Drawn Sound on Film Before Oram

A soundtrack is a picture

Cinema film carries its sound as a narrow strip printed down one side, beside the pictures. In the projector a lamp shines through that strip onto a photocell. As the film travels, the width of the clear part of the strip changes, so the amount of light getting through changes, and the photocell turns that changing light into a changing voltage. Amplify the voltage and you have the sound.

That is the only mechanism any of what follows needs. If the sound is held as a shape, and the shape is just ink on a transparent strip, then nothing requires the shape to have come from a microphone. It can be drawn.

Arseny Avraamov

The composer Arseny Avraamov proposed making sound by drawing it in 1916, which is more than a decade before films carried soundtracks at all. He got to do it later, making the sound for the Soviet film Piatiletka, released around 1929 to 1930, by photographing series of drawings onto the film. His interest was in what would happen if the shapes came from somewhere other than music:

what if we take Egyptian or ancient Greek ornaments as a sound track

Avraamov, on Piatiletka, 1929

Oskar Fischinger, working on the same idea in Germany, put it the other way round and wrote that these ornaments are drawn music. The attraction in both cases was that a decorative pattern has a structure nobody chose for its sound, so playing it tells you something you could not have composed.

Evgeny Sholpo's Variophone

In 1932 the engineers Evgeny Sholpo and Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov, a grandson of the composer Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, built the Variophone at the Central Laboratory of Wire Communication in Leningrad, after several years of research into music that could be made without performers. Sound waves were cut into cardboard discs which turned in step with 35mm film and were photographed onto the film's soundtrack. Running the film through the process again added another part, so a single soundtrack could carry up to twelve voices.

Sholpo used it for film and cartoon soundtracks through the 1930s and 1940s, among them A Symphony of Peace in 1932. The machine was destroyed in a bombardment during the Siege of Leningrad. After the war he ran a laboratory for graphical sound in Leningrad with Boris Yankovsky; he died in 1951 and the laboratory was closed.

Norman McLaren

Norman McLaren was an animator, later at the National Film Board of Canada, and he drew both the pictures and the sound of his films by hand onto the same piece of stock. Loops, from 1940, is the method at its plainest. In Pen Point Percussion, made in 1951, he sits at a desk and explains on camera how the marks turn into pitch and loudness, which makes it the clearest surviving account of how any of this was actually done.

Where Oram departs

Popular accounts usually file Oramics alongside this work, and the distinction is worth being exact about. Avraamov, Sholpo and McLaren drew the sound wave itself. The drawing was the recording: the film held the audio, and playing the film played the sound. Nothing generated anything.

Daphne Oram drew instructions. Her film strips told the machine which pitch to play, how loud to play it, and how much vibrato and reverberation to add. The waveform that sets the timbre was painted separately, on static glass slides, and read by the wave scanner. The machine generated the sound live, following the written instructions, which means the film is a score rather than a recording and the same film could in principle sound different on a differently painted set of slides.

Two machines that came close

PAT, Edinburgh

The Parametric Artificial Talker was built at the University of Edinburgh's Phonetics Department. It produced speech from six graphs drawn on loops of clear material: pitch, volume, noise and three vowel overtones. It was not built for music. Walter Lawrence of the Ministry of Supply started it to find a way of sending speech down undersea cables using less bandwidth. Oram probably first saw it in a 1958 BBC programme, Eye on Research, and visited it on 27 August 1959, writing in her diary that she had gleaned a lot of useful information. She came away with a recording of PAT saying one sentence, "what have you done with it?", which is in her archive, and wrote asking for more.

The Hamograph, Toronto

Myron Schaeffer and Hugh Le Caine built the Hamograph in 1960. Brushes read six loops of 35mm film drawn in conductive tape. Schaeffer sent Oram a description and some recordings on 11 July 1961.

The question of who influenced whom matters here, because both machines read drawn parameters off loops in a way that looks like Oramics. Tom Richards found Schaeffer's letter in Toronto rather than in Oram's own archive, which puts her knowledge of the Hamograph nearly a year before her first Gulbenkian grant. His conclusion is that she had already conceived the basic elements and an overall block design for a drawn-sound device before discovering either one, and that their influence was limited to technical nuances rather than overall design concepts.

Sources

The dates and detail on Avraamov and Sholpo come from 120years.net, drawing on Andrey Smirnov's research. Everything on Oram, PAT and the Hamograph comes from Tom Richards, Oramics: Precedents, Technology and Influence, PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2018. The 1958 BBC programme on PAT is online at vimeo.com/26005634. Written for Drawing Sound.