Yevgeny Murzin

The ANS at the Theremin Center (February, 2006)

Yevgeny Murzin (Russian: Евгений Мурзин; 1914–1970) was a Russian audio engineer and inventor of the ANS synthesizer.

Murzin's synthesizer

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

• 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).

Links

• Link
• From the Thermin center 1
• From the Thermin center 2

Persondata
Name	Murzin, Yevgeny
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1914
Place of birth
Date of death	1970
Place of death