Oram was largely tasked with providing whizzy sound effects for radio dramas. While some of these were innovative – soundtracking Samuel Beckett’s All That Falls, for instance – the potential for a whole new musical language remained untapped. Oram, undaunted, would work alone at night, pushing around tape recorders to create her own multi-track studio for producing symphonic works.

But then Oram was told to take six months off; her bosses said they were concerned about the effect of radiophonic equipment on the human body. Or should that be the female body? (Her male colleagues were fine, it seems). Deeply frustrated, Oram quit. Despite years of fighting for the Radiophonic Workshop, she barely saw it past its infancy.

“The BBC was an institution run by men, in a world that was more sexist,” says McArthur of Oram’s time. “This is not to say she was perfect or everyone around her was villainous, but she was standing up for something she felt was undervalued. And she was met with the attitude: this woman is very difficult, and willful, and stubborn, and these are all bad things for a woman to be.”

Striking out

Oram set up her own studio at Tower Folly, a converted oast house (hop-drying barn) in Kent. There she composed trail-blazing concert works using tape manipulation; these included Four Aspects (1960), whose twirling melodies, sludgy rhythms and ambient sound-washes were heard at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in 1968, and the heady, echo-sodden Pulse Persephone, a commission for the 1965 Treasures of the Commonwealth exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts. Commercial work (including jingles for Lego and Nestea) helped fund her.

Legend has it that Oram also received some well-known visitors, including The Who, Mick Jagger and The Beatles. Tantalising as it is to imagine the White Album with Oram in the studio, it was not to be. “She was heard to say that these boys with long hair had come to visit, but it was not really her thing,” says McArthur.