{"id":1571,"date":"2026-08-22T09:30:00","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T09:30:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/adesa.test\/drawn-sound-oram-derbyshire\/"},"modified":"2026-08-22T09:30:00","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T09:30:00","slug":"drawn-sound-oram-derbyshire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/drawn-sound-oram-derbyshire\/","title":{"rendered":"Drawn Sound: Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire and the Workshop of the Future"},"content":{"rendered":"

Before the synthesizer became a keyboard you could buy in a shop, electronic music was something made by hand, slowly, with scissors, tape and patience. Much of that history happened in Britain, in rooms at the BBC’s Maida Vale studios, and much of it was the work of women whose names were not on the credits.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Oram’s workshop<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Daphne Oram joined the BBC as a junior studio engineer in 1943 and spent the following years experimenting after hours with tape recorders, trying to persuade her employers that electronically produced sound had a future. In 1958 she and Desmond Briscoe set up the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a small unit to produce effects and music for radio drama. Within a year Oram had left, frustrated by how little room the corporation allowed for music as such.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She established her own studio at Tower Folly, a converted oast house in Kent, and began to build the Oramics machine. Instead of playing notes on a keyboard, the composer drew shapes on strips of 35mm film, which ran past photocells and were translated into pitch, volume and timbre. It was music you could see before you heard it, a kind of graphic score that played itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Derbyshire and the theme<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Delia Derbyshire came to the Workshop in 1962 with a degree in mathematics and music from Cambridge. When she had applied to Decca Records, she was told the company did not employ women in its recording studios. At the BBC she found a place where her particular mix of skills was valued, if not always credited.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1963 she was handed a single sheet of score by the composer Ron Grainer: the theme for a new science-fiction series called Doctor Who<\/em>. There were no synthesizers to realise it. Every note of the famous bassline and swooping melody was built from individual recordings of oscillators, white noise and a plucked string, cut, spliced, sped up and slowed down, then layered by hand. When Grainer heard the result he reportedly asked whether he had really written it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I decided to call my music “organized sound” and myself, not a musician, but “a worker in rhythms, frequencies, and intensities.”<\/p>\nEdgard Var\u00e8se, “The Liberation of Sound”<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Var\u00e8se had been asking for new instruments since the 1910s, long before they existed. Oram and Derbyshire were among the first people anywhere to work in exactly the way he described.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Patch cables and waveforms<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The image at the top of this page, with its tangle of orange and green cables, a panel of sockets and knobs, and a waveform drawn across a dark screen, belongs to the next chapter. In the mid-1960s Robert Moog in New York State and Don Buchla in California each built modular synthesizers: separate oscillators, filters and amplifiers connected by patch cords, so that a sound was designed by routing signals from one module to another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wendy Carlos’s Switched-On Bach<\/em>, released in 1968, made the Moog famous. But the modular instruments still demanded the kind of thinking Derbyshire had brought to her tape loops. The musician was a builder of sounds, not only a player of them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Record\n\t\t\t\n\t\t\t\t\n\t\t\t<\/svg>\n\t\t<\/button>
A record turns slowly above the domes of Rome.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Listening to this music now, ideally on a record in a quiet room, is a strange experience. It sounds both dated and unfinished, as if it belonged to a future that never fully arrived. Some of the Workshop’s pieces were only ever meant to last a few seconds, as the hum of a spaceship or the voice of a ghost in a radio play. They have outlived the dramas they were made for.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Recognition, late<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Derbyshire left the BBC in 1973 and largely withdrew from music for many years. Oram struggled to fund her machine and her later work. Both died in the early 2000s, Derbyshire in 2001 and Oram in 2003, before the recent wave of interest in their careers. Their archives are now studied, exhibited and sampled; Oram’s papers are held at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the Oramics machine itself has been shown at the Science Museum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It would be easy to tell their story only as a tale of neglect. It is also a story about what invention looks like at small scale: two people in modest rooms with very limited equipment, working out by trial and error how to make sounds no one had heard before. Every modular synthesizer, every software instrument and every producer with a laptop inherits a little of that patience.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Before synthesizers came with keyboards, electronic music was cut by hand from tape. Two women at the BBC showed what it could become.<\/p>","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1282,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"audio","meta":{"footnotes":"","_adesa_post_subtitle":"Before synthesizers came with keyboards, electronic music was cut by hand from tape. Two women at the BBC showed what it could become.","_adesa_featured_post":false,"_adesa_single_summary":"Daphne Oram and Delia Derbyshire made electronic music by hand at the BBC long before synthesizers were common. Their slow, inventive work anticipated the modular instruments and laptop studios that followed.","_adesa_single_key_points":"[{\"text\":\"Oram co-founded the Radiophonic Workshop in 1958\"},{\"text\":\"The Doctor Who theme was built from spliced tape\"},{\"text\":\"Their recognition came late\"}]","_adesa_read_also":null,"_adesa_gallery_images":"","_adesa_video_file":"","_adesa_video_url":"","_adesa_video_poster":"","_adesa_audio_file":"3443","_adesa_audio_url":"","_adesa_quote_text":"","_adesa_quote_cite":"","_adesa_link_url":"","_adesa_link_label":"","_jkd_coauthors":null,"_jkd_coauthors_hide_primary":false},"categories":[596],"tags":[642,643,641,644],"class_list":["post-1571","post","type-post","status-publish","format-audio","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music","tag-bbc-radiophonic-workshop","tag-delia-derbyshire","tag-electronic-music","tag-synthesizers","post_format-post-format-audio"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1571"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1571\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1571"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1571"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/adesa-theme.jkdevstudio.com\/fr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1571"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}