Generative Art Timeline · Chapter 4: Digital Era (1960s)

1962

Daphne Oram Develops Oramics, Sound Drawn by Hand

Invention · Europe

Daphne Oram’s Oramics Machine on display at the Science Museum in London.
Daphne Oram’s Oramics Machine on display at the Science Museum in London. The Oramics Machine, Science Museum, London. CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

Have you ever wanted to make sound by drawing?

Daphne Oram did. Oram co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop in 1958 before leaving the following year to work on her own. With a grant from the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in 1962 she began building Oramics, a machine that turned drawing into sound.

How exactly in 1962 was this possible you ask? Shapes painted on ten strips of 35 mm film were read by photocells as the strips moved. This controlled a sound's pitch, volume and timbre. It was among the first ways to compose electronic music by drawing, a graphic score that the machine played directly.

Text by Peter Bauman. Generative Art Timeline, Le Random, fact-checked September 2026.

Sources

Movements

Electronic Music, Generative Sound

Filed under

Ideas
Electronic Music
Other subjects
BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Daphne Oram, drawn sound, graphic score, Oramics, synthesizer, women in music technology

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