[Glice]

I could've sworn there was a thread about Daphne previously. But the search function doesn't yield anything. So. I'm starting a new thread. Because I got the Oramics CD, on Paradigm recordings, recently. And it's very good. And exciting. And old. And electronic. It's really rather good. I think you should 'check it out' or whatever you internet people do.

Ok, lots of love.

Bye.

I've uploaded that book for you a while ago, i think.


I've found this on the wfmu blog.

4.) Daphne Oram reworkings

 

In June 2008 People Like Us were invited into the archives of electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram to rework them into new compositions, which were presented at a day-long symposium at London's South Bank Centre. Here are the results. 1. Daphne Speaks (mp3), 2. Daphne Inuit Song (mp3), 3. Daphne Bird in a Teacup (mp3), 4. Daphne Everybody's Calling (mp3), 5. Daphne Reggae Lady (mp3), 6. Daphne Waltz (mp3)


http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2008/0...-releases.html

-The Oram Archive
In 2003, Daphne Oram died. Her life’s work was passed to the care of Hugh Davies, a British composer and musician who knew Daphne and her work better than anyone in the UK. Following Hugh’s death in January 2005, Sonic Arts Network, the leading UK body for electronic music and sound art, was asked by Daphne’s descendants to care for her collected papers, recordings and other items. It was with the benefit of experimental electronic music practice in mind that Goldsmiths Electronic Music Studio (EMS) collaborated with the Sonic Arts Network (SAN) to bring this collection into the academic community where it could be properly studied and developed. To this end, a grant was awarded to Goldsmiths, University of London in 2007 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, to catalogue the collection, digitise the audio tapes and initiate related research.
This collection houses a number of important recordings, including some of her key works such as Pulse Persephone (1965), Bird of Parallax (1972), Rockets in Ursa Major (1962), Broceliande (1969-70), and the soundtrack to the feature film The Innocents (1961). There are also a number of professional showreels (including adverts for ICI and Heinz), and recorded lectures/demonstrations (for research purposes). Additionally, the collection includes Daphne Oram’s research documents detailing her theoretical approaches and studies in electronic music. Also included is early computer software relating to her composition practice, instrument design and synthesis techniques. In total, there are roughly 1000 papers, 200 7” reel-to-reel tapes, some 10” and 12” reel-to-reel masters, and a collection of floppy disks for the Acorn Archimedes and Apple 2 computer systems. These disks contain technical details and versions of Daphne Oram’s audiovisual synthesis and composition system, Oramics. Although this system is widely known to have been of some significance, it has not been studied or researched in any great depth. The software is considered to be possibly the first computer software designed by a woman for the purpose of creating electronic music. This alone highlights the importance of the collection. In addition, the tapes themselves are of great interest to musicologists and electronic musicians, serving as a record of both her personal research focus, and also as an indication of her aesthetic. Finally, the collection includes a great deal of personal correspondence, photographic documentation, and press cuttings.

