The development of industry and technology in the USSR in the 20s and 30s of the last century influenced many areas of society, including the art of making music. For example, in this area, experiments were conducted with “painted sound”, which led to the emergence of technologies that reproduce sounds that are inaccessible to traditional musical instruments.
Today we will talk about experiments with artificially synthesized music and instruments created by Soviet composers and engineers.
Pxhere PD PhotosThe birth of the concept of "drawn sound"
The main ideologue of creating a new "automatic" music was the composer
Arseny Avrahamov . He became known for his unusual ideas, which he promoted in the early 20s of the last century. One of them is the “
Beeps Symphony ”, works that were performed using the system of steam beeps. According to the composer's idea, the Symphonies were to become a symbol of the revolutionary power of the workers.
In 1929, Abraham became part of a team that worked on the creation of the first Soviet sound film, Plan of Great Works, or Five-Year Plan. Together with Avraamov, inventor
Yevgeny Sholpo and animator
Mikhail Tsekhanovsky worked on the sound for the film. When the sound track was created and
displayed on the film, Tsekhanovsky admired the “acoustic patterns” that had been formed. And the thought came to him - what will happen if you tape an ancient ornament? What music unknown to humanity can be heard while playing it?
So the idea of “drawn sound” appeared. And Abraham and Sholpo undertook to make it come to life. To conduct their first experiments, they used the laboratory of the inventor
Alexander Shorin .
Arseny Avraamov presented the first works already in 1930, when he attended the first conference of sound films. He
cut out figures and ornaments from paper and captured them on film. As Arseny himself wrote, he managed to imitate the sound of a barrel organ and reproduce the famous song “Marusya Poisoned”.
In the fall of 1930, Arseny Avrahamov founded the Multzvuk laboratory, in which he continued to work on recording sound from paper tapes. Sholpo decided to mechanize the whole process, so he began working on a tool that would simplify the process of creating synthetic sound tracks. And the ways of research of Abraham and Sholpo diverged.
What scientists have created from the laboratory "Multzvuk"
The structure of "Multzvuk"
includes animator Nikolai Voinov, acoustics Boris Yankovsky and cameraman Nikolai Zhelinsky. They continued to work on the creation of artificial sound. In total, "Multzvuk" filmed almost 2 kilometers of film. On it were captured excerpts of such works as "Chinese Melody", "Etude Staccato", "Organ Triad", etc.
However, soon Yankovsky and Voinov left the laboratory to continue research in this area on their own.
In 1931, Nikolai Voinov invented his own method of optical sound synthesis. Instead of drawing sound waves or imprinting them on film, Voinov
cut them out of strips of paper , which were then read by a machine he invented called Nivoton. Voinov applied his invention in animated films, and with the help of Nivoton in 1931–1934 several cartoons
were voiced .
As for Boris Yankovsky, the theme of his work
was the sounds of synthetic instruments . He wanted to create a universal
collection of sounds, a kind of Mendeleev acoustic table, and lay a new area of knowledge - synthetic acoustics. To demonstrate his ideas, Yankovsky created the “
Vibroexponentier ”, a device that
generated images on 35-mm
motion-picture that were reproduced with an arbitrary timbre.
"Variofon" Sholpo
Together with the composer Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov in 1932, Yevgeny Sholpo
created the “Variophon”. The tool for work used rotating
cardboard discs , on which the contours of the reproduced sound wave were cut. They periodically interrupted a beam of light, “writing” the outlines of the sound track to a 35-mm film. This process could be repeated several times to create a polyphonic sound. How the variofon works you can see in the preserved 1934 film. A variophon scheme can be found
on the digitalmusicacademy website .
With the help of a variophon, up to 12 parallel audio tracks could be recorded on the tape. At the same time, the device made it possible to transmit intonations characteristic of "live sound". Thanks to the use of discs, long pieces could be recorded on the variofon, although this required constant manual adjustment of the instrument. Another limitation associated with the discs was the impossibility of synthesizing complex timbres that were impossible to cut out of cardboard by hand.
From 1931 to 1951, Sholpo was the head of the “Graphic Sound” laboratory, where he worked on research in the field of “drawn sound” together with Jankowski. With the help of a variophon in the 30s and 40s, Sholpo and Rimsky-Korsakov sounded a number of films and cartoons, for example, “1905 in bourgeois satire” and “Symphony of the world”. Also during these years, several original pieces of music were created, as well as transcriptions of classical compositions for the variophon: “
Suite Carburation ” by Rimsky-Korsakov (1932), the version of “
Flight of the Valkyries ” by Wagner and the 6th Rhapsody by Liszt and others.
The original "Varyophon" was destroyed in 41 in a rocket attack on Leningrad. At the end of the war, Sholpo continued to work on a new version of the variophone, but the project remained unfinished. Yevgeny Sholpo died in 1951, and the laboratory, of which he was the director, was closed.
What did the technology of "drawn sound"
The pioneers of "drawn sound" have not been able to fully realize their ideas. "Multzvuk" closed in 1934, and the archives were destroyed. All the works were recorded on nitrofilm, which was kept in the apartment of Arseny Avraamov. Somewhere in the period from 1936 to 1938, her sons of the composer, who used the film as a fuel, accidentally
destroyed it . Boris Yankovsky stopped working on the issues of graphic sound due to a war that broke out, and Sholpo did not have time to finish work on the new variofon.
Nevertheless, these ideas survived and later took shape in the world's first multi-vocal
synthesizer ANS, which was named in honor of Alexander Nikolaevich Scriabin, one of the first ideologists of the synthesis of light and sound in works of art. ANS was created in 1958 by engineer Yevgeny Murzin. In the instrument, the sound track was recorded by means of a beam of light passing through five discs with a printed pattern. The ANS device made it possible to create 720 unique sound waves. Later, avant-garde composers
recorded their first electronic works on ANS.
Photo linearclassifier mop / oramics tool“Painted Sound” in its work was also
researched by composer and sound engineer Daphne Oram, one of the founders of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop. One of her inventions is the Oramics instrument, which reproduced soundtracks drawn by hand on a 35 mm film. With the help of Oramics, Daphne Oram created music for films, performances, television and radio programs.
In the 1950s, Norman McLaren, an innovator in the field of animation, also worked with optical sound reproduction. In his works he used the sound created by the methods of Nikolai Voinov. An example would be his movie
Synchromy .
Nowadays,
sound artists continue to comprehend and recycle the legacy of Soviet sound innovators. And if the ideas of Evgeny Sholpo were implemented in the synthesizer ANS in the 1950s, the vision of Boris Yankovsky was
embodied with the advent of computer music.
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