I just had the sad news that Daphne Oram died on Sunday January 5, 2003. After being one of the founder members of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, she then devoted her life to creating her unique Oramics music-making machine. The music she made is not easy to find, but there is an extract on a recent Leonardo double CD compilation - (I can't find a sound clip there, though.) A forthcoming double CD compilation by Sub Rosa in Belgium will feature the whole of this piece, called Four Aspects. She wrote a book called An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, which is a brilliant, quirky mix of electronics, quasi-psychedelic revelation, and general musings.

Talking of her music, and of the way that her Oramics system evolved, she says:

http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/machines/oramics/ has some info.

My draft of the Oramics entry in the N-Z of Analog Synths looks like this:- Daphne Oram worked for the BBC as a Music Balancer from 1943 onwards. She was instrumental, with Desmond Briscoe, in setting up the Radiophonic Workshop there in 1958. She then left only a year later to concentrate on her own ideas for sound creation. She worked single-mindedly on her 'Oramics' system, building it from scratch, with the help of an engineer called Graham Wrench, and occasionally a part-time assistant. She also wrote a book, 'An Individual Note', which would have been guaranteed to enfuriate all the predominantly male experts on electronic music. It's an eccentric swoop around the mystical further reaches of electronics, life and the universe - "Could individuality be viewed as the equal and opposite force which balances entropy? Just as a node balances an antinode? Could the world be a never ending pulsation of energy forming into individuality, then being disseminated by entropy, only to reform into new individuality - a basic pulsation, the very fundamental of all fundamental sinewaves?".

She was able to work on the Oramics system thanks to a generous grant of £3500 from the Gulbenkian Foundation in 1961. The first version of Oramics was working in 1962, using ten tracks on a 35mm cine film - nine to control pitch, envelope, rhythm and duration, dynamics, vibrato, reverb, timbre, and one for synchronisation. The timbres were actually wave-forms drawn on glass slides, scanned by cathode-ray tubes. By June 9th, 1966, when she had received another £1000 from the Gulbenkian Foundation, she reported progress as follows:

"We are delighted to tell you that we have succeeded in proving that graphic information can be converted into sound. We can draw any wave form pattern and scan this electronically to produce sound. By varying the shape of the scanned pattern the timbre is varied accordingly. The speed of the scanning is controlled by digital information written on the clear 35mm films of the programmer, and this determines the pitch of the sound produced. A number of scanners can be controlled for pitch in this way. By writing information on the other films of the programmer, the following parameters are controlled-duration of each note; timbre mixture; the overall volume envelope of each separate waveform which is contributing to that timbre mixture; reverberation (either on the timbre mixture or on a selected waveform of the timbre mixture); and vibrato......there is much work to be done in learning its "language".

At the moment my own writing technique is rather akin to the efforts of a small child who has just learnt to write "the cat is on the mat"! As this is an entirely new field, no one can teach me how to do it-I have just got to work it out for myself. This will be a time consuming occupation-for the possibilities are so great (--but at least this machine does not need the great amount of digital information which has to be supplied to a computer.) Once I am fairly proficient at it I shall write a guide book for other composers. Whilst I am evolving these graphic techniques on the programmer, Mr. Wrench will be modifying and expanding the equipment to suit these techniques. Although June 1st has proved to be "prototype day", just as we had hoped it would, the fact that the machine now works does not mean that it is finished (--no more than the Wright brothers felt that the aeroplane was completed the day they first flew on in North Carolina !) I expect to go on for the rest of my life developing this idea of graphic sound."

The Oramics system that finally evolved had more than a touch of the Heath Robinson about it. A large structure made of angle iron holds the main section, with a flat table on which the 35mm film could have its black control patterns added to it. (The method Ms Oram seems to have settled on was using black insulating tape, cut into the required shape with scissors - but black ink applied with a brush was another, more immediately aesthetic method.) Underneath this section were the motor and massive tube amplifiers. Next to this (and perhaps a later addition) was an extremely heavy section with what seems to be a primitive multi-tracking system, using several tracks of 35mm magnetic stock. While this may have been heavy in order to provide a smoothing flywheel effect, it must have given big engineering headaches, since only the heaviest-duty motor could have operated it.

Other sections of the system were two sizable speaker cabinets - very basic in design, but with now valuable old Goodmans inside - and a light proof cabinet made out of an old (possibly antique) cupboard. This cabinet also had a considerable amount of processing electronics in it. How this fits into the scheme of things is difficult to work out. The 35mm film optical readers are placed on the main section, so what this separate thing does is open to conjecture. In 'An Individual Note', Ms Oram has a photo of her studio, and this cupboard is some way from the main unit, and at an angle. The speakers and cabinet were painted cream, to try to get some sort of visual homogeneity into this hotchpotch of metal and wood. The keyboard from a Clavioline has been adapted as some sort of controller at some stage, but whether it was designed to bypass the optical processing or supplement it isn't clear.

The system is in storage as of 2003, and in a very bad state - with bent angle-iron, missing tubes, and a big hand-written notice next to a mains-level switch saying 'Do not use this switch!'. The Gulbenkian Foundation have been very helpful in supplying copies of all their correspondence with Ms Oram (including the letter quoted above), but don't have any circuit diagrams or other technical information.

Peter Forrest