Mothers of Invention: Five Pioneering Women and their Musical Creations

Laurie Spiegel, inventor of ‘The Music Mouse’

Music is still far from a level playing field in terms of gender equality. But in recent years, at least, there has been a concerted effort to raise profiles, improve opportunities and offer a greater appreciation of the overlooked women who define our industry. It’s something we’ve seen everywhere from feature film productions to awards ceremonies. 

On the Goldstein blog, we’ve championed films like ‘Sisters With Transistors’ — a documentary on the unsung heroines of electronic music. We’ve explored key female composers from Japanese video games maestro Rika Muranaka to Icelandic Academy Award-winner Hildur Guðnadóttir. And we were talking about female orchestra conductors long before ‘Tár’ was getting Cate Blanchett hyped for Oscars glory.

This International Women’s Day, we’re taking the opportunity to celebrate women in music once again — but this time, we’re looking at things from a different angle. Here’s a list of some of our favourite inventors and innovators who have contributed to the artistic development of music over the past century or so. Enjoy!

Antha Minerva Virgil: The Techniphone

Funnily enough, the first instrument on this list doesn’t actually make any sound. 

After moving to New York in 1883, piano teacher and music school founder Antha Minerva Virgil developed a soundless keyboard for the purpose of practising music at home. The device, called the ‘Techniphone’ (also known as the Virgil clavier), produced no pitched tones, but the keys were weighted — which enabled players to build up their finger strength during their silent practice.

It might sound like a funny proposition now, but this was nearly a full decade before French engineer Ernest Mercadier filed the first personal headphones patent in 1891 — and they wouldn’t be utilised for music until years later. Today, brands like Yamaha are still running with the idea — their SILENT series includes violins, drums, brass, and even guitars, all designed to help players with personal practice without disturbing the neighbours.

Megan Watts Hughes: The Eidophone

‘Plant Forms’, an Impression Figure by Megan Watts Hughes (via Cyfarthfa Castle Museum and Art Gallery)

Welsh singer, songwriter and scientist Megan Watts Hughes is recognised for being one of the first individuals to experiment with the visualisation of resonating sounds — something she achieved using a device called an ‘Eidophone’. 

The contraption consisted of a mouthpiece, a receiving chamber, and a rubber membrane — upon which a variety of powders were sprinkled. Watts Hughes would sing into the device, causing the powders to “resolve themselves into a perfect geometrical figure” upon the membrane. The results would vary depending on adjustments to things like tone and volume. 

Her research was sufficient enough that she was able to publish a book on the subject in 1904, titled ‘The Eidophone Voice Figures: Geometrical and Natural Forms Produced by Vibrations of the Human Voice’. Perhaps even more interesting was the art that she was able to create with her invention — much of which resembles the shapes and patterns seen in flowers and plant life.

Daphne Oram: The Oramics Machine

As a pioneer of musique concrète in the UK — and the first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop — Daphne Oram’s impact on electronic music in British cinema is profound, yet largely unsung. She was not, for example, credited for her audio contributions to the James Bond films ‘Dr. No’ and ‘From Russia With Love’ — nor was she for her work on the 1961 Gothic horror ‘The Innocents’. But she is celebrated for pioneering a drawn-sound technique known as ‘Oramics’.

Oramics was a method that involved drawing directly onto 35mm film stock, which was then read by photo-electric cells and transformed into sounds. The concept is today considered a forerunner to MIDI sequencing and digital audio workstation (DAW) technology. The electro-mechanical interface itself (known as the Oramics Machine), which was co-designed by Oram between 1962 and 1969, can now be found in the permanent collection of the Science Museum — a testament to its historical significance.

Laurie Spiegel: The Music Mouse

In 1986, composer Laurie Spiegel completed what would become her best-known software creation: a program for Macintosh, Amiga and Atari computers called ‘The Music Mouse’.

Spiegel’s innovation was an “intelligent instrument” that could track mouse movements inside a grid on the screen and transform them into a series of moving voices. The program featured built-in knowledge of chord and scale conventions and stylistic constraints, enabling the automatic creation of chords, harmonies and tones in participation with the user’s input.

With voices assignable to MIDI channels, and tempo, velocity, and other kinds of modulation and filtering controlled during playback via typed keyboard commands, the result was a fun and intuitive compositional platform that produced inspiring results regardless of the user’s musical ability.

Ellen Fullman: The Long String Instrument

In a 2016 Guardian article titled ‘Ellen Fullman: how to play a 100ft stringed instrument’, Ben Beaumont-Thomas summed up this inventor’s unique musical contraption aptly: “It’s got 56 strings, takes five days to install, and sounds like a prairie wind”, he wrote. It conjures an image entirely conducive to the photos displayed further in — with the device spanning an entire room, dwarfing its player in comparison.

The Long Stringed Instrument (LSI) is more than just an oversized harp, though. The product of a 30-year obsession, the LSI combines stainless steel and phosphor bronze strings to produce droning, cosmic tones almost akin to those of Indian ragas. Better yet, when deconstructed, it all fits into Fullman’s suitcase — making it easy to cart to places like the London Contemporary Music Festival, and The Sydney Festival in Australia.

If you’re interested in music composition, supervision, licensing or sound branding for your project, please do get in touch.