Nick what? Now the role call for the great pioneers and electronic music favors men but that is very far from the real story. Tomorrow there's going to be a world premiere of a new documentary with a great title, Sisters with Transistors narrated by Laurie Anderson, which celebrates the genius of female electronic pioneers, some classically trained musicians, others mathematicians and some both, but often eclipsed by men. Well, earlier I spoke to the film's director, Lisa Rovner. Technology isn't a tremendous liberator. You didn't have to be accepted by any of the male dominated resources. You could make something with electronics and you can present music directly to your audience and that gives you tremendous freedom. But somehow women get forgotten from the history. Lisa, why is it that we know so little about the role that women have played in electronic music? I think the story of women or the history of women has been a story of silence. What I realized when I was looking for archive was that these women were acknowledged at the time. The fact that they've been forgotten is more a case of the way that we tell stories and the way that we write history. Like we really need to rethink how we tell stories because we're leaving a whole group of people out. Women pioneered electronic music. Women pushed the boundaries of what we considered to be music. Here hold your hand over these. You cannot play air with hammers, Clara would say. You have to play with butterfly wings. These women were enabled by this new technology with this new technology they could do it all themselves. Let me introduce this electronic generator here which produces a sound like this. Now I've made a little loop of tape here with varying pure turns on it. Now if I then put a little artificial reverberation on that I think you'll see where just beginning to get somewhere a little music. They were the composer, they were the performer and they were the sole arbiter of their creation. This technology was incredibly liberating. Being a woman composer was controversial at the time so this was a way for them to kind of circumvent the hierarchy or the establishment but there was something particularly suited to the idea that women are great listeners wasn't there. I think it's just that they were listening to the world around them and being inspired by what they heard. In the film Delia Darbyshire talks about being inspired by the sounds of the war. It comes to me that my laughter abstracts were sounds of the air ate sirens. One of the things that I realized throughout the making of this film what connects all these women is this active listening. I really feel that you know Pauline Oliveros in the film talks about listening as activism. Writing in the car with my parents for instance maybe in the back seat. Listening to my father tune his shortwave radio listening to the whistles and pops and static. I mean I was always fascinated with the in between sounds and the stations just tuning in between. I love that. Elian Radique talks about being inspired hearing music in the sounds of the airplanes flying above her apartment in Nice. These women were listening attentively and hearing music in sound and of course this is the beauty of what these women did is that they really broke the boundaries of the definition of music to include sound. Forbidden Planet was the first electronic music score. It was created by Louis and BB Baron with electronic circuits. The dying of morbias was the actual dying of the circuits. They saw the circuits as performers. The music that they composed was credited as electronic tonalities and this was because people from the music unions were worried that someday you know people would no longer use them but of course the only way that these machines were making music was because there were people behind manipulating cutting and composing with sound. The BBC archive. It's just amazing. Seeing Delia compose with tape is just you know one of the kind of gems of the film I think. You know it took her 40 days to compose a doctor who themes on that's how dedicate that's how difficult it was to work with this new technology with tape and then all we have to do is cut the notes the right limb. One of the people interviewed in the film talks about Delia's music as making electronic music beautiful and in that way more accessible. I think they definitely all realized that what they were doing was important. There were no female composers before these women that were able to get their music out to audiences. And Lisa Rovner's Sisters with Transistors film has a virtual cinema release on multiple platforms from tomorrow via modern films. So let's take a look.