Pioneering Electronic Music Pioneer Celebrated in Free One-Day Festival
The Daphne Oram Trust and National Science and Media Museum are hosting a one-day celebration of Daphne’s extraordinary legacy as a composer, inventor and electronic music pioneer. The free event on Saturday 21st November 2026 brings together artists, DIY enthusiasts, listeners of her music, academics, and the simply curious to explore Daphne’s groundbreaking work and enduring influence on electronic music and sound.
The event will also feature the first public demonstration of Daphne’s digital code since she first ran it and saved it to floppy disk in the mid-1980s.
Daphne (1925–2003) was a visionary who bridged the analogue and digital worlds long before the digital revolution. She was a pioneering electronic composer, the inventor of the Oramics Machine, and a co-founder of the highly influential BBC Radiophonic Workshop in the 1950s. Like many women in the history of sound and audio technology, her groundbreaking work was not fully recognised until after her death.
Daphne created the Oramics machine-a revolutionary electronic instrument that allowed her to compose directly onto film using a form of visual code, effectively liberating electronic music from the synthesiser and inventing an early system of musical notation through drawing. Her pioneering work in cybernetics, exploring the relationship between technology, sound, and human creativity, prefigured contemporary conversations about artificial intelligence and creative systems. Daphne’s curiosity about the possibilities of code, machines, and human imagination was decades ahead of its time, and her enduring influence is profound.
Saturday 21st November 2026, 11am – 7pm
National Science and Media Museum (various spaces), Bradford.