- ORAMICS
In 1962, Daphne Oram presented Oramics, the project that consumed so much of her time and resources. She received two consecutive Gulbenkian Foundation grants in the region of £3,500, a sizeable sum in the 1960s, to develop her research. Daphne said of Oramics, “I visualize the composer learning an alphabet of symbols with which he will be able to indicate all the parameters needed to build up the sound he requires. These symbols, drawn…freehand on an ordinary piece of paper, will be fed to the equipment and the resultant sound will be recorded onto magnetic tape.”
The concept of drawn sound was not new. The technique of drawing patterns by hand onto the thin strip at the edge of 35mm film had been around since the 1920s. Russian film makers Arseny Arraamov and Yevgeny Sholpo created soundtracks from intricate ink drawings on thin strips that were 1.93 - 2.5.mm in width. Norman McClaren used drawn sound in many films. South African electronics engineer , Johannes van der Bijl, working in the 1940s, developed a method of recording sound using photographed waveforms on 35mm film, which were passed across and interrupted a steady beam of light, and thus generated an electronic impulse to represent sound but the Oramics system reveals a more lucid, free and at the same time more precise analogue of sound waveforms.
Peter Manning noted “The ability to draw the dynamic shaping of pitched events not only allows a readily assimilated audio-visual correlation of specifications, it also overcomes the rigid attack and decay characteristics of electronic envelope shapers”.
The main body of the machine is a steel-framed table, across which a centre strip of graph paper is placed at right angles. Waveforms are drawn freehand onto this paper (these are still in place) and then traced, or marked out with masking tape, onto transparent, sprocketed loops of 35mm film. There are ten looped strips of film in total, arranged in five banks and each passes clockwise from right to left operated simultaneously by a common motor. The near group is individually and directly looped around the clutch mechanism and drive wheel, and the far group is looped around a wheel that is slaved to the main motor. Clutch and gears control speed of rotation, which normals at 10cm per second, although a handwheel enables the user to turn all strips simultaneously more slowly if desired. The near group of four control waveform shape, duration and vibrato, the raw ingredients of the desired sound, and the far group control the finer nuances of timbre and intensity, amplitude, frequency. The drawn waveforms pass over photocells, illuminated from above by a steady stream of light, to the right of the flat surface, The dark patches on the transparent film strip modulate the rays of light, and these are picked up as voltage measurements by the capacitors in the photocells. The electronic signal triggers oscillators and filters and envelope shape can be manipulated in fine detail. The signal is also passed to a separate sealed light box which houses four cathode-ray tubes. A flat plate of glass slides into a slot in the light box. The glass plate is partially covered by an opaque mask, selected from a number of pre-set shapes which correspond to the desired effect. This partially covers the tube output which is picked up by a photomultiplier inside the light box and conveyed to the output of the various oscillators.
Actual sound recording takes place at the end of the process, once the drawn sound has been manipulated and created according to mental and mathematical specifications, and not monitored at the outset by aural observations. A separate unit houses another motor, across which four strips of oxidised 35mm film are tensely looped. The output signal from the multitrack magnetic recording is passed to a stack of four Mulla 323 amplifiers, and from there to a pair of home- made speakers.
Composers such as Thea Musgrave, Hugh Davies used the Oramics machine to compose, although the finished product was perhaps too complex, comprising several separate housings and units for the different processes, to achieve commercial productivity, or even professional use by other composers.
The timing of its completion left it overshadowed by other developments in voltage controlled oscillator technology. Oramics was superseded by the Moog synthesisers, the synthi VCS3 and other more compact electronic sound creators and as a sound recording medium by more compact and practical portable tape recorders such as the early Revox A77s. The finished Oramics product remained in need of further investment and Robert Moog recently observed, ‘I remember thinking that it must have been a job and a half to make music with…’ (Moog 2000).
Another criticism of Oramics is that recording the sound and converting it to acoustic sound energy takes place only after it has been graphically defined. Delia Derbyshire pointed out, ‘…My attitude was that the ear is a better judge of what it hears than the eye can be in constructing a sound…I personally wouldn’t approach making a sound from any visual parameters, I’d rather do it from mathematical parameters and then rely on the ear to change it. (|Derbyshire 2000).
Acknowledgements: This article is comprised largely of text taken from Jo Hutton’s article ‘DAPHNE ORAM Innovator, Writer and Composer.’

Daphne Oram is best known for her design of her Oramics system, and also for co-founding the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, but until now the only easily available piece of music by her on CD has been the 8 minute long ‘Four Aspects’. There was also a 7” EP from 1962 on HMV, released as part of the ‘Listen, Move and Dance’ series that was specifically designed to help children dance. Although the short pieces on this record are very basic it could be argued that this was the first ever electronic dance record!
Now for the first time is a survey of nearly all the major pieces that she produced since her departure from the BBC in January 1959 until her final tape piece in 1977. During this time she worked independently in her home studio, and thanks to a grant from the Gulbenkian Foundation in 1962 she was able to persue her interests. In Britain there were no state funded studios other than the Radiophonic Workshop which in its earliest times mainly existed at the behest of the drama studio and was not generally seen as a place to develop personal artistic ideas. There were also no university studios at this time, so it was necessary for British electronic composers to be self funded. Throughout this period she devoted her attention to developing her Oramics ‘drawn sound’ system, which consisted of a large machine that enabled patterns drawn on transparent 35mm film to be converted into sound. This system was eventually fully realised in the late 60’s and several pieces here incorporate its use.
The 2 and a half hours of music on this 2CD set covers the whole range of Oram’s post BBC output. All of the music is electronic with some occassional use of real instruments, especially small percussion and piano frame. There is also some use of musique concrète techniques. The works fall roughly into the following catagories: works for TV and cinema advertising, film soundtracks, music for theatre productions, installations and exhibitions as well as concert pieces and several studio experiments. Also included are 4 mini compositions that resulted from an experimental music course given by Oram at a high school in Yorkshire in 1967.

REVIEWS

Boomkat
Daphne Oram might not be a name as familiar as, say Delia Derbyshire or Raymond Scott, but she is one of the unsung heroes of the early electronics movement, and even more interestingly was the founder of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop! Are you impressed yet? Well you should be, Daphne joined the BBC at a mere 17 years of age back in 1942 (turning down a place at the Royal Academy of Music) and from there on she badgered the company endlessly to start investing in electronic music. She was convinced of the potential of this new sound and was totally
obsessed with pioneering it, to the point where she would camp out at the BBC studios for nights on end splicing tapes and working with various modified machines to create her abstract soundscapes. Eventually the BBC bent under her pressure and in studio 13 created the soon-to-be-legendary Radiophonic Workshop, with Daphne Oram as the director. Sadly this involvement was to be short lived as Daphne decided she was unhappy to be writing music simply to be heard in the background of some science fiction television show or another, and left the compan to start her own studio and pioneer her own musical instrument. Named the Oramics system, this incredible device allowed her to 'draw' sound, and had the synthesizer's oscillators, pitch, volume, vibrato and more controlled by hand drawn slides. It was an incredibly original way to think about sound creation, and her work was totally pioneering in the genre - allowing her to make sounds and compositions totally unlike anything heard before. Daphne continued to experiment with music using the Oramics system and then an Apple II computer until she had a stroke in 1994, and was up until that time totally dedicated to experimental electronic music. Her work is here presented across two discs and shows
many of her early compositions for film and television and also some later work (post 1966) which made use of the Oramics system. Having only managed to hear a very small amount of Daphne's work before (notably the track 'Four Aspects' on Sub Rosa's influential 'An Anthology of Noise and Electronic Music #2') it is an absolute revelation hearing this collection. Each track shows just how important she was on the development of music we know and love so dearly - Delia Derbyshire for instance was a devoted follower of hers, and is quoted as saying she was "one of the most important people in the history of electronic music". This sentiment is clearly evident as we are taken through a journey of devastatingly complex electronic and concrete music, music that would give any number of the more well-known composers a run for their money. Possibly one of the finest collections of early electronic music we've ever had through our doors, this is a stunning presentation of a truly remarkable woman's work - I think we've found our holy grail. Unmissable.

