Music Book Review: An Individual Note by Daphne Oram

An Individual Note: Of Music, Sound and Electronics
by Daphne Oram (Music 786.7 Ora)

Composer Daphne Oram’s contributions to electronic music run wide and deep: she was a pioneer in working with electronic music systems, eventually developing her own “Oramics” sound-drawing machine. She petitioned the BBC to pursue electronic music as a component of their programming, leading to her becoming one of the co-founders of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958. From there, the sounds of electronic music were incorporated into a wide range of video and audio programming, influencing commercial A/V production approaches up to the present day. She left the Radiophonic Workshop to run her own studio, Tower Folly, producing varieties of inventive commercial and concert music as her own boss. Her work continued to grow and evolve alongside technology throughout her career, and she became comfortable working with digital computer code-based work just as she had been fluent with tape and oscillator-based music.

Daphne Oram published a book on her musical thinking called An Individual Note in 1972. It’s a wild ride that oscillates (pardon the pun) between some technical ruminations about early electronic music architectural features like capacitors and circuits, and Oram’s own philosophical extensions of the concepts of wave forms and signal flow into other areas of human endeavor, from cognition to sociology. Her boundless creative spirit is well captured in the book, which was out of print for decades, but has recently been reprinted with a great new introduction by Sarah Angliss. In recent years, there has been renewed interest in early electronic music, the Radiophonic Workshop, and Daphne Oram’s unique work as well, so the timing is perfect to dig into this book.

Oram wastes no time thinking big: by chapter 2 in An Individual Note, she is making comparisons between the simple sine wave, the building block of electronic music, and quantum mechanics, as the sine wave is kind of an irreducible particle-wave of its own, which only becomes more harmonically sophisticated by removing information from it (removing parts of a sine wave results in “squaring” of the sine wave, or imparting odd-numbered harmonics). At times, Oram searches for a kind of metaphysical unified field theory of sorts through the physics of sound waves, which themselves of course conform to the whole family of rapidly-repeating waves of the electromagnetic spectrum, from radio and suspersonic frequencies all the way through to light itself. She looks at frequencies occurring at cellular and atomic levels, and while these may not contribute directly to writing your next song, they’re also interesting to consider as a way to organically frame electronic music. These mysterious sounds, once thought of as very strange and unnatural, are very much grounded in the laws of nature observed in other forms of music and art.

Her discussion of tape-based musical forms toward the center of the book may refer to mostly outdated equipment in our digital world today, but most of the musical concepts she’s applying to taped music work perfectly with digital music, too: modifying formants, or the front-end articulation of recorded notes, repeating and “looping” segments of sound, and filtering or modifying various timbral elements of sounds. Oram’s optimism about the future of music and its composition is positively infectious, as she envisions a world in which the role of composers could reach levels where they could simply think their most ambitious creations into existence, without the limitations of human hands playing instruments, by leveraging the technology that she and others were starting to develop in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. While at times the book veers into the territory of science fiction, written as it was on the cutting edge of technology of its time and in anticipation of ever greater technological evolution, it’s a wonderfully optimistic book, and it’s likely to change the way you listen to and think about electronic music.

[If you enjoy this, you may also wish to try Future Sounds: The Story of Electronic Music from Stockhausen to Skrillex by David Stubbs, or Living Electronic Music by Simon Emmerson.]

[ An Individual Note as a PDF online ] | [Daphne Oram page on Wikipedia ]

Recommended by Scott S.
Polley Music Library

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