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, in England from 1959 onwards. It consisted of drawing onto a set of ten sprocketed synchronised strips of 35mm film which covered a series of photo-electric cells that in turn generated an electrical charge to control the sound fequency, timbre, amplitude and duration. This technique was similar to the work of Yevgeny Sholpo’s “Variophone” some years earlier in Leningrad and in some ways to the punch-roll system of the RCA Synthesiser. The output from the instrument was only monophonic relying on multitrack tape recording to build up polyphonic textures.

The attraction of this technique was a direct relation of a graphic image to the audio signal and even though the system was monophonic the flexibility of control over the nuances of sound production was unmatched in all but the most sophisticated analogue voltage controlled synthesisers.”

A closer look at the Oramics machine, via obsolete.com.

Are you going to the exhibit? Send us films and clips, please!