While I can’t stand fake icons of style and women’s magazines who encourage their readers to be inspired by such superficially bland icons, I love celebrating whoever supports or rediscovers pioneering women who have brought some amazing changes into our lives.
Among them there is Daphne Oram whose achievements – as it often happens with women’s achievements –
were for a time forgotten.
Born in 1925, Oram had a great passion for sound and electronics.
While she worked as a sound balancer at the BBC (where she started in 1943) and as the key instigator of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the late 1950s, Oram experimented with a new photo-electric music system that she called Oramics.
This technique represents one of the earliest forms of electronic audiovisual synthesis since it’s based on the composer drawing onto a synchronised set of ten 35mm film strips read by photo-electric cells, generating electrical charges to control amplitude, timbre, frequency, and duration.
When Oram first started working on this innovative system she had to fight many battles especially against the lack of enthusiasm showed at the BBC for her ideas, though at the end of the ‘50s, some of the effects she created were finally broadcast and she also created the sound for a TV play.
She eventually opened the Tower Folly Studio in Kent and continued pushing the sound boundaries with her experiments from there, receiving European support to develop Oramics in 1962 and eventually writing music for film, television, ballets and concert performances.
In recent years, the Electronic Music Studios of London’s Goldsmiths College acquired her archive including recordings 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).
A new exhibition featuring also the Oramic Machine at London’s Science Museum currently celebrates Oram.
The exhibition features a display that will expand in the next few months (from around 10th October) with further information on the birth and history of electronic music.
While the Oramic Machine can not be used, Goldsmiths College recently came up with an iPhone app that recreates its sound, so electronica enthusiasts will be able to recreate it on their own portable devices.
What has Oram got to do with fashion? Well, she’s definitely an inspiring icon of style since she fought to carry on experimenting with her groundbreaking ideas in a fields that, in recent years, has been largely been appropriated by male artists who often stole entire bits and pieces of Oram's journeys into the sound to use them in their own compositions.
Besides - and here's a challenge for the fashion design students out there - the spots and lines on the film strips used by the Oramic Machine could provide interesting and unusual ideas for prints.
For further inspiration I'm embedding here a track from the "Oramics" (2007) compilation and a documentary by Nick Street about the Oramic Machine that will give you an idea about the size and structure of this amazing device.
Oramics from Nick Street on Vimeo.
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