Daphne Oram - Electronic Music Pioneer - and the Oramics machine

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This topic is for posts about Daphne Oram - the Electronic Music Pioneer, whose name has been given to Zynthian’s first named release. First up, an article from Music Radar today, 2024-03-08:

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Thanks @tunagenes !!
Nice report.

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And here is a lot more technical detail as well as very interesting stories and history about early British electronic music, EMS, Daphne Oram (of course), and funding all of the above from Tom Richards’ PhD thesis on (re)building the Oramics Machine:

Lots of interesting ideas for Zynthian and Zynia, arrived at via:
https://www.daphneoram.org/oramicsmachine/

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From 8 years ago, a Mini-Oramics Medley by Tom Richards:

Makes me wonder what we could do in Oram, without substantially delaying the release, that would actually incorporate some of the “drawn sound” ideas.

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The Audio Player is a tool that is providing many of the basic operations for a sound sample manipulation, and has been quietly developing from what was originally a test feature in the zynthian.
It started out just playing audio files but after it had been refined enough to start precisely it grew alarmingly. It got pitch accurate transposition, the ability to easily top and tail a clip and after a fairly success driven session it grew envelope controls. It also has some pretty impressive scrub controls.

@riban is, obviously, all to blame for all this…

How this integrates with zynseq is something that is shuffling into view, perhaps the pad view of the interface might allow an opto tranparency layer on top!! Why not … ?

Any thing else is best thrown to the rapid pit of arduino hardware interface developers that do this sort of thing…

There is, of course, the touchscreen X-y modulation that might play into this area…

https://wiki.zynthian.org/index.php/Zynthian_UI_User_Guide_-_V1/V4#XY-Controller

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Some further breadcrumbs from exploring the web for Daphne Oram, here is a site called
The Sound Drawer - Daphne Oram: the woman who could paint music:

Which led to a YouTube video or more accurately audio with a picture:

Which led to a whole YouTube channel of her records-works!:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCpq2fPNjj_sq7ncB2etGyKg

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Here is a very interesting story on Daphne Oram and her multi-decade effort to realize her vision of “reversing an oscilloscope” to “paint sound”:

The story of the Oramics Machine

There’s even a picture of Daphne and Peter Sellers cooperatively operating what I presume is an audio oscillator!

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