Daphne Oram (1925–2003)

Initially, the BBC hired Daphne Oram as a ‘music balancer’ during the Second World War because of her background in classical music, a job that required her to control the various input and output levels from microphones during broadcast. At the same time, she trained as a recording engineer and by the early 1950s had been promoted to the role of studio manager, responsible for recording and playing back music and sound effects during broadcasts.

Already by 1956 she was working towards the creation of an electronic music studio at the BBC and had been privately experimenting on her own with the limited resources available to her, including tape recorders and primitive noise-generating equipment. Her engineering training and interest in electronics allowed her to make adjustments to this equipment to suit her own needs, as well as to supplement these with hardware of her own construction, such as sound-altering filters. In 1958 she contributed tape effects to several radio broadcasts as well as to the first television programme to contain electronic sounds in Britain, Amphitryon 38. When the decision was made to open a dedicated electronic music studio at the BBC, she was the first person considered to run it. Her classical training and experience gave the Workshop a much-needed dash of musical credibility. Staffing for the opening of the Radiophonic Workshop also included another woman, Jeannie MacDowell, as a junior engineer. Initially, Oram operated as the Workshop’s only full-time composer, which newspapers announced at the time of the studio’s opening as: ‘A team of enthusiasts, led by musician and technician Daphne Oram’, who would ‘yet dazzle their continental counterparts by their independent discoveries and ambitions’.¹

From the start, Oram struggled with the lack of autonomy that she faced at the Workshop, particularly the requirement that the studio provide what she considered insignificant sound effects (what the BBC called ‘Special Sound’) rather than more substantial music. Consequently, Oram left within six months of the studio’s opening, and spent the rest of her career building and refining her own private music studio in her home. In particular, she focused on a project she called ‘Oramics’, a process of creating electronic music from fluctuating light patterns. Oram’s specially crafted instruments consisted of photoelectric cells that read an image drawn with black ink onto plastic sheets, converting that image into sound. Eventually Oram adapted this technology to personal computers, developing software to exploit the possibilities of Oramics. Oram’s position on the process of composition and her ideas about music in general can be read in her fascinating autobiography, An Individual Note, written as she worked through the implications of her Oramics system.²

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s, Oram divided her compositional output between occasional ‘concert’ pieces such as ‘Four Aspects’ (1968) and music for art installations and exhibits such as Pulse Persephone (1965), incidental music for theatre, like the soundtrack for Fred Hoyle’s and John Elliot’s play Rockets in Ursa Major (1962), and more commercial work. In the commercial field she achieved a great deal of success, contributing music and sound effects to advertisements for Lego, Schweppes, Nestea, and others; mainstream films such as The Innocents (1961) and Dr. No (1962); and commercial films like Power Tools (1965) for Atlas Copco, Rotolock (1967) for Rayant Films, and Costain Mine (1977). She also composed music for two fascinating projects, Electronic Sound Patterns and Listen, Move and Dance (both 1962), a collaboration with educator Vera Grey, intended for teachers to use as an instructional aid, with Oram’s electronic swoops, dips, and whooshes imaginatively mirrored by the movement of children.

While until relatively recently Oram’s contributions to the history of electronic music have been neglected, after her death in 2003 a resurgence of interest led to several commercial releases of her music.³ Her Oramics machine is on permanent display at the Science Museum in London, and Goldsmiths, University of London has been digitising the hundreds of reel-to-reel tapes she left to them.⁴ Future research will hopefully give a fuller account of the profound influence that Oram had on the field of electronic music.

Delia Derbyshire (1937–2001)

While the BBC had historically hired women in primarily clerical roles in the 1950s and 1960s, as Oram’s colleague Fagandini acknowledged, there had also been a tradition of employing them as engineers during the Second World War. These same women, however, faced ‘quite a cutback after the war when the surviving gentlemen came back and wanted their jobs’.⁵ Certainly these prejudices were still very much in place in the early 1960s when Delia Derbyshire arrived at the Workshop. She had studied mathematics and music at the University of Cambridge, recalling that: ‘There were only a few women at the University at that time and so we were treated terribly. But I had the solace of my music’.⁶ After an unsuccessful application to Decca Records, where she was told that ‘they didn’t employ women in the recording studio’, she toured for a time with the Pembroke University Players’ production of Julius Caesar, providing off-stage electronic sound effects, before being hired at the BBC as a studio manager.⁷ After discovering the Radiophonic Workshop, she requested a three-month attachment, and once employed there, she quickly earned a reputation as one of the studio’s most talented and original composers; one who combined her love of music and mathematics to create revelatory new sounds.

Derbyshire was still new to the Workshop when she was assigned what would become her most famous contribution to electronic music: realising the signature tune for the new television series Doctor Who (1963). One of her standard methods involved analysing complex concrete sounds using an oscilloscope, then reconstructing the sounds using banks of Jason valve oscillators. For Doctor Who, composer Ron Grainer is said to have ‘scribbled a melody and bass line on a piece of paper’,⁸ leaving it to Derbyshire and engineer Dick Mills to ‘realise’ his score completely using electronic sound. Producer Verity Lambert, one of the first women at the BBC to fill that role, wanted the signature tune to ‘use music, whether electronic or otherwise that had a melody rather than just musique concrète’.⁹ Derbyshire took Grainer’s melody and slowly pieced together the tune: ‘I was dead into using as much electronic sound as possible. The boss was on record as saying that it was impossible to make a beautiful sound electronically and it was my pleasure to prove him wrong’.¹⁰ The result, however, was worth the effort. She recalled later, ‘In those days people were so cynical about electronic music and so Doctor Who was my private delight. It proved them all wrong … [Ron Grainer] said “I can’t believe you’ve been able to do this! I want you to have half my royalties”. Unfortunately, that wasn’t allowed’.¹¹ While she may not have received the financial compensation she deserved, her arrangement helped bring electronic music to a larger, mainstream audience. With the subsequent success of Doctor Who, everyone had heard electronic music.

After Doctor Who, probably the most important project Derbyshire worked on at the Radiophonic Workshop was the four Inventions for Radio (1964–65), collaborations with playwright Barry Bermange. ‘The Dreams’, ‘Amor Dei’, ‘The Afterlife’, and ‘The Evenings of Certain Lives’ each used a similar collage technique to explore single themes. For the premiere Invention, ‘The Dreams’, like the others on different topics, Bermange interviewed a diverse group of ordinary people on their thoughts related to dreaming, recorded their comments, and edited and shaped the responses into a cohesive whole. The resulting product resembled a scripted work. Specially composed radiophonic music by Derbyshire then provided the background to these spoken-word collages, often occupying quite a substantial role in them, with purely musical interludes separating individual sections and topics, and, more importantly, creating an electronic musical glue that held together and unified the often disparate voices.