The WIRE (March 2007 - in collaboration with Lily Greenham review)
Two sonic artists, both different in almost all respects other than being neglected, almost forgotten, both women, and both based in England; neither of them living, and both now reconstructed through the fragments of sound that have remained as traces of two complex lives. As with all archive projects hedged by incomplete sources, there is a sense of privileged gazing, the battered scrapbook lying open, the photo album partially revealed, a glimpse through to the hidden person; and pathos, those few moments when access to the inner sanctum was granted: a temporary opening of microphones in a BBC radio studio; a concert in some official palace of the high arts.
Inevitably, the simultaneous release of these retrospectives acts as a reproach to the flawed utopianism of post-war music. Within the male technocracy of electronic music and masculine, even combative world of sound poetry, women were considered rare exotics; their presence and difference highlighting the pathetic subjectivity of aesthetic choices that a male majority battled among themselves to dignify as Theory and Law.
A composer and inventor of the Oramics 'drawn sound' system, Daphne Oram is currently the better known of the two, if only because the kind of early electronic music in which she specialised is now fetishised. Her major work, Four Aspects, composed in 1960 and described by Hugh Davies as an uncanny anticipation of Brian Eno's Discreet Music, was a genuine glimpse into one version of the future. Another futurism, the 1960s techno-paradise, has become insufferably cute and kitsch, as illustrated by the current use of Raymond Scott's Baltimore Gas and Electric Co ("395") for a TV commercial by the beleaguered online bank, Egg. Before his unexpected death in 2005, Hugh Davies had plans to catalogue the Oram archive, of which he was custodian, and prepare material for release. He had noted the CD issue in 2000 of Scott's advertising jingles, film collaborations and musique concrète experiments from the 1950s-60s and believed Oram's largely unknown work to be a British equivalent.
Having worked within the BBC, first as a balance engineer during World War Two, then as a founder member of the Radiophonic Workshop in 1958, Oram had to supplement the financing of her studio by making short electronic pieces for radio and television commercials. Themes of machine futurism - leisure through robotics, labour-saving devices and miracle substances - surface only too easily in her jingles for power tools, Lego, washing machines, instant tea and Schweppes Kia-Ora. These were recorded between 1962 and 1966, which suggests that sonic experimenters of my generation were almost certainly affected by them at an impressionable age (is our vintage of experimental music just another side-effect of media manipulation, re Vance Packard's Hidden Persuaders?).
Predictably, these vignettes are charming but rather one-dimensional. Her music for dramas of a more philosophical nature - plays by Professor Fred Hoyle and Arthur Adamov - are necessarily episodic, but evident within the grain and fracture, ominous, melancholy, dystopian, of these distorted micro-compositions, spread over two CDs, is the sense of a composer who never found resources or support to extend her potential. No, the future is not always bright. (David Toop)

 

''I'm dead. Bye.''

The Tone Generation - Around the world in electronic sound

 

This Friday sees the launch of a new simonsound produced radio series looking at the history of electronic music as a worldwide phenomenon. The 10 part series called ‘The Tone Generation’ is presented by electronic musician and film-maker Ian Helliwell. Starting in Europe and finishing in the Southern Hemisphere Ian will be playing vintage tracks - some celebrated, many obscure and overlooked, to give an overview of electronic music. Part one starts with Great Britain and features music from a number of BBC Radiophonic composers including Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire.
The series will be broadcast every Friday evening at 7.30 on Resonance 104.4 FM. Subscribe to the podcast by clicking here (the podcast feed now seems to be working) or download an MP3 of show 1 here.
Other radio news - Expo 67 was transmitted on BBC Radio 6 last week and has been broadcast in Paris, New York and Bristol over the last 5 months. The complete programme will be available to download here shortly.


the podcast above can still be downloaded.

ok, i know that i take any opportunity to mention her, but please check this out.

Delia Derbyshire is probably most famous for creating the Dr Who theme tune but, as a part of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, she created a series of compositions throughout the decade which stand out both for their originality and forward thinking. Rephlex even went so far as to lovingly issue a 4x10" box set a few years ago which now seem to be rare as hens teeth.

Part of the four programme Inventions for Radio series (1964), created in collaboration with Barry Bermange, Dreams is a collection of spliced/reassembled interviews with people describing their dreams.

Delia's editing and repetition, together with her dissonant, often terrifying musique concrete soundbeds, make this distinctly uneasy bedtime listening. Little fluffy clouds this is not!!

link: Delia Derbyshire - Dreams

http://moveyourfeettothebeat.blogspo...re-dreams.html