Yevgeny Murzin



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

Academic life and military service
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
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).
 * 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.