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Female Pioneers of Electronic Music Joanne Baker Lauds a Paean to the Experimentalists of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop

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Female Pioneers of Electronic Music Joanne Baker Lauds a Paean to the Experimentalists of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop COMMENT BOOKS & ARTS and US space programmes — their suc- cesses and failures. This political, cultural and technical context is enriched with infor- mation that has come from the cosmonauts themselves in recent years. For example, MISSION MOON 3D details of the accidents and deaths that hin- dered the Soviet lunar programme, from the cosmonauts’ point of view, enable Eicher to tell a more complete story. He strikes a fine balance between detail and readability. But the book is so much more. Its 150 ste- reo photographs, which can be seen in 3D through a stereo viewer, make it an immer- sive experience. Since childhood, May has collected stereoscopic devices — a Victorian technology in which two photographs of the same subject (taken a small horizontal distance apart) are displayed side by side. Looking at these through a viewing device, A stereoscopic image of US astronaut Gene Cernan next to a lunar rover during an Apollo 17 moonwalk. at a certain distance and with eyes ‘relaxed’, the brain creates the perception of depth, Soviet effort, for which no sequential images space to the ultimate sacrifice made by and previously unresolved details jump into existed, they had to convert ‘mono’ photo- humans (and animals) in the name of space focus. The pairs of images that Eicher and graphs into stereo pairs. exploration, underlining the risks of propel- May include show everything from cosmo- As these vivid images remind us, the pace ling earthlings into an alien environment. naut Alexei Leonov, the first spacewalker, in of progress would have been much slower Now, NASA, the Russian, Japanese and Chi- 1965, to the Apollo 12 lunar module Intrepid without the fierce competitiveness of the nese space agencies, and the private compa- flying insect-like above the Moon’s surface in space race. However, the cold-war wall nies SpaceX and Blue Origin, plan to send 1969. A hand-held LITE OWL viewer devel- between the two countries made avoidable, humans back to the Moon. Before that hap- oped by May is included with the book with sometimes tragic, mistakes inevitable. One pens, any benefits must be weighed carefully instructions (see go.nature.com/2ezgyg6). chilling example is the Apollo 1 accident in against the risks, and the expense. Reaching For those struggling to see in 3D, try starting 1967. During a routine countdown rehearsal, Mars will demand that several nations work with high-contrast images such as the one a fire erupted in the craft’s main capsule, together, with involvement from the public of Comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko. which contained pure oxygen; astronauts and private sectors. Robotic and telescopic Stereo photography was not an aim of Roger Chaffee, Gus Grissom and Ed White missions cost much less and can reach more- the Apollo missions. But many sequential died almost instantly. (Only later was a quick- distant planets and moons. But there is no photographs were taken — for instance by release hatch added to the design.) Six years substitute for human experience; and while Stuart Roosa in Apollo 14 while circling the before, unbeknown to NASA, trainee cos- we wait for another foot to fall on an extra- Moon — which enabled May to assemble monaut Valentin Bondarenko had suffered terrestrial landscape, books such as this one several pairs. May and his team also trawled a similar fate during a test in Moscow. The give us an inkling of that ultimate thrill. ■ the NASA archives to find serendipitous two superpowers’ first cooperative space- pairs of photographs or film stills with just flight would have to wait until 1975. May Chiao is chief editor of Nature the right baseline separation. To illustrate the Mission Moon 3-D devotes significant Astronomy. TECHNOLOGY The Doctor Who theme and beyond: female pioneers of electronic music Joanne Baker lauds a paean to the experimentalists of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. he history of electronic music usually Synth Remix its engineers were women was, and still is, a centres on the men (including Pierre 93 Feet East, London. rarity. Last week, two of them, Daphne Oram Schaeffer, Olivier Messiaen, Pierre 8 November 2018; Touring 8–11 November. and Delia Derbyshire, were celebrated anew TBoulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Edgard in Synth Remix, a concert series of live per- Varèse) who developed musique concrète produced effects and theme tunes for formances and DJ sets touring Britain. from recorded everyday sounds in Paris in the British broadcaster, including iconic Oram (1925–2003) co-founded the the mid-twentieth century. Also in those sounds for the sci-fi television and radio Radio phonic Workshop. She gained experi- decades, a group of sound engineers — many programmes Doctor Who and The Hitch- ence in mixing electronics and music during of them women — were making waves in an hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, using electronic the Second World War while working for the old London skating rink. oscillators and tape loops decades before BBC on sound balance for radio broadcasts. The BBC Radiophonic Workshop synthesizers were common. That many of During Germany’s bombings of London in 470 | NATURE | VOL 563 | 22 NOVEMBER 2018 BOOKS & ARTS COMMENT the Blitz, she switched pre-recorded tracks tune in 1963. Derbyshire told interviewers that of orchestral music into broadcasts of live her love of abstract sounds came from the air- music. That allowed the musicians to flee the raid sirens she heard growing up in Coventry TOM RICHARDS TOM city’s grand concert venue, the Albert Hall, during the Blitz, recalling that “the sound of without the radio audience knowing. the ‘all clear’” was electronic music. She stud- In the 1950s, Oram became intrigued by ied mathematics and music at the University of the potential of tape recording to transform Cambridge, and took an analytical approach music by exploding space and time. She was to experimenting with sound. Her notes, now a fan of musique concrète, regularly staying up archived at the University of Manchester, are all night to mix her own tracks. In 1958, after full of mathematical symbols and equations. years of badgering the BBC to modernize its She jotted down explicit frequencies and used music, Oram and her colleague Desmond the dots and dashes of Morse code. Briscoe were given a room with some old Her sketched scores are visual — cre- equipment. Thus began the workshop. scendos of squiggles, rings of organic con- An Oramics machine for drawing sound. Oram left after just a year. The BBC asked tours and hatched textures of mass and her to take six months off, saying it was void. Triangular bursts march across the art, and Thomas has roamed far into that concerned that the equipment might have page like streams from flak guns. Some liminal space. In 2012, her Crystal Sounds adverse effects on the human body. So she rounded forms look like the Lissajous pat- of a Synchrotron — based on blips and beeps quit. terns (formed from interacting sine waves) from the Diamond Light Source particle Oram set up her own home studio in a that she must have seen on oscilloscope dis- accelerator near Didcot, UK — won an inter- converted rural oast house in Kent. She con- plays. Her notes are national award for digital music and sound tinued to compose electronic sounds, and to “Her sketched also littered with art from Austrian arts body Ars Electronica. lecture and write about the nature of vibra- scores are visual evocative words: Here, her three-part work Nature’s Numbers tions. She launched a field that she called — crescendos hum, beat, splash, nods to Derbyshire and Oram using a bank Oramics, using a device that she built for of squiggles, shimmer. of self-built electronic components, con- ‘drawing’ sound. The size of a dressing table, This Radio- ventional synthesizers and computers aug- it subverted the technology behind the cath- rings of organic phonic legacy mented with tones of her own voice. Thomas ode-ray oscilloscope, which converts sound contours and was the launching immersed herself in Derbyshire’s archives for waves into a picture. Lines, squiggles and hatched textures point for the con- Synth Remix. dots sketched on 35-mm film were scanned of mass and certs, performed ‘Time Lament’, the first part of Thomas’s and used as indications of pitch, vibrato and void.” by musician Jo performance, combines high, plaintive timbre. (It was, in effect, an early sequencer Thomas and artist vocals over a heartbeat reminiscent of — a technology that eventually came along Olivia Louvel. At the first performance at spinning tape loops. Inspirations include in the 1980s.) In her seminal 1972 book An 93 Feet East, a concrete venue in east Lon- Derbyshire’s love of seventeenth-century Individual Note of Music, Sound and Elec- don, each deftly controlled networks of composer Henry Purcell (and his aria tronics, she wrote of humans as instruments, tabletop electronics. These sent tsunamis ‘Dido’s Lament’) and effects from The Hitch- harbouring “a whole spectrum of resonant of sound waves shuddering through the hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. In ‘Echoes of the frequencies” that are “vibrant with pulsat- audience’s chests, and lofted clouds of siren Earth’, sounds like showers of rain punctuate ing tension”. vocals around our heads. The compositions the eery silence of a cavern, as a homage to Oram paved the way for Derbyshire (1937– were compelling, richly textured and darkly Derbyshire’s vocal experimentations. ‘Cel- 2001), who famously crafted the unearthly powerful. lophane Resonance’ is a playful collage of ‘sweeps and swoops’ of the Doctor Who theme Electronic music integrates science with sci-fi sound effects. Here, Thomas exploits a compact reproduction of an Oramics machine, generating sounds from scribbles on what look like rolls of transparent film from an overhead projector.
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