3.7 Musical examples

Daphne Oram - Tumble Wash (1962)

Daphne Oram co-founded the BBC Radiophonic Workshop and then invented Oramics, a system that let her draw waveforms and control curves directly onto strips of 35mm film. Reading a hand-drawn single cycle back as a repeating tone is essentially wavetable synthesis done by hand, defining a timbre by its shape decades before the technique was digitized. Tumble Wash is a short study made with the Oramics machine.