I was surprised to find out the involvement of Daphne Oram with drawn sound, which is something I took an interest in reading about sound art in Russia and Evgeny Sholpo’s Variophone. It’s quite a popular practice translating the sound into visuals but it somehow never occurred to me that it could be done the other way around too. It did occur to Daphne Oram in 1957 when she encountered a Cathode Ray Oscilloscope, which shows a visual image of sound waves, during her BBC training. If you paint in waves the ‘shape’ of the sound you want to hear on 35mm film, determining the pitch, vibrato, timbre and so on, scanners can read and convert that into layered sound. This new synthesis technique bears the name Oramics and the device, the Oramics Machine.[2] She was the first woman to design and construct an electronic musical instrument. It allows for imperfection in electronic sound and for the human element to interfere, which seems to have been something Daphne sought.
In 1965, Oram produced Pulse Persephone for the Treasures of the Commonwealth exhibition at the Royal Academy of the Arts.[3]
She provided electronic sounds for the soundtrack of Dr. No (1962), uncredited. These sounds were used by the James Bond films up until Goldfinger (1964).
A Mini-Oramics Machine, imagined by Oram in the 1960s, has been built in 2016 by Tom Richards.[4]
[1]Weibel, P. (2019) Sound Art: Sound as a Medium of Art, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA/London, England
[2] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20170522-daphne-oram-pioneered-electronic-music
[3] https://www.daphneoram.org/aboutoram/
[4] https://www.gold.ac.uk/news/mini-oramics/