Technology as Liberation: The Role of Women in Early Electronic Composition

This article was inspired by a YouTube comment thread. L’Île re-sonante by Éliane Radigue is a gorgeously meditative 55-minute work that very easily sets me into a trance. Thank the YouTube recommendation gods once again for their handiwork. Anyway, the top comment on this video comes from Lucywilliams5069 who quite rightly points out:
‘Interesting to notice how a lot (if not most?) of the pioneers of ambient and electronic music from the 60s across to the early 80s were women. Eliane Radrigue, Laurie Spiegel, Pauline Oliveros, Daphne Oram, Delia Derbyshire, Charlotte Barron etc....’

This made me realise that the names I know in this space, like Wendy Carlos and Beatriz Ferreyra, are also women. As Borowiecki et al. (2025) posit, women faced systemic barriers throughout history in acquiring the ‘human capital’ needed to succeed – access to training, mentors, and conservatories was limited or unequal. Families sometimes supported daughters (especially musician-mothers), but teachers and institutions often invested less in female students. Conservatories, while raising standards, frequently restricted entry and further reduced women’s representation. On top of these structural disadvantages, women were not taken seriously as composers, forcing many to publish under male pseudonyms.

In many ways, electronic sound was a liberator from this history: your route to your audience was direct; radio stations and funding organisations could be bypassed. As the documentary Sisters with Transistors puts it: “Technology is a tremendous liberator; it blows up power structures”.

Take Daphne Oram, who co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958 and soon left to build an independent studio — in the 1950s! Her Oramics system literally drew music. She inked shapes on 35mm film and translated those graphics into sound, bypassing notation and orchestras entirely. Composition became inscription.

Or take Delia Derbyshire, who proved this experimental noise could be popular. Working at the Radiophonic Workshop in 1963, she realised Ron Grainer’s Doctor Who theme with test tones, spliced tape, and varispeed, introducing electronic music to millions of TV viewers. That theme took her 40 days; at that time, this sort of work was such a meticulous process — the talent of these composers cannot be overstated.

Across the Atlantic, Bebe and Louis Barron wired bespoke circuits that behaved more like their own unruly performers than instruments. Their score for Forbidden Planet became Hollywood’s first completely electronic soundtrack, but to their dismay, and because of the ignorance of the Musicians’ Union at the time, MGM credited the score as “electronic tonalities”, not “music”, and therefore they were not able to win any awards for the groundbreaking score.

Pauline Oliveros, one of my favourite composers, who championed the idea of “Quantum” and “Deep Listening”, co-founded the San Francisco Tape Music Centre, pooling gear and inventing practices – tape-delay systems, Sonic Meditations, and later Deep Listening – turning listening into compositional action and a form of social care. You didn’t need an orchestra, you didn’t need musical training; you just needed your ears, friends, and a room.

The documentary is a powerful account of this early, important, and often forgotten history. However, an important problem Pitchfork points out is that it largely centres white, Western figures and misses many women from Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Black diaspora who pushed the medium in parallel. Take, for example, Michiko Toyama – she was one of the first women at the Columbia–Princeton Electronic Music Center in the late 1950s, studying tape techniques with Otto Luening and Vladimir Ussachevsky while the studio was being built with Rockefeller money during the Cold War “cultural diplomacy” push. Her 1960 album Waka and Other Compositions folds classical Japanese verse and timbres into mid-century experimental procedures, including electronic instrumentation – an early recorded example of a woman composer using tape and electronics to connect non-Western aesthetics to American lab culture.

This sort of exclusion reminded me of something I learnt in sociology – firstly, Du Bois’s double consciousness: that is, the pressure to see yourself both through your own eyes and through the dominant culture’s gaze — a split many P.O.C. artists have had to internalise, judged by the “excellence” of Euro-American standards. Kimberlé Crenshaw took Du Bois’s idea further with intersectionality: that race, gender, and class do not add up in neat layers but intersect, producing qualitatively different barriers for a poor woman of colour than for a white middle-class woman. So, I think it’s important to acknowledge the pipeline into grants, archives, and the press cannot be solely put down to gender.

Electronic technology didn’t just change the palette of sounds; it changed the pathways into composing. By letting artists bypass entrenched gatekeepers and claim total authorship, it opened doors that had long been closed. Yet liberation wasn’t evenly distributed: the same structures that kept women out of conservatories also shaped who gained access to labs, airtime, and historical credit. Honouring this history means celebrating figures like Oram, Derbyshire, and Oliveros while also widening the lens to include pioneers from outside the Euro-American frame. The more completely we listen, the more accurately we can hear how women — across many contexts — rebuilt the very idea of what composition could be.