Daphne Oram

Abstract

In her book An Individual Note (1972), Daphne Oram developed multiple extended analogies between humans and electronic sound technologies. Oram used these to suggest how “music and information theory, allied to technology” might be applied to mental health; and to support her design for a machine that would preserve human qualities through its interactivity and musical results. This music machine, Oram wrote, “is based mainly on controlled feedback and the computing of resultants.…It is a control system which could be applied to many fields, as well as music.” Analogies between organisms and machines, core concepts of control and feedback, information theory: These suggest a cybernetic cast to Oram’s work. As Dunbar-Hester (2010) has observed, however, some experimental musicians drew directly from cybernetic sources, while others employed cybernetic-sounding language without such explicit engagement. To date, Oram has figured in neither camp, scholarly interests having been directed primarily toward her pioneering position in the male-dominated field of electronic music. Drawing on archival work at the Daphne Oram Collection at Goldsmiths, University of London, this article uncovers sources and conditions that informed Oram’s relationship to cybernetic science and aesthetics. As Oram pursued a program of music research and invention in the 1960s–70s, cybernetics offered a vocabulary, methodology, and ontology that interfaced the worlds of computer art and scientific progress with those of spiritualism and higher sense perception. At the same time, Oram’s commitment to authorial control for the composer put her at odds with the interests in indeterminacy and self-generating systems predominant among artists publicly recognized as cybernetic. The uneasy fit between Oram’s work and music’s cybernetic canon points toward a “scientific-spiritual space” (Pickering, 2010) that existing historiographies of electronic music have not fully recognized, and shows there is far more than Oram as woman that needs to be written back into history.