What is Electronic Music?: Pioneering Electronic Musician Daphne Oram Explains (1969)

Survey the British public about the most important institution to arise in their country after World War II, and a lot of respondents are going to say the National Health Service. But keep asking around, and you’ll sooner or later encounter a few serious electronic-music enthusiasts who name the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Established in 1958 to provide music and sound effects for the Beeb’s radio productions — not least the documentaries and dramas of the artistically and intellectually ambitious Third Programme — the unit’s work eventually expanded to work on television shows as well. One could scarcely imagine Doctor Who, which debuted in 1963, without the Radiophonic Workshop’s sonic aesthetic.

By the end of the nineteen-sixties, the Radiophonic Workshop had been creating electronic music and injecting it into the lives of ordinary listeners and viewers for more than a decade. Even so, that same public didn’t necessarily possess a clear understanding of what, exactly, electronic music was. Hence this explanatory BBC television clip from 1969, which brings on Radiophonic Workshop head Desmond Briscoe as well as composers John Baker, David Cain, and Daphne Oram (previously featured here on Open Culture).

Having long since built her own studio, Oram also demonstrates her own techniques for creating and manipulating sound, few of which will look familiar to fans of electronic music in our digital culture today.

Even in 1969, none of Oram’s tools were digital in the way we now understand the term. In fact, the working process shown in this clip was so thoroughly analog as to involve painting the forms of sound waves directly onto slides and strips of film. She crafted sounds by hand in this way not purely due to technical limitation, but because extensive experience had shown her that it produced more interesting results: “if one does it by purely electronic means, one tends to get fixed on one vibration, one frequency of vibrato, which becomes dull.” Believing that “music should be a projection of a thought process in the mind of a human being,” Oram expressed reservations about a future in which computers pump out “music by the yard”: a future that, these 55 years later, seems to have arrived.

Related content:

Daphne Oram Created the BBC’s First-Ever Piece of Electronic Music (1957)

Meet Delia Derbyshire, the Dr. Who Composer Who Almost Turned The Beatles’ “Yesterday” Into Early Electronica

Meet Four Women Who Pioneered Electronic Music: Daphne Oram, Laurie Spiegel, Éliane Radigue & Pauline Oliveros

Hear Electronic Ladyland, a Mixtape Featuring 55 Tracks from 35 Pioneering Women in Electronic Music

New Documentary Sisters with Transistors Tells the Story of Electronic Music’s Female Pioneers

Hear Seven Hours of Women Making Electronic Music (1938–2014)

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.