A brief history of the oramics machine:
Daphne Oram attended Sherborne School where she studied music, and subsequently was accepted for the Royal College of Music in 1942. She joined the BBC as a Junior Programme Engineer, drawing on her musical talent and technical skills she had learned from her brother, an electrical engineer, with whom she had built radio transmitters and receivers as a child. Her responsibilities at the time included sequencing the playback of classical recordings, which required the seamless transition every four minutes between 78 RPM discs. Engineers had to sync and mix the discs that made up the long symphonies to play them in full live, a technique almost identical to mixing two vinyl records today.
One of the features of joining the BBC at the time was the scope and depth of the training programme offered to new employees. Oram attended a residential course in 1944 which focussed on broadcast engineering. During the course a particular device caught her attention, the Cathode Ray Oscilloscope. The machine is used to display the characteristics of waveforms—in this case sound waves—graphically. Characteristically keen to advance her understanding of the technology for her own creative ends, she asked the tutor at the time whether it would be possible to reverse the process of the oscilloscope, drawing the waveform in and thereby controlling the harmonic content of the soundwave. He replied "no," a word which seems to have been interpreted by Oram as a direct challenge. It was not long after this encounter that she began to refer to the idea for a "graphical music" system. She resigned to set up her own studio, the Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition, and to begin work in earnest on her system for graphical music, the Oramics Machine.
Daphne Oram attended Sherborne School where she studied music, and subsequently was accepted for the Royal College of Music in 1942. She joined the BBC as a Junior Programme Engineer, drawing on her musical talent and technical skills she had learned from her brother, an electrical engineer, with whom she had built radio transmitters and receivers as a child. Her responsibilities at the time included sequencing the playback of classical recordings, which required the seamless transition every four minutes between 78 RPM discs. Engineers had to sync and mix the discs that made up the long symphonies to play them in full live, a technique almost identical to mixing two vinyl records today.
One of the features of joining the BBC at the time was the scope and depth of the training programme offered to new employees. Oram attended a residential course in 1944 which focussed on broadcast engineering. During the course a particular device caught her attention, the Cathode Ray Oscilloscope. The machine is used to display the characteristics of waveforms—in this case sound waves—graphically. Characteristically keen to advance her understanding of the technology for her own creative ends, she asked the tutor at the time whether it would be possible to reverse the process of the oscilloscope, drawing the waveform in and thereby controlling the harmonic content of the soundwave. He replied "no," a word which seems to have been interpreted by Oram as a direct challenge. It was not long after this encounter that she began to refer to the idea for a "graphical music" system. She resigned to set up her own studio, the Oramics Studios for Electronic Composition, and to begin work in earnest on her system for graphical music, the Oramics Machine.
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