Daphne Oram's audiovisual music synthesizer, 1957

Daphne Oram (1925-2003) was the co-founder and first director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, a sound effects and music studio established in the 1950s that had a vast influence on electronic music and synthesizer technology. At the BBC and after, Oram developed an incredible new kind of sound synthesis technology, called Oramics. The video above offers a glimpse of her Oramics synthesizer, purchased from a collector in 2009 and now under restoration at the Science Museum in London. From DaphneOram.org:

Not only is this one of the earliest forms of electronic sound synthesis, it is noteworthy for being audiovisual in nature - i.e. the composer draws onto a synchronised set of ten 35mm film strips which overlay a series of photo-electric cells, generating electrical charges to control amplitude, timbre, frequency, and duration. This system was a key part of early BBC Radiophonic Workshop practice. However, after Daphne left the BBC (in 1959), her research, including Oramics, continued in relative secrecy.

"Oram was the first (and only?) woman to design and build an entirely new sound recording medium." (Hutton, J. 2003. Daphne Oram: Innovator, Writer and Composer. Organised Sound 8(1): 49-56. Camb: CUP).

"Daphne Oram's Oramics Post BBC Synthesizer" (MATRIXSYNTH via @chris_carter_)

Daphne Oram: An Electronic Music Pioneer

• [Anonymous]

  So the tape are the sequence ?

• [nixiebunny]

  I like this picture better than that one – it’s got more raw electronics.

  • [GearheadBustello]

    As well as an awesome ladyhacker.

    • [DoctressJulia]

      I think just ‘hacker’ should suffice. Why the hell do you have to add that patronizing ‘lady’ prefix? Ugh.

• [chroma]

  Was this used to create the Dr. Who theme?

  • [SpinkySulks]

    No, this was not the equipment used for the Doctor Who theme.

    That was created by Delia Derbyshire (another fascinating woman of early British electronic music), and Derbyshire used an even more motley connection of doodads and thingies to realize it.

    Oram’s Oramics came a bit later, and it was either after Miss Oram had left the BBC, or shortly before.

• [Phikus]

  Wow. This is quite remarkable. Ten years before Wendy Carlos got her hands on one of the first Moogs, and 13 years before Kraftwerk and other German bands created electronic art rock (which the bits on the video most closely resemble, imho.) Wonderful!

• [robulus]

  Fascinating stuff.

• [Anonymous]

  Very strange – just a few minutes ago, I read a piece about Paul McCartney considering using the BBC Radiophonic Workshop for the backing track to Yesterday (!), with just his voice over an electronic quartet, talked to them about it, but never pursued it. I had never heard of the Workshop and then clicked over to BB to find this post. This proves the InternetsGod is real!

• [jphilby]

  From the rust on the machine and on the film can, it looks as though this breakthrough relic was treated with all the care and consideration (erm, chuck it out in the shed) accorded the original WHO episodes.

  What a fucking crime. (LeCaine’s synth has similarly been eroded by decades of neglect.) I’m reminded of the long-neglected books in Pal’s “Time Machine”. Amazing, isn’t it, that noone can see the value of so many artifacts for so long?

• [burritoflats]

  The Radiophonic Workshop technicians (and they were always called technicians) were fairly badass. Last year BBC1 Radio broadcast and podcast a couple of long audio documentaries on the Workshop. One of the shows was a two-hour collection of bits and bobs from the Radiophonic sound effects and musical archives

  After Delia Derbyshire’s death, a whole slew of shoeboxes were discovered in her garage, filled with 5-inch reels of her impressive personal audio experiments. I believe those tapes are still being sorted through. Like I say, the Radiophonic workers were always considered technicians and were never to be confused with actual musicians – though of course they were, of the highest degree. I’ve always wondered whether sound alchemist Joe Meek ever crossed paths with the Radiophonic crew(?) – does anyone know?

• [Anonymous]

  Lev Termen patented the Theremin in 1928 and it was not the first electronic instrument. Quibbles about precedence set aside, yes, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop played an important role in the development of electronic music. Almost all the early development of electronic music in Europe was associated with studios at the various national radio services.

• [showcasejase]

  Composer and weirdo Percy Grainger was developing something similar around the same time. Have a look for his Free Music Machines.

