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0.4.0
0.2.0
Pitch can now be drawn as notes, the sheet can leave the app as sound, and the session survives quitting.
Pitch as notes and octaves. A twelve-row note band over an eight-row octave band, the shape of Oram's own later design. Mark it with dots, where each mark sets a note that holds, or with lines that are followed as they move. Pick a key and a scale and marks snap to it; chromatic by default. What the machine reads is drawn over your marks, so what you see is what plays. The Hertz strip is still there and still the default.
Audio and MIDI out. Export Audio renders one pass of the sheet offline, faster than real time, so there is nothing to record. Export MIDI comes from that same render and is written from what the machine actually played, with vibrato and glides as pitch bend and the amplitude contour as expression. The two files line up.
It remembers. The drawing, the slides and every setting are kept as you work and restored at launch.
Timbres. A preset menu on each slide: sine, saw, square, supersaw, detune and blank. Supersaw and detune add detuned voices, drawn on the glass as orange echoes. Each timbre has a pan setting, heard with Mono switched off, and the engine renders in stereo.
Effects strips. The vibrato strip can be switched to a delay, where the line's height is the echo time. The reverb send can go to a plate or to a room.
Also: the projector window works in the packaged app, where it had been showing nothing. Clear (⌘N) starts a fresh sheet. Space plays and stops. The brush on the slides has a solid edge. Rewind shows itself when the transport is stopped.
macOS builds are signed and notarised. On Windows, SmartScreen will warn: the build is unsigned there.
0.1.0
v0.0.2 — signed and notarised on macOS
The macOS build is now signed with a Developer ID certificate and notarised by Apple, so it opens without any workaround. Windows and Linux are unchanged from v0.0.1.
Which file
| macOS, Apple Silicon | Oramics-0.0.2-arm64.dmg |
| macOS, Intel | Oramics-0.0.2.dmg |
| Windows | Oramics-Setup-0.0.2.exe |
| Linux | Oramics-0.0.2-x86_64.AppImage |
The .zip and .tar.gz builds are the same apps without an installer.
Signing
macOS builds are signed by Developer ID Application: Stuart Frederich-Smith with the hardened runtime enabled, notarised by Apple, and the ticket is stapled. Gatekeeper reports accepted, source=Notarized Developer ID. No right-click Open, no xattr command.
Windows is still unsigned. SmartScreen will warn on first run: More info, then Run anyway. Certificates now have to live on hardware or in a cloud HSM, so this is on hold.
Linux AppImages are not signed in any way that affects running them. chmod +x first.
Changes since v0.0.1
Nothing in the instrument itself. This release exists to get signing working end to end.
v0.0.1 — first release
A drawn-sound instrument after Daphne Oram's Oramics machine, and the printable sheets people draw on to feed it.
Which file
| macOS, Apple Silicon | Oramics-0.0.1-arm64.dmg |
| macOS, Intel | Oramics-0.0.1.dmg |
| Windows | Oramics-Setup-0.0.1.exe |
| Linux | Oramics-0.0.1-x86_64.AppImage |
The .zip and .tar.gz builds are the same apps without an installer.
These builds are unsigned
Signing needs an Apple Developer account and a Windows code-signing certificate, and this has neither.
macOS — Gatekeeper will refuse it. Right-click → Open once, or:
xattr -dr com.apple.quarantine /Applications/Oramics.app
Windows — SmartScreen will warn. More info → Run anyway.
Linux — chmod +x the AppImage first.
What it does
Ten strips of drawn control feeding a monophonic four-timbre voice, the way the machine did. Three of its constraints are modelled rather than approximated:
- Flying-spot scanner. Timbres come from running Wrench's edge-tracking servo over a painted slide at audio rate, not from a wavetable. Timbre therefore changes with pitch, the loop rings inharmonically, a gap in the enamel drops the spot, and no two cycles are identical.
- Pitch in whole Hertz. The painted code is the frequency — relays switched banks of resistors, so the scale is linear rather than logarithmic, and the tracks are weighted 1-2-4-2 from the film's lower edge, not 8-4-2-1. Relays latch and don't move together, so decimal carries sweep through frequencies nobody painted.
- Optical amplitude. Level was set by shining a torch bulb at a photoresistor, so no envelope has a sharp attack.
Each is a switch. Turn them off and you leave 1969.
Print the sheets with pnpm template. A sheet is exactly 30.000 seconds — 1 cm to the second, one tenth of the original film speed — and corner fiducials mean print scaling and scan DPI can't affect the timing.
Not yet
Importing scanned sheets. You can draw, paint, hear and print; the scan-back half isn't written.
Independent reconstruction, not affiliated with the Daphne Oram Trust, Goldsmiths or the Science Museum. GPL-3.0.