Women In Electronic Music Animations and Record Sleeves
A personal project using analogue collage and animation to tell the story of the pioneering women behind the development of electronic music.
“The history of women has been a story of silence, of breaking through the silence with beautiful noise” Laurie Anderson, Sisters With Transistors.


Delia Derbyshire
Delia Derbyshire was an English mathematician who carried out groundbreaking work at the BBC radiophonics workshop in the 1960s. Attracted to abstract sounds, Delia recorded real world noises on reels of magnetic tape before splicing, layering and manipulating them to create new sounds. Her work was entirely analogue, and she had a penchant for the beautiful ringing notes created by the BBC studio metal lampshades.
Music: Ziwzih ziwzih oo-oo-oo by Delia Derbyshire
Pauline Oliveros
Pauline Oliveros was a pioneer of early electronic music in the US who coined the term ‘Deep Listening’. She famously started out with a tape recorder collecting and abstracting the ambient sounds of the world around her. She developed her sonic meditations as a reaction to the post-war political environment, where ‘Deep Listening’ explores the difference between the involuntary nature of hearing and the conscious nature of listening. Her seminal album of the same name was recorded 14 feet below ground in a cistern where sounds reverberated for up to 45 seconds.
“The key to multi-level existence is Deep Listening – listening in as many ways as possible to everything that can possibly be heard all of the time”, Pauline Oliveros.
Music: Excerpt from the album Deep Listening