In ‘Amor Dei’, (‘The Love of God’), Derbyshire was responsible, as she had been for ‘The Dreams’, for constructing the radiophonic accompaniment to Bermange’s collage of voices, who were this time discussing the role God has in ordinary people’s lives. It was agreed that all radiophonic sound would be derived from the sound of the human voice. Perhaps due to her study of mathematics at Cambridge, Derbyshire loved using complex formulae to construct elaborate structures for even the simplest of signature tunes. This may have been an attempt for her and her works to be taken more seriously. At the top of the first page of notes for this work is outlined the ‘Dies Irae’ melody, but she quickly settled on a library recording of the more expansive Advent antiphon ‘Rorate coeli desuper et nubes pluant justum’ (‘Drop down dew, ye heavens, from above, and let the clouds rain the just’).¹² In her notes for the construction of this piece, she writes on the first day: ‘Take “rorate”, make detailed analysis, serial, statistic and linguistic, rebuild a fragmented variation, serially organised fragments of voice. Find best tech for cutting fragments: normal cut, switched, scanned, long cut, spaced fade up, etc. Very very fast at first in short groups, then in breathtakingly long complex dramatic sections’.¹³ From these basic ideas, throughout the last weeks of May 1964, she began working with the prerecorded chant, first rerecording it, isolating each individual pitch, and rearranging them into a new musical utterance.

By the early 1970s, Derbyshire, like Oram before her, had grown tired of the limited opportunities for making her own music at the BBC, and she left in 1972. By that time she had developed a reputation as a skilled, witty, and effective composer of electronic music in her own right, having worked on projects outside the BBC, including scoring Yoko Ono’s short film Wrapping in 1967; written a song, ‘Moogies Bloogies’, with the West End singer Anthony Newley in 1966; composed the electronic score for Peter Hall’s film Work Is a Four-Letter Word (1968); and, with David Vorhaus and fellow Radiophonic Workshop composer Brian Hodgson, had formed the band White Noise and released an album, An Electric Storm, in 1968 on Island Records. As ‘Kaleidophon’, Vorhaus, Hodgson, and Derbyshire moonlighted an album of television stock music and scored incidental music for several other stage plays in the late 1960s. Upon her leaving the BBC, she worked with Hodgson as ‘Electrophon Ltd.’, composing the music library for the 1970s British children’s science fiction television series The Tomorrow People for Thames Television. But by the mid-1970s, she had almost entirely retired from music.¹⁴ According to Hodgson, Derbyshire’s primary frustration had always been with inflexible equipment, and the consequent inability to see a vision through:

In the 1990s, Derbyshire’s non-Who work was rediscovered by a new generation of popular electronic musicians, and she began collaborating with younger composers. Sadly, her untimely death in 2001 ended any new projects she had been working on, but since her death her reputation has grown exponentially. Numerous recordings of her works, as well as documentaries and a radio play based on her life, have all helped restore her legacy to its rightful place in the history of electronic music. In 2013, Delia Derbyshire Day was established as a registered charity to ‘advance the art of British electronic music via the archive and works of Delia Derbyshire’.¹⁶ Finally, in 2017 Derbyshire was honoured by a commemorative blue plaque placed on her home in Coventry from the British Plaque Trust which reads ‘BBC Radiophonic Workshop pioneer who influenced the course of electronic music lived and worked here’.

Wendy Carlos (1939–)

Women composers of electronic music have consistently faced institutionalised obstacles to success, particularly a feeling by studios that audiences wouldn’t be receptive to music known to have been produced by women. At the BBC both Oram’s and Derbyshire’s work was almost always credited to the generic ‘Radiophonic Workshop’ rather than by their names. And things were no different in the United States. According to Switched-On Bach’s record jacket (1968), the album-length Columbia Masterworks collection of some of Johann Sebastian Bach’s most popular works interpreted on the new Moog synthesiser was produced by the anonymous, corporate-sounding ‘Trans-Electronic Music Productions, Inc’, or ‘TEMPI’. In actual fact, this project was a collaboration between electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos and jazz-singer-turned-producer Rachel Elkind, with contributions made from musicologist and musician Benjamin Folkman. Wendy Carlos – who was identified as ‘Walter Carlos’ on subsequent albums until the mid-1970s, when her identity as a transgender woman was acknowledged with the credit ‘Wendy Carlos’ on album covers – had started her studies at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studio in 1962, working with the famous composer Vladimir Ussechevsky. However, Carlos found herself frustrated by the constraints under which composers were then held, with the contemporary academic trend for techniques like serialism and other dissonant styles.

Carlos and Folkman were both graduate students at Columbia and together worked on a simple electronic arrangement of Bach’s ‘Invention in F’, amongst other experiments. When Elkind heard this, it seemed like the perfect way for the composer Carlos to show the public that electronic music could be accessible, and hopefully pave the way for original compositions in a less dissonant style. The problem, however, was that before Robert Moog’s synthesiser innovations, there was no practical way, economically or artistically, to get the kinds of nuanced performances required of Bach’s works. Carlos had been looking for a way to demonstrate the power and potential musicality of the electronic music equipment coming out of Robert Moog’s studio.

Carlos had met Moog at the annual meeting of the Audio Engineering Society in 1964, and they immediately became friends, with Carlos frequently testing Moog’s latest products. Meanwhile, Carlos was building a small studio of her own. She assembled an Ampex 8-track tape recorder out of spare and used parts, and gradually acquired other pieces of equipment. Unlike today’s more compact digital keyboards, the so-called ‘modular’ analogue synthesisers of this time were custom-built and often had very large combinations of components. Carlos’s small studio apartment eventually housed an assemblage of oscillators, filters, a white noise source, an artificial echo generator, and an envelope generator for constructing more complex sounds, as well as a chord generator, which chained a series of oscillators together to form harmonies, created by Moog for Carlos to realise Bach’s continuo parts. The final innovation was a touch-sensitive keyboard that enabled greater sensitivity in performance.

