For most of human history, musical instruments were strictly mechanical devices. The musician either plucked something, blew into or across something, or banged on something to produce the sounds the occasion called for. All musical instruments, the human voice included, worked by vibrating air more or less directly as a result of these mechanical manipulations.

But if one thing can be said of musicians at any point in history, it’s that they’ll use anything and everything to create just the right sound. The dawn of the electronic age presented opportunities galore for musicians by giving them new tools to create sounds that nobody had ever dreamed of before. No longer would musicians be constrained by the limitations of traditional instruments; sounds could now be synthesized, recorded, modified, filtered, and amplified to create something completely new.

Few composers took to the new opportunities offered by electronics like Daphne Oram. From earliest days, Daphne lived at the intersection of music and electronics, and her passion for pursuing “the sound” lead to one of the earliest and hackiest synthesizers, and a totally unique way of making music.

When You’re Right, You’re Right

When a medium accurately predicts your eventual career at a séance hosted by your father, there’s a good chance your life will be more interesting than usual. The fact that Daphne Oram, born in 1925 in Wiltshire, England, had always been musical, concentrating on the piano, was probably a tip-off used by the later-debunked mystic in making his prediction, but the proclamation was just what the 17-year-old nursing student needed to change the course of her life, and she did so in dramatic fashion.

With World War II raging, Daphne turned down an opportunity to study at the Royal College of Music to take a position with the BBC in 1942 as a music balancer, a position we’d probably refer to as a sound engineer these days. She was primarily responsible for setting up microphones for live performances and mixing the sound. Another part of Daphne’s job was to follow along with a vinyl record as the orchestra played, ready to switch to the recording seamlessly in case anything went wrong with the live performance.

Tape recorders would have eased Daphne’s job considerably, but they weren’t widely available until the 1950s. When they were, Daphne took to tape technology right away, seeing that it had the potential for not only recording music but for creating it. After hours, Daphne would experiment with tape recorders and other sound gear. She’d record short tones from sine wave generators onto tape loops and record the effects of playing them back at various speeds. More complicated sounds, like single notes from a clarinet or even environmental sounds like splashing water, were recorded and mixed with other tones, sometimes even played backward for unusual effects.

All of Daphne’s musical experimentation went unnoticed by BBC management. By the late 1950s, Daphne had been promoted to studio manager, and along with fellow recording engineer Desmond Briscoe, she began campaigning …read more

Source:: Hackaday