Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was one of the central figures in the
development of British experimental electronic music. Having
declined a place at the Royal College of Music to become a music
balancer at the BBC, she went on to become the co-founder and first
director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. Oram left the BBC in 1959
to pursue commercial work in television, advertising, film and
theatre, to make her own music for recording and performance, and
to continue her personal research into sound technology - a passion
she had had since her childhood in rural Wiltshire. Her home, a
former oasthouse in Kent, became an unorthodox studio and workshop
in which, mostly on a shoestring budget, she developed her
pioneering equipment, sounds and ideas. A significant part of her
personal research was the invention of a machine that offered a new
form of sound synthesis - the Oramics machine. Oram's contribution
to electronic music is receiving considerable attention from new
generations of composers, sound engineers, musicians, musicologists
and music lovers around the world. Following her death, the Daphne
Oram Trust was established to preserve and promote her work, life
and legacy, and an archive created in the Special Collections
Library at Goldsmiths, University of London. One of the Trust's
ambitions has been to publish a new edition of Oram's one and only
book, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, which was
originally published in 1972. With support from the Daphne Oram
Archive, the Trust has now been able to realize this ambition. An
Individual Note is both curious and remarkable. When commissioned
to write a book, she was keen to avoid it becoming a manual or
how-to guide, preferring instead to use the opportunity to muse on
the subjects of music, sound and electronics, and the relationships
between them. 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. And her thinking was
not limited to just the future of the orchestra, synthesizer,
computer and home studio, but ventured, with great spirit and wit,
into other realms of science, technology, culture and thought. An
Individual Note is a playful yet compelling manifesto for the dawn
of electronic music and for our individual capacity to use,
experience and enjoy it. This new edition of An Individual Note
features a specially commissioned introduction from the British
composer, performer, roboticist and sound historian Sarah Angliss.
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