All was not perfect, however. Tuning was the notorious bugbear of early synthesisers; the slightest change in temperature could affect a sound’s pitch. In the notes to her Switched-On boxset, Carlos remembers the agonising process behind achieving a perfectly tuned synthesiser melody:

Carlos and Elkind organised the first album, originally titled The Electronic Bach, in such a way that each track highlighted a different strength of the new synthesiser. Bach’s music was the perfect candidate, in their eyes, for this project, since, as Carlos explains on her website, ‘It was contrapuntal … it used clean, Baroque lines, not demanding great “expressivo” (a weakness in the Moog at the time), and it was neutral as to orchestration (Bach freely used many variations on what instruments played what)’.¹⁸

Carlos, Elkind, and Folkman weren’t prepared for the massive success of the album upon its release, and had no immediate plans for a sequel. Folkman went on to a career as a successful musicologist and composer. Carlos and Elkind, for their part, took the opportunity of making a follow-up to perfect their techniques, and for their second album, they took and expanded the repertoire to include contemporaries of Bach’s, as well as a version of his Fourth Brandenburg Concerto. This too, achieved both notoriety and success, with the Canadian pianist Glenn Gould declaring that ‘Carlos’s realisation of the Fourth Brandenburg Concerto is, to put it bluntly, the finest performance of any of the Brandenburgs – live, canned, or intuited – I’ve ever heard’.¹⁹

Over four albums from 1968 to 1979 (Switched-On Bach, The Well-Tempered Synthesizer, Switched-On Bach II, and Switched-On Brandenburgs), Carlos and Elkind successfully produced electronic interpretations of the works of Bach and other Baroque composers, using each album to refine their equipment and techniques, though the joyous spirit of experimentalism is strong throughout all of the recordings. They all display a level of virtuosity unheard of in electronic popular music up to that point, and the relative paucity of Carlos and Elkind’s output can be traced to their methodical approach of assembling each track.

Elkind left music as a producer in the early 1980s and now lives in France. In her later work, Carlos continued to expand the boundaries of electronic music, perhaps most memorably in the film scores to Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange (1971) and Disney’s Tron (1982). She, more than anyone else, was responsible for acclimating audiences to the sound of the synthesiser, to showing music lovers that there was more to electronic music than science fiction and scary movies, and that electronic music could both convey a sense of the modern and the beautiful.

Pauline Oliveros (1932–2016)

As a representative of the academic side of music, Pauline Oliveros is unique amongst these case studies. While electronic music formed only a small part of Oliveros’s total compositional output, what she did write has had an outsized influence on later composers, through both her technical procedures and in her philosophy of music as expressed through her works and writings. Oliveros developed an interest in electronic music in the 1960s through her composition teacher Robert Erickson at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music (although influence undoubtedly flowed in both directions) and was a member of the San Francisco Tape Music Center from its founding in 1962. There, alongside fellow composers Ramon Sender, Terry Riley, and Loren Rush, Oliveros explored electronic and electroacoustic music in relation to improvisational techniques. In 1967, both she and Erickson accepted positions at the University of California, San Diego, where she went on to teach composition for twenty years, directing the university’s Center for Music Experiment for four of those years. One of Oliveros’s most important contributions to music in the second half of the twentieth century was her emphasis on focused listening, particularly to the musical background of modern life. Drones, especially, are a persistent theme of both her own works and her writing. In 1970, she recalled how the ubiquity of drones began infiltrating her own works:

In electronic works such as Bye Bye Butterfly (1965) and I and II of IV (1966) slowly shifting electronic notes foreground static and repetitive bass figures. But by gradually adding up and removing musical elements, these works generate a sense of forward motion and momentum in a familiar way that makes them accessible rather than alienating for audiences. Indeed, investment and involvement on the part of audiences (and in fact, the removal of the boundaries between ‘audience’ and ‘musician’) was of vital importance to her.

The prejudice she faced as a woman composer was a persistent theme in her writings, and in an essay for the New York Times entitled, ‘And Don’t Call Them Lady Composers’ (1970), she mused that,

Despite her initial frustration at the perceived separation between male and female composers in academic circles, she later came to embrace that difference, and throughout the 1970s and ’80s, with her ♀ ensemble, Oliveros brought her ideas of ‘sonic awareness’ to large audiences through workshops and lectures. Towards the end of her life, Oliveros returned to electronic sound as part of her ‘deep listening’ project, an extension of her lifelong interest in ambient music.

Suzanne Ciani (1946–)

Walking in the footsteps of Oliveros, Suzanne Ciani also began her electronic music career in the San Francisco area. But it was a career that moved in a very different direction; whereas Oliveros chose an academic path, Ciani has spent the majority of her career in the commercial and media realm. Ciani’s interest in electronic music began in earnest while studying for a master’s in music composition at the University of California, Berkeley, where she was able to merge her classical music education from her undergraduate years at Wesleyan with her passion for cutting-edge technology. Mills College owned a new Buchla synthesiser, and Ciani’s discovery of this instrument cemented her commitment to electronic sound. Whereas the Moog, primarily through the work of Carlos, encouraged music that followed a standard tuning system and emulated the sounds of traditional instruments, the layout of the Buchla promoted a more inherently abstract style. She recalls:

This she did by working at the San Francisco Tape Music Center, where she built instruments for Buchla and continued her own composing: ‘From the moment that I was able to actually get my hands on one, that was my sole possession. I had a Buchla, I didn’t have anything else. That went on for ten years. It was my constant companion. It was on all the time. I never shut it off. It was like a living being in my space’.²³

As was made clear in Ciani’s release of Buchla Concerts 1975 (2016), her work with the Buchla, while tonal and diatonic, has more in common with the drone music of Riley or Oliveros than the pop sensibility of Carlos’s Moog work. Ironic, then, that Ciani had her first big successes writing electronic commercial jingles for companies such as Coca-Cola and Energizer, with distinctive sound designs and accessible timbres appealing to a wide audience. Film scores have also formed a significant component of her output. Indeed, her work on The Incredible Shrinking Woman (1982) made her the first woman to score a major Hollywood film, and with its alternation between the sound of gratingly cheerful advertising jingles, abstract electronic textures, and comforting tonal synth pads, the score can be seen as a demonstration of her primary stylistic technique.

That same year, Ciani released her first solo album, Seven Waves, a recording of electronic synthesiser music which started a long and successful career in the New Age genre (an umbrella marketing term to describe largely instrumental music perceived as relaxing, meditative, or inspirational). Over the course of twenty-three solo albums, Ciani’s music frequently employed the acoustic piano in combination with banks of synthesisers for a commercial, accessible sound that made her one of the most important contemporary New Age musicians in America. In recent years, Ciani has returned to the Buchla, presenting a quadrophonic Buchla concert in San Francisco in 2016 with a limited-edition vinyl release, releasing old recordings she had made in the 1970s and never released, and composing new works for the instrument.

Conclusion

While these case studies, by necessity of space, have been limited to English-speaking countries, there have of course been women from all over the world who have made huge contributions to electronic music’s early years. Else Marie Pade (1924–2016) was Denmark’s first electronic musician, and like Oram, experimented from within her state-run radio station, where she worked from 1952. Influenced by her studies with musique concrète inventor Schaeffer at France’s RTF in the late 1950s, she presented a series of radio lectures on musique concrète, and composed Denmark’s first electronic score for a television programme. She is remarkable, like the British composer Elisabeth Lutyens (who is discussed in Chapter 2, ‘Women in Composition 2: The Cold War in Music’), for her adoption of serial techniques in composition, and participated in the summer programme at Darmstadt in the 1960s and 1970s. Likewise, French composer Éliane Radigue (1932–) began her career studying with Schaeffer in the late 1950s, but since the mid-1970s, the course of her career has been influenced more by her adherence to Tibetan Buddhism. In particular, her music, as realised primarily through the ARP synthesiser, explores the meditative aspect of subtly evolving drones. In works like the Adnos trilogy (1974, 1980, 1982), she clearly articulated her ethos, which she explained in an interview: ‘For me, maintaining the sound did not interest me as such; it was primarily a means to bring out the overtones, harmonics and subharmonics. This is what made it possible to develop this inner richness of sound’.²⁴ The work of Kaija Saariaho (1952–) of Finland – discussed further in Chapter 4, ‘Still Exceptional? Women in Composition Approaching the Twenty-First Century’ – initially explored the combination of acoustic and electronic sounds within the context of serialism, but after attending the Darmstadt summer course in 1980 and later working at IRCAM, her style evolved into a more textural and abstract language.²⁵ For example, Jardin Secret I for tape (1984–85) superficially resembles Karlheinz Stockhausen’s mathematically rigorous Gesang der Jünglinge (1955–56) but upon closer examination reveals itself to be far more interested in contrasting timbres and an exploration of shifting textures.

Women have had a permanent and lasting influence on the development of electronic music. Some of the most essential contributors to its history have been women, and the individuals discussed in this chapter have made it possible for subsequent generations of composers and innovators of any gender to continue the pioneering work begun in the 1950s and 1960s. The fact that their accomplishments have only been acknowledged relatively recently does nothing to diminish their importance, and in the future, as the full scale of their contributions are better understood, their reputations can only grow in prominence.

Identities

Many of these artists also seemed reluctant to subscribe to a single label for themselves. Though some were content to call themselves by familiar names like ‘composer’ or ‘sound artist’, many either listed a number of such terms, preferred to talk about the range of ways that they work rather than artistic identities, or even resisted particular terms on principle. Pamela Z calls herself ‘an extremely “hyphenated” artist’, noting that while she is ‘best known for [her] solo performances of works for voice and electronics with gesture-controlled sound and video’, she ‘work[s] as a composer/performer – sound artist – installation artist – voice artist – composer for dance, film, and video – experimental theatre artist – etc.’ Cecilia Lopez goes further, disliking even a multi-category identity: ‘I don’t usually observe the distinction between music and sound art and I am, in fact, specially interested in producing works that inhabit the intersections of these disciplines or concepts.’ Lauren Sarah Hayes feels somewhat similarly: ‘I move through such a mixture of domains and making sound and music that it seems funny to try to draw such distinctions in my practice. People can call it what they like, although I don’t really see much difference in what I do when I improvise noisy electronics versus sitting down to play some Schubert on the piano.’ She goes on to say that she describes herself as an improviser and sound artist, mainly to avoid using the term composer, which she doesn’t really identify with anymore. Others also resist the term composer in particular. Sadah Espii Proctor writes that she calls herself a sound artist because she struggles with the title ‘composer’, as she associates it with ‘traditional classical or jazz composition and do[es] not see a space for [her]’. Russell Butler argues for a broader, more general conception of their practice, while acknowledging the necessity of describing their work in ways legible to audiences: ‘I choose to use the broader title of artist, as this better represents my potential in exploring the creative process … “sound artist” or “musician” function more as convenient terms that I use to say that I use sound to express myself and to connect’. Jess Rowland describes her work in similarly general terms, eloquently tying that decision to her way of being in the world:

Finally, some have even coined new terms that they feel best convey the breadth of their practices; Elizabeth A. Baker, for instance, calls herself a ‘New Renaissance Artist’ encompassing her many artistic practices.

Approaches and Practices

In general, our respondents work in and across four main areas of electronics: fixed media, live electronics, instrument or environment building, and installation works. Much like the artists themselves, the boundaries between these four areas are not always neat, and multiple identities can overlap within a given work. For example, many pieces contain both prerecorded fixed media and live, interactive elements. Helmuth has written pieces with electronics that are entirely fixed and others that are ‘completely interactive’, but she often mixes these methods to facilitate the technical needs of the work. Her Irresistible Flux (2014) for tárogató and electronics uses this ‘best of both worlds’ approach, triggering sound files when it would be too difficult to accomplish particular processing live. Other artists also use prerecorded audio as an element to be triggered or manipulated by a live performer. Power often writes music using self-made field recordings of environmental sound combined with instruments. In Nourbakhsh’s METRO (2018) for dancer and electronics, the dancer moves around a self-assembled Arduino-based sensor system that controls playback of electronic material consisting mainly of recordings of female-only train carriages in Nourbakhsh’s native Iran. Using sensors in this way allows for a gesturally rich exploration of the particular social and sonic space of these train carriages, using the dancer’s body to sketch the train’s confines both physically and sonically. Though all the piece’s sound is prerecorded, its performance is dynamic and demanding. Finally, while there can be a striking difference in the demands of performing with fixed-media track and live electronics, in practice these two experiences can sometimes be closer than one might think for an audience. As Nourbakhsh observes, ‘depending on the piece, fixed media can actually work in a way that looks [as] if it’s interactive’. She writes: ‘There is a certain flexibility in timing that comes along with live electronics that I highly enjoy. At the same time, the advantage of fixed media is the predictability of it. So, I try to use both elements in my pieces.’

