Drawing Sound

A workshop on Daphne Oram and the Oramics machine

The workshop title card: a photograph of Daphne Oram speaking, over a black band reading Drawing Sound, Daphne Oram And The Oramics Synthesizer

Drawing Sound is a workshop by Stuart Frederich-Smith, debuting at Synth Library Portland. It runs in two halves. The first is an hour on Daphne Oram and the machine she spent most of her working life building, in order to write sound rather than record it. The second is given over to drawing, on paper and on screen, and playing back the results. The deck for the first half is below, along with the speaker notes, which carry the sourcing and the asides that would not fit on a slide. Four of its thirty-four slides are live diagrams rather than pictures: the studio at Tower Folly, how a pitch was written, how the flying spot and photomultiplier worked, and the wave scanner itself.

Open the deck Read the speaker notes

Several slides cue up recordings that are not published here, since the clips are commercial releases and archive material. The deck checks for them when it loads and marks them as missing, and it runs without them.

The history

In 1958 electronic music meant tape. A composer recorded a sound, cut the tape, and spliced it back together in a different order, and the work lived in the editing. Daphne Oram wanted to write sound directly, the way a composer writes notes on a stave, and she spent roughly fifteen years building a machine that would let her do it. The BBC was not the place to do it from: where Paris, Cologne and Milan founded studios so that composers could make art music, the BBC founded a facility to make noises for radio drama, and the word radiophonic was itself a way of avoiding the word music. She left in January 1959 and set up her own studio at Tower Folly, a converted oast house in Kent, where the machine was built between 1962 and 1969.

It ran ten strips of clear 35mm film over photocells. The pitch of each note was written on them as short bars of black tape, while volume, vibrato, glissando and reverberation were drawn by hand as lines, and four hand-painted glass slides mounted in front of cathode ray tubes supplied the waveforms. By any ordinary measure it was a difficult instrument: monophonic, chronically out of tune, good for about forty seconds of music at a time, and effectively immovable. She had set out her case for the method in a notebook in January 1961, and it is the argument the second half of the workshop takes up:

A freehand drawing method might produce very much more artistic results because of the inaccuracies inherent within it.

The full history is a separate series of five guides, written from the same material as the deck and carrying the live diagrams from it:

Then we draw

The second half runs on Daphne, a drawn-sound instrument written for this workshop. Sheets are printed and drawn on by hand, then photographed, and the application reads the drawing back and plays it, though it is also possible to draw directly on screen. Several of the original machine’s constraints are modelled rather than approximated, since they account for much of how it sounded, and each one is a switch that can be turned off. The scanner is the same feedback loop described above, running at audio rate over a two-dimensional opacity field.

The Daphne app: lanes for note, octave and three amplitudes drawn as lines, with four painted timbre slides along the bottom
The lanes are the film strips: pitch and octave at the top, then three amplitudes, drawn as lines the way Oram drew hers. The four slides along the foot are the painted waveforms, one cycle each, and the spot sits on the top edge of the paint. The checkboxes above are the constraints, including the flying-spot scanner, relay lag, whole-Hertz pitch and optical amplitude.

Daphne is free and open source, and every version of it always will be. There are builds for macOS, Windows and Linux, and its own page covers the drawing tools, the printed sheets and what it models from the machine. The sheet people draw on is a printable PDF, thirty seconds of paper at a centimetre to the second.

Workshop 1

October 18th, 2026
Synth Library Portland

Daphne made its formal debut at a Synth Library Portland workshop. All attendees contributed one or multiple composition sheets which you can see below. We got a lot of different approaches and one or two gave the app some trouble, which I’ll try to patch up for the next release. Feel free to download any of the images here, they should easily import into the app.

A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot A composition sheet drawn by hand at the first workshop, with lines across the pitch, amplitude, vibrato, reverberation and transport lanes and four waveforms at the foot

Sources

Most of the dates, quotations and technical detail come from Tom Richards, Oramics: Precedents, Technology and Influence, PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, 2018. Graham Wrench, who built much of the electronics including the wave scanner, described the work in an interview in Sound on Sound. The account also draws on Peter Manning in Organised Sound 17(2), 2012, and on Oram’s own logbooks and correspondence in the Daphne Oram Archive at Goldsmiths.