Description
This presentation will discuss Daphne Oram’s Oramics, it’s importance and legacy for the history of electronicmusic, and recent research at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire that explores the future creative potential of
Oramics as a drawn/gesture-based interface for creative music production.
After leaving the BBC in 1959, Daphne Oram’s work on her graphical scoring synthesiser, Oramics, was
groundbreaking for its time: foreshadowing features like the MIDI roll and automation that are near-ubiquitous
in modern DAWs, while also offering the user a vast expressive range by scanning and translating nuanced,
hand-painted gestures. For Oram, drawn sound represented a route to music making that is ‘so much more
humanized than turning lots of knobs’
– and this human factor is as crucial in the context of musically-agentic
tools today as it was in face of the more restrictive technical frontiers faced by Oram in the mid 20th century.
Oram’s work and legacy has seen increasing exposure since her death in 2003, largely through the work of the
Oram Trust, Oram Awards, and through archival and practice research at Goldsmiths University in the archiving
and further exploration of Orams designs for Oramics. Tom Richard’s PhD work in realising Oram’s revised
designs for a tabletop version of the system – Mini Oramics – make composing with Oramics a possibility for
musicians today. Unfortunately, Mini-Oramics’ one-of-a-kind nature limits access to a broader user base, and by
extension, to a unique interface between composer and electronic sound. In the digital realm, touchscreen
installations and an iOS version of Oramics have also been developed by Mick Grierson at Goldsmiths, but are
no longer maintained. A RBC, the graphic scoring app, KlangPad takes inspiration from Oramics in its synthesis
of Oram and Iannis Xenakis’ work, but also doesn’t fully capture the essence of Oramics in it own right.
Recent research at RBC, with support from the Daphne Oram Trust, has begun exploring the extension of
Oramics from this existing post-Oramics landscape: the prototype, MIDI-Oramics, aims to make the
Mini-Oramics experience more accessible – aiming towards a finished device that can be open sourced and
built by schools, institutions and enthusiasts. Work towards a haptic, Oramics-inspired device aims to fill a gap
in accessible production tools that might open up new possibilities for shaping automation in modern DAWs.
Continuation of work relating to KlangPad investigates how motion data in smartphones might be used to take
Oramics-like gestures into the 3D domain, and overcome issues of limited screen size on mobile devices for a
graphic scoring app.
| Period | 13 Jun 2026 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Innovation In Music 2026: Music Beyond Tools and Rules |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Aalborg, DenmarkShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |