You may not know the name Oskar Sala, but you’re likely familiar with some of the German composer and physicist’s work. This pioneer in electronic music mastered and refined synthesizer predecessors, creating music and sound effects for television, radio, and film, as well as creating the eerie bird sounds for Hitchcock’s “Birds.”In honor of his contributions to electronic music, Google will dedicate its doodle to Sarah on his 112th birthday on Monday.
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Born in Greiz, a small town in eastern Germany, in 1910, Sarah was immersed in music at a young age, learning the organ and piano in her youth. In 1930, he became fascinated by the trautonium (theremin, readers of The Big Bang Theory should be impressed), an electronic instrument that produces a variety of sounds and noises. He later worked on the instrument, sometimes with the Berlin Philharmonic, performing with an instrument that is widely regarded as a precursor to the modern synthesizer.
Sara refined the design of the instrument to create the Hybrid Tweeter, which produces sound through the sawtooth oscillations of low-voltage neon lights and a filter controlled by a rotary switch. The instrument has a three-octave range that reproduces sounds commonly found in traditional instruments and in nature.
The instrument’s sound was often featured in German TV commercials in the 1950s, but its greatest contribution to cinema was in Hitchcock’s 1963 natural horror film about birds in a coastal town. class attack. The film has no soundtrack at all, relying instead on Sara to use subharmonics to create ominous wing flapping and bird calls that often closely resemble natural sounds familiar to humans to heighten the level of fear in the audience.
Sarah has won several awards for her work, but never an Oscar. He donated his first synthesizer to the German Museum of Contemporary Technology in 1995.
Sarah died in 2002 at the age of 91.