[LOUD NOISES] "Generative Music", an engineering approach that ended up not very musical at all.

Based on "Oramics", Daphne Oram's (1925-2003) fascinating early electronic music process and machinery involving the painting of timbre, volume envelopes, and pitch changes on strips of film.

I've been meaning to make a Web Audio version of this technique for a while, and it's far from complete - for one the frequencies and timings are completely random and not based on music scales or intervals at all, and the reverb section is completely missing. Really, the music should be generated from a scan of an imperfect plot... Now there's a project bigger than a day in January!

Credits: the last picture is a system diagram from Oram's book "An Individual Note" (1972), as shared online by the Daphne Oram Trust. Also helpful in understanding the machine and process were sections of Tom Richard's PhD Thesis "Oramics: Precedents, Technology and Influence" (2018) and an interview with Graham Wrench in Sound On Sound (2009).

#genuary10 #genuary2023 #generativeart #electronicmusic #bleepsandblops #oramics #daphneoram #webaudio #generativemusic #noise

1 year ago