Even when the actions of performance are digital, the sounds sparked by those actions can draw on acoustic sources. Unmute (2018), a laptop ensemble piece by Flannery Cunningham (one of the authors of this chapter), uses such a technique, with ‘quasi-vocal’ samples of voices resonating piano strings controlled through facial motions via a webcam, hand tracking with a motion sensor, and keyboard input. In this way, Unmute aims to open up the experience of communal singing to those who cannot (or do not want to) use a physical voice through a kind of ‘voiceless choir’. Rebecca Fiebrink also loves the richness of acoustic sounds and the skills of acoustic players, noting that ‘[h]aving this expertise at hand takes some pressure off the technology to be capable of the range of expression, structure, improvisational flexibility, etc. that an expert acoustic musician can bring to the table’.

Fiebrink presents an interesting case in terms of identity; she is a musician, performer, and composer, but professionally she considers herself primarily a programmer and ‘interaction designer’. She views herself foremost as ‘someone who makes tools for others, informed by a variety of other people’s practices and experiences’. Her own artistic practices do aid her work, by ‘giving [her] some intuition about what is likely to be useful to others’, but her goal is to make software that is interesting and broadly useful for other artists. Her Wekinator software has become a standard for musicians who wish to leverage the power of machine learning in their practice, through providing an open-source platform in which an artist can feed a system examples of their desired behaviour through simply matching input and output data. Though working with machine learning presents new challenges of its own, such an adaptive ‘black box’ allows for the creation of systems that would not only be almost impossibly complex to code, but that are also robust to the variability of human gesture. Margaret Schedel (one of the authors of this chapter) used Wekinator to create After | Apple Box (2018), which was inspired by her mentor Pauline Oliveros’ piece Apple Box (1965). In After | Apple Box, performers ‘fill’ ammunition crates with the sounds of loved ones who have passed away through recordings of those loved ones and their memories of them. Using Wekinator the performers then ‘train’ their boxes so that tapping in different positions triggers and affects the prerecorded sounds, allowing simple wooden boxes to become expressive instruments.

While Wekinator provides an environment that facilitates the creation of a wide range of pieces, other artists build hardware, software, or combined set-ups that they conceptualise as more akin to musical instruments; systems that are distinctive (and thus not limitless in potential), but which offer sufficient variety and richness to sustain multiple works. Such a tradition of instrument-building stems back to work such as Laurie Spiegel’s mid-1980s ‘Music Mouse’ intelligent instrument. Spiegel writes that:

Today, such set-ups are sometimes called NIMEs (New Interfaces for Musical Expression), though some artists prefer simply to call them instruments. Artists build these systems for a range of reasons, but often seem to create them to fill a sonic, gestural, or experiential vacuum in existing acoustic or electronic instruments. Akiko Hatakeyama, for instance, feels that ‘there are no other instruments or interfaces that allow [her] to realise the world that [she] want[s] to create with [her] music […]’. For Hatakeyama, ‘creating and playing custom-made instruments enables [her] to reflect certain bodily gestures that come from deep inside [her], cultural associations, personal experiences, and memories in [her] performances’. Contemporary research and development of NIMEs often focuses on expanding the sonic possibilities of acoustic instruments or restoring the tactile, vibrational feedback of acoustic instruments to digital or hybrid digital/analogue systems. Hayes, for instance, played classical piano from the age of four. She writes: ‘When much later I started to perform with computers, the disconnect between sound and touch left me unfulfilled as a musician.’ This missing linkage between touch and sonic result led Hayes to develop a hybrid piano, with digitally augmented sound as well as vibration-based haptic feedback.

Besides the hybrid piano, Hayes performs using a variety of combined analogue/digital electronic systems. She describes these as ‘assemblages of various components, including analogue synthesisers, hardware drum machines, various MIDI and game controllers, foot pedals, and bespoke software built using Max/MSP’. This kind of hybrid practice, especially the adaptation of existing game/MIDI controllers or building new controllers to create a personal set-up, was pioneered by artists such as Pamela Z and has become a fairly widespread approach. Z performs primarily with her voice, electronics, and video using custom gestural controllers (built with her collaborator, Don Swearingen) with Max/MSP and Isadora software to create ‘dense, complex sonic layers’ through processing her voice in real-time. Z has worked with this system over a long period and has a single Max patch that serves as her main console for performance. While new works sometimes require her to add new effects to her patch, this continuity has helped Z develop a deep compositional and performative virtuosity on her instrument, which she considers to be the entire system of her voice and electronics set-up. Indeed, the possibility of developing physical skills akin to those required to perform on wholly acoustic instruments is a core attraction of an instrument-building approach. Z observes: ‘I think of music as a very physical thing. I think that part of its power is that it gets into our bodies […] I find it very moving and engaging to watch musicians playing music that requires great physical skill and concentration […]’. Hatakeyama shares this view on the importance of physicality, and is particularly interested in physicality as a way of knowing; she writes that ‘the presence of a human body, particularly my body presence is extremely important in my art … Many times, my body navigates for me the ways to move in my performances.’

Besides her large-scale solo voice/electronics works, another area of Z’s practice is installation works. Other respondents, especially Rowland and Proctor, shared this dual pursuit of performance and installation works, which are meant to be experienced on a timescale that the viewer/listener controls rather than one determined by the composer or performer. Often these installations involve sounds that are the result of the viewer’s/listener’s interactions with the piece. Rowland, for instance, uses a digital design process to create plans for conductive material, and the conductive material is then cut and ‘printed’ onto flat materials like paper with analogue circuitry.  As she explains, ‘at that point, the final product is a physical object which can be explored and interacted with without using any digital technology at all’, giving her audiences a concrete, material way to engage with Rowland’s work. Proctor often takes a less material approach to interaction, but it is nonetheless important to her, as in her works for virtual reality in which an avatar’s movement in an artificial landscape determines the sonic progression of her pre-composed material. Whether interaction is physical or not, a visual element is often an important aspect of a viewer’s/listener’s interaction with installation-based work. Indeed, installation-based sound art can even be deeply concerned with sound without sounding at all. Maria Chavez’s sound art spans a wide range of experiential approaches that range from carefully placed speakers that listeners must stand between to hear fragmented sections of text to paintings of microscopic images of vinyl records and turntable needles; the latter works make no sound, but Chavez still considers them sound art pieces. She explains: ‘Sound art doesn’t just have to be about emitted sound … I’m interested in sound in all of its physicalities, whether it’s how you visualise it in your mind, how it presents itself through speakers in a space, or how you can present sound beyond sonic emission.’ Besides sounding or non-sounding installations, though, Proctor, Rowland, and Chavez all also create works meant to be experienced within the more controlled timescale of a performance, further demonstrating the ways in which many of the artists we surveyed work across multiple electronic practices.

