The Woman Who Drew Sound

In 1958, Daphne Oram co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, the room where, four years later, the Doctor Who theme would be assembled. She had spent her teens as a BBC studio engineer, perched under the dome of the Royal Albert Hall during the 1944 Proms, ready to drop the needle on a matching 78 the instant a doodlebug forced the orchestra to flee, so German listening posts wouldn't hear the broadcast skip. She had turned down the Royal College of Music for the job.

She quit within months. The BBC had decided that electronic-music staff could only stay three months, to protect their hearing. The rule was applied only to her.

She moved to a converted oasthouse in Kent called Tower Folly — circular, conical-roofed, festooned with windows at different heights, as if drawn by someone who had heard about houses but never seen one — and named her cats Elect, Tronic, Sine and Square, and her two goats Deci and Bell. In the octagonal studio at the base, she and her brother built a machine the size of a photocopier out of Dexion shelving, ten loops of 35mm film, hand-wound ferrite rings, transistors with the paint scraped off, and a blue broom handle holding part of it together.

You painted a shape on the film. The machine sang the shape.