Music in Miniature

In 1946, the British Home Service began broadcasting the half hour chamber music program Music in Miniature, a half hour of continuous music from the London Studios. Junior engineer Daphne Oram and British Opera personality Basil Douglas put the program together with no announcements during the course of the broadcast so that the music would flow without interruption.

Ms. Oram had been accepted to the Royal Academy of Music in 1942, but because of Wartime regulations, she would have had to sign an obligation to serve as a music teacher upon graduation. With no desire to wind up a "school ma’am", she instead joined the British Broadcasting. Due to the drain on the labor force due to the War, many women were trained for engineering duties.

Music in Miniature was as much of an artistic endeavor for Ms. Oram as it was for the featured players. "With no intermediate announcements to stop the flow, the programme enabled me to devise 25 minutes of continuous controlled sound, shaped as if it was a complete composition from beginning to end".

The program began with the strains of "Elizabethan Serenade 8" and a short announcement of the musicians who would play in the episode. It closed with a rereading of the artist’s names along with the composers featured.

Daphne Oram would go on to become a pioneer in Electronic Music and the creator of Oramics, a technique of "drawn sound" that uses waveforms drawn on clear media to control light reaching a sensor which creates the music.