A closer look
Long before modern producers were clicking piano rolls in Ableton, Daphne Oram was literally drawing music by hand. Fed up with the BBC’s lack of vision, she quit and built the Oramics machine. It read painted squiggles on strips of clear 35mm film and converted those shapes into electronic sounds. She essentially invented the concept of graphical user interfaces for music production, yet remained woefully underfunded because the 1960s music industry hated women with soldering irons.
