Hacker Cinema
Sisters with Transistors
2021 · Film · documentary · 86 min
Directed by Lisa Rovner
Think of early electronic music and you’ll likely see men pushing buttons, knobs, and boundaries. While electronic music is often perceived as a boys' club, the truth is that from the very beginning women have been integral in inventing the devices, techniques and tropes that would define the shape of sound for years to come.
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6 comments on Hacker News
> Waveforms were drawn on glass plates
Interestingly enough the documentary "Sisters with Transistors" show some British pioneers adopt a similar approach, but drawing on film rather than glass plates, in the 40s and 50s.
"Sisters with Transistors" is a superb film. Before I watched it, the only one of the many extraordinary women presented therein that I knew of was Delia Derbyshire.
I had no idea that the soundtrack to The Forbidden Planet (which may very well be the greatest Science Fiction film ever made), was by Louis and Bebe Barron on equipment they pretty much entirely built themselves. Today, we plug in a laptop, back then you were a true pioneer.
Adult Swim's "Lords of Synth" comedy short contains a homage to Wendy Carlos in the form of a certain "Carla Wendos" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXgNo5Smino
There's also the documentary "Sisters with transistors" about women pioneers of electronic music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r-3hlzpV7M
It's a modern Web Audio implementation of this Mac software from 1986 (last updated in 2004).
Music Mouse - An Intelligent Instrument - https://web.archive.org/web/20220629172536fw_/http://retiary.org/ls/programs.html (Archived because the original site is quite slow: http://retiary.org/ls/programs.html)
It was written by Laurie Spiegel, a composer and early pioneer in electronic music.
> Music Mouse is an algorithmic musical composition software developed by Laurie Spiegel. The "intelligent instrument" name refers to the program's built-in knowledge of chord and scale convention and stylistic constraints. Automating these processes allows the user to focus on other aspects of the music in real time.
> In addition to improvisations using this software, Spiegel composed several works for "Music Mouse", including Cavis muris in 1986, Three Sonic Spaces in 1989, and Sound Zones in 1990. She continued to update the program through Macintosh OS 9 and, as of 2021, it remained available for purchase or demo download from her website.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurie_Spiegel
She was featured in the documentary, Sisters with Transistors. https://sisterswithtransistors.com/
If you like electronic music, check out "Sisters with Transistors", a documentary about women in electronic music going back to the 1920's.
https://sisterswithtransistors.com/the-pioneers
Something like Eno's tape loops, in 1949 Daphe Oram was doing similar research with optical "tape" loops on some early synths she built. What's fascinating is how no one had any paths to follow, they were just throwing things at the wall to see what worked.
For those interested there is also "Delia Derbyshire: The Myths and the Legendary Tapes" that aired on BBC4 recently and is available on the iPlayer:
https://djmag.com/news/new-documentary-drama-about-electronic-music-pioneer-delia-derbyshire
Cosey Fanni Tutti from Throbbing Gristle also contributed to the soundtrack.
There is also "Sisters with Transistors" which features a bunch of pioneering women in electronic music including Delia Derbyshire. This also came out recently as well:
https://sisterswithtransistors.com/