Alongside this widespread fluidity, some artists also have deep-seated aesthetic or philosophical commitments to particular practices. Schedel is deeply interested in interactivity, rarely creating fixed media. While she does not completely eschew using recorded audio material, she is interested in a more extensive kind of in-the-moment interactivity than, say, triggering short sections of audio. Indeed, it may be most useful to conceptualise both ‘liveness’ and interactivity on a kind of spectrum, from wholly pre-arranged fixed media played back on speakers, through practices such as in-performance triggering of fundamentally fixed audio material, to something like Schedel’s ‘ferocious interactivity’, in which extracted data about musical parameters and/or performer decisions often deeply affect the form or sound of a work.

Hardware and Software

Our respondents use a wide range of technologies to create sound. For artists with long careers, the gear they use has often undergone significant changes over time. Joan LaBarbara, for instance, began performing solo with her voice and electronics around 1974 and primarily used commercially available hardware audio units such as the Roland Space Echo, Electro-Harmonix Frequency Analyzer, and others to modify the signal from her vocal mic. During the period from the 1970s to 1990 she moved to multitrack analogue recording, and around 1990 she began to work more with digital audio workstations (DAWs). Today, DAWs such as ProTools (which is LaBarbara’s software of choice) provide powerful, flexible environments for artists to record acoustic instruments; create sound with software instruments built from sample libraries; modify tracks with audio effects and plug-ins; and arrange their sounds with the help of visual interfaces. In general, DAWs have allowed more detailed editing to be done much more quickly than would have been possible before the advent of digital sound. Z reflects on the effect on her compositional choices: ‘I make a lot more minute sound edits with digital editing software than I would have had the patience to make when I needed to use a razor blade and splicing tape for each one.’ Today, artists creating fixed media may need no more than one or two microphones, an audio interface, a laptop or desktop running a DAW, and studio monitors or monitoring headphones to create their music.

For artists who work with interactive elements instead of or alongside fixed media, other software becomes important. Max and its open-source cousin PureData (Pd) – visual programming environments built for working with audio – are the most commonly used software programmes for controlling interactive elements amongst our respondents. Both environments allow users to extract data from audio inputs, process sound in various ways, and output it to a flexible number of channels through an interface consisting of boxed ‘objects’ interacting in a ‘patch’. This is in contrast to platforms like ChucK, SuperCollider, C#, and C++, which are more traditional line-based coding languages used for audio applications that are also used by our respondents.

Some artists also draw on software that was not specifically developed for audio or music. Helmuth and Proctor both employ the game engine Unity in their installation work, and game engines have become widespread and powerful tools in the burgeoning field of virtual reality (VR). A fair number of our surveyed artists also work with video in addition to audio, drawing in a visual component to their work. This can be fixed video that is created with recording and video-editing software, algorithmic visuals reactive to audio parameters, or other means controlled by the composer/sound artist, but often such projects represent a collaboration with other artists. Both Proctor and Spiegel, for instance, have worked significantly in creating sound for theatre. When doing so, Spiegel tries ‘to support the emotional content of the central-focus medium’, while other artists negotiate the role of sound in multimedia productions differently. Across the board, though, our surveyed artists (including those who do not work with video or other ‘scored’ visual elements) displayed a deep cognisance of the importance of an audience’s visual experience to their understanding of the work. Some even draw in other senses besides vision and hearing, as in Hayes’ use of embedded transducers in risers to create a tactile response for audiences. Nearly all of our respondents understand an audience’s reading of their work as one in which sound cannot easily be teased out from other modes of reception. Jennifer Walshe puts it succinctly: ‘I don’t agree that people can listen in a pure way which ignores all non-sonic information. If we could do that they wouldn’t need blind auditions for orchestras.’

Whether for audio with video or audio alone, software-based set-ups are more common today largely because they allow new sonic control, flexibility, and possibilities for interactivity or algorithmic control. Fiebrink reflects on the effects of this access: ‘I wouldn’t be in this field if electronic music still required such specialised equipment. I got into programming and electronic music because they were activities that were possible on my home PC in the mid-1990s.’ Software set-ups also often reduce the costs of creative innovation; adding an audio effect to a Max patch does not require buying something new, as adding an effects pedal would. Transitioning from an analogue to a digital composition and/or performance set-up is not unambiguously positive, however. Analogue gear has a physicality like that of acoustic instruments, which we have already seen artists such as Hayes try to emulate in NIME design. Even digital recreations of analogue equipment lack their materiality. Spiegel, for instance, notes that ‘[t]he response curves of emulated control devices are … often not well designed’, and she thinks that ‘the quality and design of digital simulation of analogue control … makes [it] less musical when in actual use’. Though Z ultimately prefers her current digital set-up, she ‘found that [she] both gained and lost in the process of moving from hardware processors to software. It became possible to be completely accurate with delay time, for example. But I lost the ability to do some pieces that were built around some of the strange quirks of my hardware delays.’

Indeed, besides physicality, it is the very fallibility or imperfection of some kinds of hardware that attracts certain artists. Lopez, for instance writes that ‘in terms of technology, there is something about precariousness that [she’s] interested in’. Furthermore, she connects this attraction to broader social attention:

That investigation has included creating unstable acoustic feedback systems in works like Lopez’s sculpture/instrument RED (2015). Other artists working with non-digital materials share this interest in using their process or in interrogating social structures or barriers. Though Chavez’s work as an abstract turntablist seems more motivated by an aesthetics of exploration than of precarity, she also uses breakdown (in the form of damaged or broken records) as a driver of sound and structure. While digital sound has opened up access and possibilities for many creators, there is a significant subset of artists who continue to use analogue hardware exclusively, repurpose that hardware in new contexts, or combine it with digital techniques. Some even resist an analogue/digital divide. Butler finds it ‘a tiresome debate that [they] really wish would go to bed’ and ‘feel[s] that any artist in this age must interact with a hybrid of either technology to their own taste and ease’, pointing out that they use a (digital) computer to record (analogue) modular synthesisers. Others draw on both technologies, but do feel them to be separate strands of their practice: Cat Hope ‘think[s] digital and analogue creation and reproduction both sound so different, so [she] use[s] them very much as different instruments’. Hope exclusively uses analogue effects pedals in her solo electric bass performance, a practice drawn from experimental rock, but works with digital production in other streams of her music making. Overall, it is an age of hybridity for many artists in terms of the gear and techniques that they use.