• [GearheadBustello]

  I had a similar idea for a machine that would read changes in light from black dots on a long sheet of acetate. The placement of the dots correspond to the first hundred digits of pi. The notes were to be played by vibrating motors on a kalimba. I ran out of time (it was for class) and the machine didn’t work. I haven’t given up on it though. I actually got the idea from Tim Hawkinson’s Uber Organ

• [Hunty]

  Today I learned that dub music was invented by an English woman in the 50′s.

• [Jake0748]

  I haven’t even watched the video, read the article, or even the comments, yet. But, I’m in love with her already.

• [Jake0748]

  So… when are one of you electronics geeks(oops, I mean wizards) out there, going to come up with a way to emulate Daphne Oram’s machine?

  • [El Mariachi]

    It’s already been done!

    Oramics Emulator v.1 (OS X only)

    • [Jake0748]

      Cool! I want to play, but I’m stuck on a Windows machine. :P

• [Manooshi]

  Very cool post, David. Stoked to see a MATRIXSYNTH reference on BB!

• [rrh]

  Due to the use of film strips, it might have some ancestry in the sort of thing Norman McLaren did. There’s a short called “Pen Point Percussion” about how he worked. I had been trying to work out a way to emulate it, but ran into limitations in image size. Plus, in terms of interface, there’s a lot to be said for having a physical strip of film to draw on.

• [HerbT]

  An in depth read on the origins and events in the Radiophonic Workshop can be found in this book:

  http://www.oup.com/us/companion.websites/9780195368413/book/?view=usa

• [genre slur]

  I wonder if her and LeCaine hooked up and compared brains? He’s Canadian shizzle — check the instrument section
  http://www.hughlecaine.com

• [waxx]

  The BBC was truly a audiolab, where a lot of equipment of the past is still searched a lot (or still sold trough private firms). Their Calrec broadcast mixers are very sought and go for a high second hand price, and some microphones like the Coles 4038 (still in production after 60+ years) and various Calrec microphones are true classics who are still used a lot in big studio’s worldwide. Both firms are originally BBC tech shops who became independent BBC spinoffs firms…

  I’m rather sure more hidden treasures are in the BBC vaults, it’s just a matter that someone get them out.

  • [burritoflats]

    According to a recent BBC documentary I heard, a lot of the old BBC audio equipment is kept in house. The BBC radio staff are currently involved in a massive effort to digitize old, one of a kind programs – some of which were cut direct to fragile transcription discs. Also keeping ancient tape heads alligned and such is important. I think the number of preservation tasks/audio projects they complete per day is something like 5 to 10

• [avraamov]

  @jphilby:

  yeah – it had gone through the hands of one or two collectors of such thing, before spending the last few years in an old barn in france… it actually had birdshit on it in places when it arrived.

  @rrh – oramics is related to McClaren’s work, insofar as it uses hand-drawn figures to shape the waveform, but the similarity ends there. Oram didn’t use the optical film soundtrack as it was formulated at the time, she just utilised a ready made, cheap transparent medium to draw on, which came with lot’s of useful bits for accurate transport and alignment (ie, 35mm film). the squiggles and squares you see on the film strips in the archive photos are instructions for the circuitry that sits in that white cabinet, rather than the sounds themselves. the oscillators in the cabinet produce the basic waveform, which is then shaped using ‘masking’, whereby an opaque mask is scanned by a line of light (in this case CRT’s from oscilloscopes). the mask varies the amount of light being let through, which produces a corresponding voltage from a photomultiplier above. the scanning rate is determined by the pitch of the oscillator. All those tubes are hidden in the white cabinet as well.

  Anon @9 – that’s only partly true. there was also a lot of stuff happening in the nascent film industry in the early ’30′s the optical film soundtrack got invented (pretty much simultaneously in the U.S.A, the USSR and Germany) and people instantly saw the potential for synthetic sound creation, since they could either draw or photograph it straight on. Sholpo’s ‘variophon’ is a good example of this, as was Arsenii Avraamov’s ‘ornamental sound’.

  photophonic synthesis got superseded for the most part by voltage control oscillators and tape after the war, partly due to the relative instability of photographic substrates, which caused sound degradation under such demanding conditions. some people still made synthesizers using these methods though – the most awesome being Murzin’s ‘ANS’ synth, which got used by Artimiev to compose the soundtracks to Tarlovsky’s ‘Solaris’ and ‘Stalker’.

  Andrei’s Smirnov’s book on the subject is due out any day now…

• [endymion]

  Synthesizer Patel would love this.