In 1959 Daphne Oram walked out of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, which she had helped create a year earlier, and set up her own studio in an oast house in Kent. There she spent a decade building the Oramics machine: ten strips of 35mm film running over photocells, waveforms painted onto glass slides, pitch written out as hand-drawn dots and lines. It had no keyboard. You didn't play music, you drew it.

We'll spend an hour on the history, then an hour drawing scores by hand and listening them together in an app making its debut at this workshop.

-
Sunday, October 18th, 2026
1:30 pm - 4:30 pm
@ 123 NE 3rd Ave Suite 012 (view map)
Portland, OR 97232
(entrance on 2nd ave side, street parking is free on Sundays, otherwise you can pay hourly for the parking lot)

$10-20 sliding scale
(tickets required to attend, no one turned away for lack of funds, email info@synthlibraryportland.org for no-cost tickets)