Graphical Sound

Graphical sound is a family of techniques in which sound is produced from drawn, printed or otherwise inscribed images, read back by a machine. Pioneers in the Soviet Union and Germany in the early 1930s, among them *Arseny Avraamov*, *Rudolf Pfenninger* and *Nikolai Voinov*, drew waveforms directly onto film soundtracks, while *Norman McLaren* applied the method to animation. Later systems include *Yevgeny Murzin*'s ANS synthesizer, which reads glass plates inscribed by the composer, and *Daphne Oram*'s Oramics, which converts hand-drawn curves into pitch, timbre and amplitude. The method bypasses performers and conventional instruments entirely, making the score itself the sound source.