Yevgeny Murzin

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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).

External links[edit]

• Link
• From the Thermin center 1
• From the Thermin center 2
• Habr.ru
• Yevgeny Murzin's wiki.ru page
• The ‘ANS Synthesiser’ Yevgeny Murzin. Russia, 1958