Not a Perfect Face, but Mine

At the top of a notebook page dated January 1961, Daphne Oram wrote "Written Sound Waves". She had left the BBC two years earlier, after helping to design its Radiophonic Workshop and then running it, and was working in a converted oast house in Kent on a single idea: a machine that would turn lines drawn by hand into sound.

The page lists what such a machine would need, from complete control of timbre, pitch and dynamics to vibrato, and then adds a few comments. Tom Richards, who reproduced the page in facsimile in his 2018 doctoral thesis, treats it as the nearest thing to a design brief for what became the Oramics machine. One of the comments seems to cut against the ambition of the whole project. The electronic methods of the day, Oram wrote, gave results that were "too simple", "too mathematically pure & calculated". By contrast, "a freehand drawing method might produce very much more artistic results because of the inaccuracies inherent" in it.

She was not asking the hand to become precise. She was counting on its imprecision.

The machine was built during the 1960s with support from the Gulbenkian Foundation, its instructions drawn on synchronised strips of clear 35mm film, one for each aspect of the sound. In 1972 Oram described the work in an unusual book, An Individual Note of Music, Sound and Electronics, where the idea from the notebook has hardened into a principle. "In drawing freehand we shall not make our lines absolutely 'accurate'—slight indeterminate factors will creep in, for 'straight lines' will not be quite straight." Indeterminacy, she went on, "has its place in our machine"; it works inside a musical form that stays determined, and "it adds richness, it confirms individuality." A page earlier she had asked: "Is it 'human' to maintain anything in a steady state for long? Your limbs, your eyes, your voice, your brain . . ."

She turned the same eye on people. "But could we, perhaps, here just attempt an analogy?" she begins, before picturing a human being as "thousands upon thousands of finely tuned circuits", a spectrum of frequencies "never at rest, never in a steady state". "Like the intricate groove of a gramophone record the resulting 'sound track' would be extremely difficult to analyse in all its aspects." Then the analogy becomes a question: "Is each cell in our bodies itself a tuned circuit (or part of a tuned circuit)?" She cites the resting tension across the cell membrane, about 70 millivolts, and follows it as it overshoots and settles back after a strong stimulus.

The book does not open with circuits, though. On page iii there is an epigraph: ". . . these are my own particular opinions and fancies, and I deliver them as only what I myself believe, and not for what is to be believed by others." It is signed "Montaigne: Essays. 1580." Oram quotes him elsewhere too, in Charles Cotton's translation: the cat he plays with, unsure which of them is amusing the other, and the senses that alter whatever reaches us. She even turns his name into a verb, proposing "to montaigne" things, "to consider facts from all directions". And at one point she calls on "our Montaigne outlook" to say that something can be "indeterminate at the same time as being determinate".

The epigraph, however, starts with an ellipsis. In Montaigne's essay on the education of children, the sentence just before it reads, in the version of Cotton's translation edited by W. C. Hazlitt: "I will say I never intended to conceal them, no more than my old bald grizzled likeness before them, where the painter has presented you not with a perfect face, but with mine." And the sentence that follows: "I have no other end in this writing, but only to discover myself, who, also shall, peradventure, be another thing to-morrow, if I chance to meet any new instruction to change me."

That Oram read Montaigne is on the record: she quotes him, makes a verb of him, and credits him with her way of holding the determined and the undetermined together. Whether those two neighbouring sentences mattered to her is something no known document says. The notebook comes eleven years before the book, and we do not know when she first read the Essays, which printing of Cotton she owned, or whether the epigraph came from the book itself or from a collection of quotations. At most this is a possible influence. It may simply be an independent likeness: the same preference for a true face over a perfect one, nearly four centuries apart.

What remains are the three dots at the top of the page. What did they leave out, for the person who put them there?