A film portrait of pioneering electronic music composer Janet Beat....

in production..

Janet Beat was born in Streetly, Staffordshire on 17 December 1937. She graduated from Birmingham University in 1960, with a Bachelor of Music degree. During the 1960’s she worked as a freelance horn player and teacher while writing her postgraduate thesis on aspects of early Italian opera. One of the women pioneers in electronic music composition in Great Britain, [her earliest works date from 1958], Beat was also a contemporary and peer of Daphne Oram.

She introduced electronic music in the 1960s first at Worcester College of Education with the help of the science department whose technician built some filters, a ring modulater and loaned a signal generator to her until the EMS Synthi A became available.

In the 1970s, she established Electronic Music & Recording Studios for the Royal Scottish Conservatoire, (formerly the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama), where she joined the full time staff in 1972 but from 1991 she became part-time in order to concentrate on composing.

In 2019 she received the first SWIM (Scottish Women Inventing Music) Lifetime Achievement Award as a composer, music educator and writer on music.

This will be the first film devoted to her work.