Daphne Oram
pioneer of electronic music
British composer and inventor Daphne Oram (Born 31 December 1925) was aged 18 and armed with a passion for sound, music and electronics when she started work at the BBC as a sound engineer. With many of her country’s men serving in the second World War, she began her career in radio broadcasting in the early ‘40s. Galvanized by the ongoing developments in audio technology, she devoted much of her free time to exploring new ways to make sounds with electronics. One of the founding figures of the BBC’s Radiophonic Workshop, she was one of the earliest British composers to produce electronic sounds and compose from field recordings – Musique Concrete, the ancestry of today’s electronic music. In 1959 she opened her own Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition dedicated to the drawn sound technique she would spend her life developing.