---
id: drawn_sound
title: "Drawn Sound"
year: 1930
category: "Synthesizers"
lang: en
canonical: https://nodemusic.cc/node/drawn_sound
source: node.music
---

# Drawn Sound (1930)

Synthesizers · https://nodemusic.cc/node/drawn_sound

## Summary

Drawn sound was not a Western invention: the first timbres drafted in ink and shot onto film — with no performer and not a single oscillator — were made in the USSR. Thirty years before the first synthesizers.

## Full text

In the autumn of 1929, in Alexander Shorin's Leningrad laboratory, a still-wet strip of optical soundtrack was being studied under a microscope — the first ever shot for the film The Plan for Great Works. Animator Mikhail Tsekhanovsky wondered aloud: if an Egyptian or ancient Greek ornament were filmed onto that strip, would some unknown archaic music sound? Composer Arseny Avraamov and engineer Evgeny Sholpo disappointed him: an ornament is strictly periodic, so it yields a single timbre, not a melody.

Avraamov drew timbres from Euclidean geometry in ink — triangles, trapezoids, semicircles — and shot them frame by frame on an animation stand; the first thing the national sound-film conference ever heard was a drawn barrel organ playing a street song. Sholpo had no wish to draw every frame by hand and mechanised the process: his Variophone spun discs with teeth cut into their rims against continuously moving film, producing glissandi, vibrato and chords. Nikolai Voinov took a third route — he cut wave profiles from paper and shot them five or six at a time against black velvet; with this "Nivoton" he scored cartoons. Germany caught up later: Rudolf Pfenninger and Oskar Fischinger began in 1932–33.

Boris Yankovsky aimed furthest of all. Timbre, he reasoned, is assembled from sine waves the way an atom is assembled from particles — so one could compile a periodic table of sound, akin to Mendeleev's table of chemical elements. To that end he converted scores into a 72-step temperament: loudness was set by camera aperture stops, duration by frame count. The group kept a dedicated engineer whose entire job was to expand shapes into Fourier series. With double exposure Yankovsky made one timbre dissolve into another, modelling spectral mutation half a century ahead of schedule.

Drawn sound held out for six years, and what killed it was not censorship but cost-cutting. Avraamov's laboratory was cut at NIKFI in December 1932, then shut down at Mezhrabpomfilm in 1934 as unprofitable. Voinov was fired in early 1936: the Nivoton sounded monotonous and filmmakers had tired of it. Some two thousand metres of exposed film sat in Avraamov's flat for years and perished there in the late 1930s.

One thread survived: in 1938 Yankovsky joined forces with Sholpo, whose laboratory held out until 1950 — and that same year a young engineer named Evgeny Murzin came to him at the Moscow Conservatory with a design for the ANS optical synthesizer. He would not have a working machine for another twenty years.

## People

- Boris Yankovsky (1905–1973) — acoustician and researcher.
- Arseny Avraamov (1886–1944) — The chief radical of the early USSR, a theorist and rebel who declared war on equal temperament (and J.S.
- Nikolai Voinov (1900–1958) — animator and inventor.
- Evgeny Sholpo (1891–1951) — engineer and inventor.
- Evgeny Murzin (1914–1970) — Soviet military engineer who developed interception systems for fighter jets by day and "music of the spheres" by night.

## Connections

### Influenced by

- [Symphony of Sirens](https://nodemusic.cc/node/avraamov_sirens.md) - EVOLVED

### Influenced

- [ANS Synthesizer](https://nodemusic.cc/node/ans.md) - EVOLVED
- [Oramics](https://nodemusic.cc/node/oramics.md) - TECHNIQUE