Yevgeny Murzin
Yevgeny Alexandrovich Murzin | |
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Евгений Александрович Мурзин | |
Born | October 25 (November 7), 1914 Samara, Russian Empire |
Died | February 27, 1970 Moscow, USSR |
![]() | This article includes a list of references, related reading, or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. (February 2013) |
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/f/f1/ANS_Synthesiser%2C_Glinka_Museum.jpg/220px-ANS_Synthesiser%2C_Glinka_Museum.jpg)
Yevgeny Alexandrovich Murzin (Russian: Евгений Мурзин; 1914–1970) was a Russian audio engineer and inventor of the ANS synthesizer.
Academic life and military service
[edit]Murzin began his academic life studying municipal building at the Moscow Institute of Engineers. When Nazi Germany invaded the USSR in 1941, he joined the soviet Artillery Academy as a Senior Technical Lieutenant. During his time in military service, Murzin was responsible for developing an electro-mechanical anti-aircraft detector which was later adopted by the Soviet Army. After the war, Murzin joined the Moscow Higher Technical School where he completed a thesis on Thematics and was involved in the development of military equipment including an artillery sound ranging device, instruments for the guidance of fighters to enemy bombers and air-raid defence systems.
Murzin's synthesizer
[edit]In 1938, invented a design for composers based on synthesizing complex musical sounds from a limited number of pure tones; this proposed system was to perform music without musicians or musical instruments. The technological basis of his invention was the method of photo-optic sound recording used in cinematography, which made it possible to obtain a visible image of a sound wave, as well as to realize the opposite goal—synthesizing a sound from an artificially drawn sound wave.
Despite the apparent simplicity of his idea of reconstructing a sound from its visible image, the technical realization of the ANS as a musical instrument did not occur until twenty years later. Murzin was an engineer who worked in areas unrelated to music, and the development of the ANS synthesizer was a hobby and he had many problems realizing on a practical level. It was not until 1958 that Murzin was able to establish a laboratory and gather a group of engineers and musicians in order to design the ANS.
Legacy
[edit]- Murzin's synthesizer was used by Alfred Schnittke, Stanislav Kreitchi, Sofia Gubaydulina, Edward Artemyev, and some other experimenting composers in Moscow.
- Much of the music for Andrey Tarkovsky film Solaris (1972) was created by Artemyev with the ANS.
- In 2003, British band Coil had released an album named ANS (using the synth itself).
- ANS (For Evgeny Murzin), Track 11 of the album For 2 by German musician Carsten Nicolai, released in 2010, was recorded live with the ANS Synthesizer at Theremin Center, Moscow State Conservatory.