Early life

A gifted young musician, in childhood Oram was already thinking beyond the boundaries of conventional music when she asked to play the notes between the keys of the piano. She was also introduced to radio electronics by her brothers. Together they would transmit music by radio around their home.
In 1942, Oram turned down a place at The Royal College of Music to take up a position as a Junior Studio Engineer and ‘music balancer’ at the BBC. One of her job responsibilities was to shadow live concerts with a pre-recorded version on a turntable so the broadcast would go on if the live show was interrupted by enemy action.

Still Point

By the mid-1940s Oram was already experimenting beyond orchestral sound. She was also dedicating time to compose music, among these the orchestral work Still Point, her visionary piece for double orchestra, live electronics and turntables. Many consider Still Point the first composition that combined acoustic orchestration with live electronic manipulation.

Rejected by the BBC and never performed, Still Point remained unheard for 70 years, until on 24 June 2016 when Shiva Feshareki, James Bulley and the London Contemporary Orchestra performed it for the first time. This was at the Deep Minimalism concert series for the South Bank in St John’s Smith Square, 2016.  Following the discovery of the finalised score, they performed the premiere of the revised version of Still Point at The BBC Proms, London, 23 July 2018.

Tape pieces for the BBC

In the 1950s, she was promoted to become a music studio manager. Following a trip to the RTF studios in Paris, she began to campaign for the BBC to provide electronic music facilities for composing sounds and music, using electronic music and musique concrète techniques, for use in its programming. In 1956 she made a visionary proposal for a dedicated, experimental electronic workshop in her report to BBC managers, 1956. Here she outlined the new sonic possibilities on offer:

During this period she became deeply involved with her own tape machine experiments. Often staying after hours, she was known to work late into the night. She recorded sounds on to tape, and then cut, spliced and looped, slowed them down, sped up, and played them backwards.

In 1957 Oram was commissioned to compose music for the play Amphitryon 38. She created this piece using a sine wave oscillator, a tape recorder and some self-designed filters, thereby producing the first wholly electronic score in BBC history.[5] Along with fellow electronic musician and BBC colleague Desmond Briscoe, she began to receive commissions for many other works, including a significant production of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall (1957).

The Radiophonic Workshop

As demand grew for these electronic sounds, the BBC gave Oram and Briscoe a budget to establish the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in early 1958, where she was the first Studio Manager. The workshop was focused on creating sound effects and theme music for all of the corporation’s output, including the science fiction serial Quatermass and the Pit (1958–59) and “Major Bloodnok’s Stomach” for the radio comedy series The Goon Show.

In October 1958, Oram was sent by the BBC to the “Journées Internationales de Musique Expérimentale” at the Brussels World’s Fair (where Edgard Varèse demonstrated his Poème électronique). After hearing some of the work produced by her contemporaries and being unhappy at the BBC music department’s continued refusal to push electronic composition into the foreground of their activities, she decided to resign from the BBC less than one year after the workshop had opened, hoping to continue more open-ended musical experimentation independently.


Private studio

Having left the BBC, in 1959, Oram was keen to continue more open experimentation with sound. She did so at her home, Tower Folly, a converted oast house at Fairseat, near Wrotham, Kent. There Oram set up her Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition. Highly adept at all forms of tape manipulation – the basis of musique concrète – Oram also considered new means of spatialising sound in performance. She composed new works for radio, film, adverts, exhibitions and the concert stage.

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

Oram provided the prominent electronic sounds for the soundtrack of Dr. No (1962), uncredited. These sounds were used by the James Bond films up until Goldfinger (1964).

Oram also added sounds to the soundtrack of Snow (1963), a short documentary by Geffrey Jones. After the success of Snow, she worked with Jones again and is credited for the Electronic Treatment (of music) of Rail (1967).

The Oramics Machine

A long-term project in her private studio, Oramics is a drawn sound technique that involves drawing directly onto 35mm film stock.

Shapes and designs etched into the film strips are read by photo-electric cells and transformed into sounds. According to Oram, “Every nuance, every subtlety of phrasing, every tone gradation or pitch inflection must be possible just by a change in the written form.”

The Oramics technique and the flexibility of control over the nuances of sound was an altogether new and innovative approach to music production. Financial pressures meant it was necessary to maintain her work as a commercial composer, and her work on the Oramics system covered a wider range than the Radiophonic Workshop. She produced music for not only radio and television but also theatre, short commercial films, sound installations and exhibitions. Other work from this studio included electronic sounds for Jack Clayton’s horror film The Innocents (1961), concert works including Four Aspects (1960), and collaborations with opera composer Thea Musgrave and Ivor Walsworth.
Oramics machine displayed at the Science Museum, London (2011)

In February 1962, she was awarded a grant of £3,550 (equivalent to £76,000 in 2019) from the Gulbenkian Foundation to support the development of the Oramics system. A second Gulbenkian grant of £1,000 was awarded in 1965. The first entirely drawn-sound composition using the machine, entitled “Contrasts Essonic”, was recorded in 1963. As the Oramics research evolved, Oram’s focus turned to the subtle nuances and interactions between sonic parameters. In this phase of Oramics, she applied her sound research to the non-linear behavior of the human ear and to perception of the brain’s apprehension of the world. She used Oramics to study vibrational phenomena, divided into “commercial Oramics” and “mystical Oramics.” In her notes, Oram defined Oramics as “the study of sound and its relationship to life.”

In the 1980s Oram worked on the development of a software version of Oramics for the Acorn Archimedes computer using grant money received from the RVW (Ralph Vaughan Williams) Trust.[3][21] She wished to continue her “Mystical Oramics” research, but a lack of funding prevented this project from being fully realized.
Throughout her career, Oram lectured on electronic music and studio techniques. Her book, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1971), investigates the physics of sound and the emergence of electronic music in a philosophical manner. A new edition was published in December 2016.

Written works

“We will be entering a strange world where composers will be mingling with capacitors, computers will be controlling crotchets and, maybe, memory, music and magnetism will lead us towards metaphysics.”

Daphne Oram, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics (1971)

Oram’s first book ‘An Individual Note’ is a remarkable treatise on music, sound and electronics, and the relationships between them. Far more than a ‘how to’ guide, it ventures into sound and metaphysics and the possibilities that new electronic sound can offer.  At a time when the world was just starting to engage with electronic music and the technology was still primarily in the hands of music studios, universities, and corporations, her approach was both innovative and inspiring, encouraging anyone with an interest in music to think about the nature, capabilities and possibilities that the new sounds could bring.

In the late 1970s, Oram began a second book, which survives in manuscript, titled The Sound of the Past – A Resonating Speculation. In this manuscript she speculates on archaeological acoustics, and presents a theory backed by research that suggests that Neolithic chambered mounds and ancient sites like Stonehenge and The Great Pyramid in Egypt were used as resonators. She said that her research suggested that the ancients may have possessed acute knowledge about the properties of sound in long distance communication.