Oramics Emulator v.1 (OS X only)

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.

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?

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?

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

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

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…