Daphne Oram Biography: Who Was Daphne Oram?
Few people know Daphne Oram but she helped shape the sounds and songs, the ones we listen to today. A pioneer of electronic music, she wrote Still Point in 1949, according to her the first composition in the world to manipulate electronic sounds in real time. In 1957, she founded the famous BBC Radiophonic Workshop. In the same year, she started her Oramics machine, which turned graphic gestures into music: the user could use the sounds sketching they wanted to hear.
Daphne Oram
Her performance has revolutionized the music world. But only in recent years her performance has been celebrated. The composer is still barely a household name. Now she's receiving overdue recognition, including in a new piece, Daphne Oram's Wonderful World of Sound . When the playwrights Isobel McArthur, who also plays Oram, and Paul Brotherston Oram went to investigate, they were blown away. Oram, who died in 2003, has a biography as unexpected as one of her compositions and not just because she worked in the male world of sound engineering.
