Next to a pile of transistors and exposed metal, a woman with a pinroll hairdo tilts her head to one side and offers the camera a tight, prim smile. This is Daphne Oram, who, according to Science Museum curator Tim Boon, looked "like Margaret Thatcher . . . with a cut-glass accent", but helped lay the foundation for techno music.

Oram seems an unlikely candidate for a techno pioneer, but as a new exhibition at the Science Museum shows, her life's work was astonishing.

She began her career at the BBC as a sound balancer in 1943 and within a handful of years, was composing instrumental pieces while working in their radiophonic workshop, before setting up on her own in the brilliantly titled Tower Folly studio in Kent. But it was the creation of Oramics, a technique she developed in 1957 that involved "drawing on 10 strips of 35mm film, which were then read by photo-electronic cells and converted into sound" that is the most remarkable. In effect, this was one of the earlier electronic instruments.

Oram worked with music continuously; in 1980, she initiated Out and Round About with Music (Oram), playing music in the open-air to older people with mobility problems. She died in 2003, but in the last few years there has been an increased interest in her legacy culminating in this exhibiton. Composer Hugh Davies, who worked in Oram's studio while still a student, wrote in her obituary: "Her dream was to create a machine with which the composer could 'convert graphic information into sound'".