The Daphne Oram Trust has launched a Kickstarter project to fund a new printing of electronic music pioneer Daphne Oram’s 1972 book on ‘music sound and electronics’, An Individual Note.
The book offers a look at the technology and ideas behind creating electronic music, from the perspective of a mid-century electronica pioneer.
“We will be entering a strange world where composers will be mingling with capacitors, computers will be controlling crotchets and, maybe, memory, music and magnetism will lead us towards metaphysics,” she writes at the start of the book.
Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was the first Director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which she co-founded in 1958. She also created a personal approach to sound synthesis, Oramics, that allowed her to score and directly control the parameters of synthesized sound.
The Oram Trust hopes to raise £10,000 via fund the new printing of the book. The money raised will allow them to pay for:
- An editor to coordinate, edit and produce the new edition of the book
- A designer to design, layout and typeset the book
- A writer to create a new introduction for the book
- Reproduction work on the images and diagrams featured in the book- Travel, courier and postage costs during the production process
- The production of 1,000 printed copies
- An advert in The Wire magazine to promote the book when it’s published
- The Kickstarter Fees and reward costs.
The new printing of An Individual Note is available to project backers for £20, about US $29.
Seems like contacting a book publisher might work better than kickstarter, since they regularly ….publish books.
I would buy this if I saw it on a shelf, but Kickstarter is the devil.
kickstarter is the devil?
seems a bit much..
It seems weird that they haven’t got this going as an editorial project first, maybe put the book together digitally (it doesn’t cost a lot of time or money to do this) and then they might raise money for printing. I’m a small press publisher. I don’t see how you need 10k to publish a reissue of an old book unless you are doing a print run of 000s, which would be foolish.
What’s weird is the apparently have a book publisher onboard already, according to the KS page.
But the publisher has no editors or graphic artists or layout/design staff? Seems like a rather useless publishing house.
Unless this is actually a Kickstarter to fund starting the publisher….
More like a way of guaranteeing a certain number of sales before risking the print run. Book looks interesting…I’m fairly keen.
An advert in Wired magazine? Really? Haven’t they heard of social media? And is Wired really the right place for this? Surely giving a few copies away to the media would be better.
10,000 seems an awful lot to publish a book whose contents already exist, with the exception of a 1 or 2 page introduction.