The doodle feature of the search engine Google is one of the most intriguing parts of web surfing. Every day, they create a beautiful doodle in honor of a certain individual, an event, or anything else.
On July 18, which is today, Google marks the 112th birth anniversary of the German physicist, composer, and pioneer of electronic music, Oskar Sala.
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Who Was Oskar Sala?
According to Google Arts & Culture, Sala was “one of the most important figures and pioneers of electronic music of the 20th century.”
Oskar Sala was a master of a lot of things. He was known for producing sound effects on a musical instrument called a mixture-trautonium which was a precursor to the synthesizer. Sala is credited for electrifying the world of television, radio, and film with his music.
Sala was born on July 18, 1910, in Greiz, Thuringia, Germany. He was into music from a very young age as his mother Annemarie (1887–1959) was a singer and his father Paul (1874–1932) was an ophthalmologist with musical talent. As a teenager, Sala studied piano and mouth organs and performed classical piano at concerts.
He had begun creating compositions, sonatas, and songs for violin and piano at the tender age of 14. Later in his life, Sala mastered the trautonium device which further inspired his studies in physics and composition at school. He studied physics at the University of Berlin.
The German composer’s fascination with electronic music pushed him further to explore the tonal possibilities of trautonium. He then fully devoted himself to playing and developing it in various forms. The instrument was invented by Friedrich Trautwein at the end of the 1920s and was used to produce different kinds of sounds and noises.
Various Accomplishments of Sala
My illustration for what would be Oskar Sala's 112th birthday. His Trautonium (the first electronic synthesizer) sound effects for Hitchcock's The Birds terrified me as a kid! pic.twitter.com/JaAiFpb41E
— Matthew Cruickshank (@MatthewCruicks4) July 18, 2022
The talented composer won several awards for his accomplishments and was also honored in radio broadcasts and films.
One of his most famous works has to be the eerie bird sounds in Alfred Hitchcock’s horror film ‘The Birds‘ (1963). He got to know that Hitchcock wanted synthetically produced bird sounds for his film and the two met following that. Sala also worked on films like ‘Rosemary‘ (1959), and Fritz Lang’s ‘Das Indische Grabmal’ (1959).
In 1995, he donated his original trautonium to the German Museum for Contemporary Technology. Sala also built the Quartett-Trautonium, Concert Trautonium and the Volkstrautonium.
The composer’s Volkstrautonium was presented to the public at the Berliner Funkausstellung radio exhibition in 1933. He was also an honorary Senator of Berlin.
Sala was the only trautonium player in the world. He passed away on February 26, 2002, in Berlin.
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