21 Facts About Daphne Oram

Daphne Blake Oram was a British composer and electronic musician.

Daphne Oram was one of the first British composers to produce electronic sound, and was an early practitioner of musique concrete in the UK.

Daphne Oram's uncredited scoring work on the 1961 film The Innocents helped to pioneer the electronic soundtrack.

Daphne Oram was the first woman to independently direct and set up a personal electronic music studio, and the first woman to design and construct an electronic musical instrument.

Daphne Oram was born to James and Ida Daphne Oram on 31 December 1925 in Devizes, Wiltshire, England.

Daphne Oram's father was the President of the Wiltshire Archeological Society in the 1950s.

In 1942, Daphne 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.

Daphne Oram recorded sounds on to tape, and then cut, spliced and looped, slowed them down, sped up, and played them backwards.

Daphne Oram dedicated time in the 1940s to composing music, including an electroacoustic work entitled Still Point.

Daphne Oram created this piece using a sine wave oscillator, a tape recorder and self-designed filters, thereby producing the first wholly electronic score in BBC history.

In October 1958, Daphne Oram was sent by the BBC to the "Journees Internationales de Musique Experimentale" at Expo 58 in Brussels, where Edgard Varese presented his electroacoustic work Poeme electronique in the Philips Pavilion.

In 1965, Daphne Oram produced the piece Pulse Persephone for the "Treasures of the Commonwealth" exhibition at the Royal Academy of the Arts.

Daphne Oram provided the prominent electronic sounds for the soundtrack of Dr No from her six-minute work Atoms in Space, but she was not credited in the film.

Daphne Oram manipulated Johnny Hawksworth's soundtrack for Snow, a short documentary by Geoffrey Jones; after the success of Snow, she worked with Jones again on Rail.

Daphne Oram produced music for not only radio and television but theatre, short commercial films, sound installations and exhibitions, including electronic sounds for Jack Clayton's horror film The Innocents, concert works such as Four Aspects, and collaborations with composers Thea Musgrave and Ivor Walsworth.

Daphne Oram used Oramics to study vibrational phenomena, divided into "commercial Oramics" and "mystical Oramics", and the Oramics machine became used more for research than composition.

Daphne Oram wished to continue her "mystical Oramics" research, but a lack of funding prevented this project from being fully realized.

Daphne Oram died in Maidstone, Kent on 5 January 2003, aged 77.

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

Daphne Oram furthered music philosophy in her writings, and dedicated time to considering the human element in connection to acoustics.

Daphne Oram's Wonderful World of Sound is a play that detailed Oram's life and career.