Along these lines, our respondents tend not to have an ideological attachment to particular kinds of software or hardware. Many express interest in using new technologies in the future, especially DIY circuitry, and some note the constant process of learning that working with electronics today entails. Nourbakhsh, for instance, calls herself a ‘generalist’ and says that she tries ‘to challenge [herself] to learn something new with every piece’. Most of our surveyed artists choose technologies that they feel will best allow them to create the sound or performative experience that interests them in a particular piece. Some of our respondents also expressed frustration with or resistance to expectations of demonstrating membership of a scene through having the ‘right’ gear or displaying technical mastery of that gear. Such expectations can sometimes have uncomfortably gendered overtones based in historical assumptions about who belongs in particular spaces and has the intellectual chops to create ‘complex’ electronic music.  Hope ‘hate[s] shopping for gear’ and writes: ‘I often feel I have to prove my technical prowess (even when I don’t have it) due to my gender.’ Others actively resist such pressure. Hayes writes that she is ‘not interested in working environments where the goal is to demonstrate some kind of technical mastery, make the most noise, or show off the most gear’, explaining that she ‘spent a long time in those scenes and … find[s] them quite boring’ despite her interest in technical work. While many of our surveyed artists in fact cited warm support from mentors and colleagues – men as well as women and gender-non-conforming artists – in the communities they work in, others described a gradual process of overcoming worries that they came from insufficiently technical/musical backgrounds. Spiegel explains how she was discouraged from pursuing music:

In contrast, Proctor found huge support and encouragement through the laptop orchestra and the Digital Interactive Sound and Intermedia Studio at Virginia Tech, where she was ‘inspired to not be embarrassed about [her] arts background and to embrace the advantage in building a story/experience, and [learned that] the math and science can be learned to support that rather than withdrawing because of it’.

Of course, there is a final piece to the gear puzzle, and one that is not always so directly in artists’ control: speakers and microphones. High-quality speakers and microphones can be prohibitively expensive and bulky to own and transport, meaning that many artists depend on venues to provide them. Most of our respondents primarily use stereo sound, meaning two channels (left and right). A stereo set-up allows for one’s work to be performed/diffused in a wide array of venues, and its low number of speakers also maximises the chances of high-quality equipment. (Some artists even take the simplicity of stereo a step further; Shin often works in what she calls ‘big mono’, aiming for a particularly robust sound with a single audio channel.) Even those who work in other set-ups often utilise stereo as a fallback option. Practicality married with a deep concern about sound quality/audience experience is a hallmark of nearly all the artists we surveyed, and it speaks to both the constraints our respondents are accustomed to and their creative responses to such constraints.

The main alternative to stereo seems to be a quadrophonic set-up (‘quad’), which still involves a relatively low number of speakers but allows for basic spatialisation of sound because of its introduction of rear left and right speakers. Power writes the majority of her works in quad, and LaBarbara and Walshe each also have at least a few works designed specifically for the set-up. Those who work with larger numbers of speakers are more apt to work with much larger numbers, such as the hundreds of speakers Proctor used at The Cube at Virginia Tech or at the SARC (Sonic Arts Research Centre) at Queen’s University, Belfast. In these cases, spatialisation of the sound becomes a primary feature of the work, and the resulting pieces are tied to a small number of possible venues.

Of course, it is not only the number or arrangement of speakers that matters, but also the type. All speakers ‘colour’ sound by boosting some frequencies and attenuating others, and they vary greatly in both self-noise and power. Many of our respondents preferred not to make particular requests that venues might not be able to accommodate. Walshe never requests particular models of speakers, and besides her custom-built speakers, Rowland is not usually particularly concerned with the speaker set-up. Others do feel strongly about particular speaker choices for particular works. Hope always makes specific requests, and she enjoys using a wide range of speakers, including instrument amplifiers, multiple large subwoofers, and ‘tiny, quiet speakers’.

Finally, some artists even assemble or build their own custom speakers or microphones. Baker designs her own microphones and is thinking of selling her hydrophones (microphones made to work under water), while Rowland creates her own speakers. Elizabeth Hoffman (author of the section ‘In Her Own Words: Practitioner Contribution 1’ within the current volume) spent months hunting for an alternative to standard public address (PA) speakers for her permanent installation Retu(r)nings (2019) in New York University’s Elmer Holmes Bobst Library. She eventually discovered a model of studio monitors with sufficient power to project in the library’s atrium when mounted on the space’s catwalks. Rowland builds her own speakers out of paper, with printed circuits, for many of her sound artworks. In these works, ‘the material object – musical instruments/interface/ graphic score/speaker – is complicated into one charged piece of material’, as in her installation using a malleable 100-foot speaker and audio work, The Very Long Sound (2016). In general, in an installation setting – where a speaker set-up might sound continuously for days, weeks, or even years – the upfront logistical costs of sourcing or making more (or less standard) speakers may seem more worthwhile.

Challenges

The challenges of dealing with speakers are in many ways illustrative of the challenges of working with electronics today more broadly. Though we have sketched a number of widespread approaches, aims, and types of equipment, there is no real consensus about so many of the techniques that go into creating music or sound with electronics. Just as artists come up with their own individual responses to lack of speaker standardisation and availability, individual creators have their own solutions to a whole range of other challenges: producing sounds that feel like they equal the richness and complexity of acoustic performance, finding ways to inject physicality into performing with computers, designing systems that facilitate rehearsal for performers who may not be experienced with electronics, figuring out how to quickly adjust levels and effects in (often very short) soundchecks, working with precarious or unreliable systems, and much more. Many artists might welcome some sort of standardisation of approaches to these problems: a kind of shared set of best practices that has not yet fully evolved. At the same time, however, the individual problem-solving that the state of the field has necessitated has led to a certain thoughtfulness about means and aims that might not otherwise exist. A lack of common practice has led to groundbreaking individual solutions and many conceptually rich approaches to working with electronics.

