
The woman who could 'draw' music - happy-go-lucky
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20170522-daphne-oram-pioneered-electronic-music
======
ssalazar
Oh wow. I am days away from finishing a PhD thesis on sketching sound and
music [1], and Daphne Oram figures highly into my background research. A
friend of mine built an iPhone app that emulates Oram's system [2].

Another notable figure in the world of drawing music is Norman McLaren, who
literally painted or drew directly on the soundtrack portion of his animated
films. The soundtrack for his film _Neighbors_ [3], which won an academy award
in 1952, was produced this way. Theres a short documentary on his process here
[4].

On the more avant-garde side, Iannis Xenakis had designed a computer-based
system called the UPIC in the late 1970s in which you could directly draw
waveforms and then direct their frequencies over time by drawing into a
graphics tablet. He used this to compose his piece _Mycenae Alpha_ [5].

This page [6] has a really great run-down of optical synthesis in general,
which includes a number of individuals and systems involved in directly
drawing sound and music. Some of the visual sound designs used in these
systems are quite striking, for instance the variophone [7] or Yankovsky's
painted soundtracks [8].

[1] Demo of my research software here:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdj5e82nPHQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tdj5e82nPHQ)

[2]
[https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oramics/id454505541?mt=8](https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/oramics/id454505541?mt=8)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-o9dYwro_Q](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-o9dYwro_Q)

[4]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0vgZv_JWfM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q0vgZv_JWfM)

[5]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yztoaNakKok](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yztoaNakKok)

[6]
[http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels_historical.html](http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels_historical.html)

[7]
[http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/vario3.jpg](http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/vario3.jpg)

[8]
[http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/painted_soundtrac...](http://www.umatic.nl/tonewheels/historical/painted_soundtrack.jpg)

~~~
alphonsegaston
In the McLaren video you linked, the uploader edited out his music and put in
some other track. Here's the link to his film with the original score:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_aSowDUUaY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e_aSowDUUaY)

~~~
ssalazar
Thanks, good catch- its really worth watching the whole thing.

------
paulgerhardt
As adults we get locked into modal thinking - breaking those modes is not
something we (usually) do naturally.

As children those modes aren't so deeply grooved so coming up with arbitrary
models of the world makes for a lot of eye-opening exploratory activity.

I recently went to an exhibit on the Reggio Emilia approach (famous for
pioneering this method 70 years ago) and one of the videos on display was an
activity involving the children drawing sound [1] - I hadn't thought to look
at the world this way but for these kids (and a bit of guided prompting) it
came very naturally. Things like painting the sound of water rushing over
stones[2] - at first glance don't parse - but if you tilt your head a bit you
can 'see' it.

[1]
[http://www.acousticecologyaustralia.org/symposium2003/procee...](http://www.acousticecologyaustralia.org/symposium2003/proceedings/papers/hDilkes.pdf)
[2] [http://imgur.com/a/RAOmy](http://imgur.com/a/RAOmy)

------
dang
Previous Daphne Oram submissions:

[https://hn.algolia.com/?query=daphne%20oram&sort=byDate&date...](https://hn.algolia.com/?query=daphne%20oram&sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=story&storyText=false&prefix=false&page=0)

------
dmix
There was a year long exhibition of her Oram synth machine in 2013. Here's a
good mini-doc on it and Daphne:

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ08diPUv6A](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mJ08diPUv6A)

Not entirely unknown fortunately.

------
kevinwang
She seems like a kindred spirit with Kandinsky. Both tried to connect the
audio and the visual arts, and both were mystical about the fundamental
humanness of their respective art forms.

------
colanderman
Don't forget the man who could 'see' music, by looking at grooves in a vinyl
record: [http://www.tonedeaf.com.au/362661/vinyl-vision-meet-the-
man-...](http://www.tonedeaf.com.au/362661/vinyl-vision-meet-the-man-who-can-
identify-a-record-by-its-grooves.htm)

------
100ideas
The woman who 'painted' music:

"Unraveling Bolero" by Anne Adams -
[http://imgur.com/a/wkwKZ](http://imgur.com/a/wkwKZ) (photograph of work)

\---

> "In this podcast, a story about obsession, creativity, and a strange
> symmetry between a biologist and a composer that revolves around one
> famously repetitive piece of music.

> "Anne Adams was a brilliant biologist. But when her son Alex was in a bad
> car accident, she decided to stay home to help him recover. And then, rather
> suddenly, she decided to quit science altogether and become a full-time
> artist. After that, her husband Robert Adams tells us, she just painted and
> painted and painted. First houses and buildings, then a series of paintings
> involving strawberries, and then ... "Bolero."

> At some point, Anne became obsessed with Maurice Ravel's famous composition
> and decided to put an elaborate visual rendition of the song to canvas. She
> called it "Unraveling Bolero." But at the time, she had no idea that both
> she and Ravel would themselves unravel shortly after their experiences with
> this odd piece of music."

Radiolab - Unraveling Bolero (S14E01)
[http://www.radiolab.org/story/217340-unraveling-
bolero/](http://www.radiolab.org/story/217340-unraveling-bolero/)

\---

> "Most neurological lesion studies emphasize performance deficits that result
> from focal brain injury. Here, we describe striking gains of function in a
> patient with primary progressive aphasia, a degenerative disease of the
> human language network. During the decade before her language deficits
> arose, Anne Adams (AA), a lifelong scientist, developed an intense drive to
> produce visual art. Paintings from AA's artistic peak revealed her capacity
> to create expressive transmodal art, such as renderings of music in paint,
> which may have reflected an increased subjective relatedness among internal
> perceptual and conceptual images. AA became fascinated with Maurice Ravel,
> the French composer who also suffered from a progressive aphasia, and
> painted his best-known work, ‘Boléro’, by translating its musical elements
> into visual form. Later paintings, achieved when AA was nearly mute, moved
> towards increasing photographic realism, perhaps because visual
> representations came to dominate AA's mental landscape during this phase of
> her illness. Neuroimaging analyses revealed that, despite severe
> degeneration of left inferior frontal-insular, temporal and striatal
> regions, AA showed increased grey matter volume and hyperperfusion in right
> posterior neocortical areas implicated in heteromodal and polysensory
> integration. The findings suggest that structural and functional
> enhancements in non-dominant posterior neocortex may give rise to specific
> forms of visual creativity that can be liberated by dominant inferior
> frontal cortex injury."

Seeley, W. W. et al. Unravelling Boléro: progressive aphasia, transmodal
creativity and the right posterior neocortex. Brain 131, 39–49 (2007).
[https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awm270](https://doi.org/10.1093/brain/awm270)

(note- edited for formatting)