Above all, the artists we have surveyed are practical-minded, serious people. They work within the constraints they experience in terms of cost and availability of equipment, access to the knowledge required to create particular tools (such as DIY hardware), restrictions of venues, and more, to deliver personal, persuasive, and often innovative sonic experiences. Many think deeply about the experience of their audiences and find ways to invite them into the work, including by using and transforming familiar natural sounds (Helmuth, Abandoned Lake in Maine (1997), LOONSPACE (2000)); creating possibilities for physical interaction by viewers/listeners in installation settings (Rowland, paper speakers and piano-roll interfaces); drawing in the element of touch through embedded transducers (Hayes); using a deeply personal reflection of self in performances with significant elements of improvisation (described as ‘me at the moment of performance like a diary’) in order to invite audiences to meditate on their own experiences and emotions (Hatakeyama); or setting up ‘feedback loops’ with an audience through groove box performances that ‘giv[e] them something to process, integrat[e] their responses, and push out that interpretation’ (Butler). They also often hope to challenge listeners/viewers, provide novel experiences, or provoke creative reimagining, such as through confronting audiences with ‘impossible transition[s] … outside our constrained conception of what sound is or could be’ (Rowland), or accepting their own sense of ‘be[ing] a stranger in any kind of society’ and the difficulty for understanding that that may pose for listeners (Shin). Taking a broader view, there is no question that this field (and the people populating it) looks different from what it did sixty, forty or even twenty years ago. It is more representative, and there have been positive shifts in the way, for example, mentorship structures have been conceived: away from single mentors and towards mentorship networks. Although institutional affiliations remain vital, advancement and access are no longer necessarily contingent on contact with a single, well-placed mentor. There is, in other words, an emerging lateral network of participants whose diverse backgrounds and approaches are transforming this area. Attending to this network and supporting it will help to continue to diversify and strengthen the future of the field.

The Domestic and Creativity

Having two children in close succession resulted in more time spent around the home and less time travelling overseas for recording projects. This elongated period at home was unusual, and grounded me in a single location for long stretches of time both in the pre- and antenatal stages. Sounds found around the home, which had always been there, suddenly became points of inspiration for compositional work, since I noticed and appreciated them more for their consistency and association with my home space; I was also around them more than usual. I came to view these home-based sound sources as personal sounds, and they began to mean more to me, as they marked out a period of time that signified importance and change. This shift in sonic focus functioned as a reminder of the emotional connections and memories one can have with the personal possessions that one is surrounded by daily. The re-imagining of the domestic ‘mundane’ is a sentiment I share here with sound artist Felicity Ford, and her concept of the ‘domestic soundscape’.² Ford’s use of everyday sound as documented in her research has been used to highlight daily activities that take place within the home, such as home decorating, knitting, cooking, and other sounds from the kitchen. The home environment as an impetus for creating music is not by any means a novel or exclusively (female) gendered approach; take, for example, the kitchen environment which has inspired a wealth of electroacoustic music repertoire from male composers:

1. – Jonty Harrison’s Klang (1982) uses two earthenware casseroles dishes as the sole sonic material.

2. – Paul Lansky’s Table’s Clear (1992) uses kitchen utensil sounds and recordings of a domestic scene in a kitchen.

3. – Matthew Herbert’s Around the House (2002) uses samples of washing machines, toasters, and toothbrushes, processed into swinging grooves.

4. – Amon Tobin’s Kitchen Sink (2007) constructs trip-hop music through looped samples of water splashing and pans clattering, inspired by musique concrète processes.

5. – Konstantinos Karathanasis’s Ode to Kitchen (2015) showcases hundreds of sounds from kitchen objects clustered together.

6. – Matmos’s Ultimate Care II (2016) derives every sound from the duo’s washing machine. The thirty-eight-minute duration mimics a single wash cycle.

Exploring the work of installation artist Fran Cottell and her House Projects (2001) furthered my interest in this area. Cottell’s own domestic home space was converted into a ‘museum’ venue accessible to visitors, initially established for the public to view ‘the honesty and truthfulness of mess over domestic order’.³ In one of these projects, visitors had access to Cottell’s home through specially constructed walkways to observe the reality of domestic life (with young children) along with the objects that inhabited this space. Assessing the domestic through the perspective of anthropology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochbert-Halton’s The Meaning of Things has also shaped my understanding of the relationship of the self to personal objects (like those objects that appear sonically in my music). This text suggests that: ‘to understand what people are and what they might become, one must understand what goes on between people and things. What things are cherished, and why, should become part of our knowledge of human beings.’⁴

The home as a site for artistic creation and contemplation has clearly inspired many, but there is something curiously subversive about the mix of motherhood and the use of domestic objects as a means for creativity within the examples I have encountered. Having an opportunity to take ownership of a domestic symbol, one that has such stereotypical connotations or associations with the ‘housewife’ role in the traditional sense, feels like an empowering move, most likely for its unconventional application and transformation within an artistic context. The remarkable (and often unbelievable) time and spaces these examples emerge from is also worth a note here. Finding a window to ‘make’ and continue practice in light of children arriving on the scene is significant and provides the subject for a growing body of practice from voices discussing and representing this impossible juggling act (consider, for instance, the national initiative Mothers Who Make).⁵ Academic study has also begun to follow suit, as articulated by the work and theories of dance practitioner Sarah Black. Black’s research led to new terminology when she considered the combination of creative practice and mothering.⁶ Her concepts of ‘maternal ethics’, ‘mother as curator’, and ‘mother-artists’ are particularly significant in this context.⁷

My collection of compositions, under the heading of ‘Domestic Bliss’, adds to this emerging body of work from women practitioners that document periods of transition, in which those artists are still eager to be creative. My contribution, from the perspective of a woman electroacoustic music composer, discusses decisions to use home-sourced sounds in my music making, and explains the connection these sounds have to my changing circumstance. From the outside, and without reading this as evidence or verification, listeners of my compositions are unlikely to receive this level of context, significance, or meaning, but to myself, as composer, I look back on these works and catch the symbolism, memories, and connections embedded within the timbres and structures.

Domestic Bliss (2013–2018)