Painting Sound and Music [2]

Soviet Graphical Sound in the Press 1935-1936

At the end of my previous post - on graphical or drawn sound in English language newspapers, journals and magazines in the 1930s - I mentioned that in September 1935 in The Witness [Ontario 4-9-1935 p. 7], an article ‘Synthetic Music’ mentioned Rudolf Pfenninger’s achievements in the field, but focused more fully on the work of graphical sound artists from the Soviet Union. In particular ‘N. Voinov’ and ‘E. Sholpo’ were discussed who until 1935 had no real profile outside the country. Around the same time several US newspapers ran a full-page illustrated article ‘Triangles Trill, Noses Make Music, Pictures Sing - in this Weird New Art’ that introduced Soviet experiments to the wider US public. However, the ‘Russian musicians and theoreticians’ who had been studying ‘the lines traced along the sound track of motion picture film’ had been working on drawn or graphical sound techniques since 1929. This post will examine how a growing awareness of Soviet work in this field (belatedly) developed from 1935 to 1936 in English language press coverage.

Andrey Smirnov and Graphical Sound

In Andrey Smirnov’s 2013 book Sound in Z: Experiments in Sound and Electronic Music in Early 20th Century Russia, the forgotten history of graphical sound in the country was excavated and revealed. Smirnov noted that in the 1930s, little information was disseminated outside Russia about these activities

Although there were several short articles published in German, French and English most publications about research and developments in the USSR were only in Russian. At the same time many of the most important documents were never published at all and were circulating only in manuscript form, similar to Samizdat (self-published forbidden literature).

As indicated, in this post I want to examine the extent of the English coverage of this work, to understand how far those encountering it would have been made aware of the potential of graphical sound methods that could result from the advanced work of Soviet musicians and theorists. First, I’ll briefly summarise Smirnov’s history.

Smirnov notes that soon after the arrival of sound-on-film systems in Russia (Pavel Tager’s Tagephon (Moscow 1926) and Alexander Shorin’s Shorinophone (Leningrad 1927)), at Shorin’s laboratory Mikhail Tsekhanovsky, Arseny Avraamov and Evgeny Sholpo experimented on drawn sound for the 1929 documentary sound film Plan velikikh rabot [The Plan of Great Works].

Arseny Avraamov demonstrated drawn sound methods in a lecture in February 1930 to the ARRK (Association of Revolutionary Cinematography) and then in August at the First Conference on Animation Techniques in Moscow in a lecture ‘Ornamental Sound Animation’. Avraamov founded the Multzvuk group in Autumn 1930 (later the Syntonfilm Laboratory from 1931-1934) to develop work using this technique. The staff included Nikolai Zhelynsky, Nikolai Voinov, and Boris Yankovsky. Of these, Voinov later became known for his paper sound method, and Yankovsky developed advanced theoretical work on sound synthesis; of all the graphical sound researchers in the 1930s, he took the process furthest through his understanding of the complexity of timbre. As Smirnov reports

From 1930-34 over 2,000 metres of ornamental sound tracks were produced by Avraamov’s Multzvuk Group and Syntonfilm, including the experimental films Ornamental Animation, Marusia otravilas, Chinese Tune, Organ Chords, Untertonikum, Prelude, Piluet, Staccato Studies, Dancing Etude and Flute Study. The whole archive had been kept for several years at Avraamov’s apartment, where it is thought that in 1936-38, during a trip by Avraamov to Caucasus, it was burned by his own sons, making rockets and smoke screens with the old nitro-film tapes, which were highly flammable.

Nikolai Voinov had left Avraamov’s Multzvuk laboratory by 1931, and moved to the Moscow Film Factory’s Cartoon Studio, working on paper sound techniques. Voinov created paper cutouts using careful calculations, in various shapes and sizes. By 1931 he managed to emulate the sound of the piano through this process. From 1931-1935 he contributed to several animated cartoons with synthetic, drwan soumnd soundtracks; Barinia (The Lady) (1931), Rachmaninov Prelude (1932), The Dance of the Crow (1933), Tsvetnie polia, Linii bezopasnosti (Colour Fields, Lines of Safety) (1934) and Vor (The Thief) (1935). However, in 1936 he was dismissed from his post at the Moscow Film Factory, and though surviving Stalin’s Great Purge, ‘for most of his life he was disappointed as his main ideas and potential were unrealized’.

Evgeny Sholpo began his experiments with sound film through what in effect were musique concrète methods; by re-editing, cutting and pasting sound recordings to produce versions of Russian songs (‘Kamarinskaya’ and ‘Down Mother-Volga River’). By 1931 in collaboration with Georgy Rimsky-Korsakov Sholpo had built an optical synthesis instrument, the Variophone. Sholpo cut sound wave patterns into small cardboard disks that were rotated at varying speeds to create waveforms of diverse timbres and at specific pitches when captured on a film soundtrack. In 1932 Sholpo and Rimsky-Korsakov produced a synthesized soundtrack for the colour cartoon The Symphony of Peace, and in 1933 for The Carburettor. From 1933-35 they recorded Waltz (Nikolai Timofeev), Flight of the Valkyries (Richard Wagner, and 6th Rhapsody (Franz Liszt) using the Variophone. Smirnov indicated that

Although aesthetically these works are similar to Walter Carlos’ Switched-on Bach (1968) and sound like ‘eight-bit music’, the main difference is in their rhythm and timing. While much early popular electronic music has a rigid, metronome-like tempo, Sholpo was able to simulate more subtle variations in rhythm such as rubato, rallentando and accelerando, based on his careful analyses of live piano performances by some of the leading pianists of the day.

In March 1935 Sholpo was dismissed from his post at Lenfilm Studios. However, unlike Voinov, he was able to continue his graphical sound work in a number of contexts in Leningrad and Moscow with official support, eventually collaborating with Boris Yankovsky at a new Laboratory of Graphical Sound in Leningrad. From 1939-41 Sholpo wrote an unpublished book Teorija i praktika grafich¬eskogo zvuka (The Theory and Practice of Graphical Sound), and continued with his work through WWII until 1950 - Sholpo died shortly afterwards in 1951.

Boris Yankovsky was an acoustician who appreciated the shortcomings of ornamental and drawn sound in timbral terms. He worked with Avraamov until 1933, and then at the Mosfilm Productions Company where he organised the Laboratory of Synthetic Sound Recording. In 1935 he joined the ANTES (Autonomous Research Section) of the Union of Composers in Moscow, and moved with his laboratory to the NIMI institute at the Moscow Conservatory. In 1938 he worked with Evgeny Murzin, an audio engineer and inventor of the ANS synthesizer, and in 1939 collaborated with Sholpo in setting up the previously mentioned Laboratory for Graphical Sound. There is no space here to do justice to Yankovsky’s research activities and theories of synthesis, or his modified animation stand called the Vibroexponator that shot ‘still images of artificial drawn sound waves by means of a rostrum camera’ (see Chapter 7 of Smirnov’s book for full details). In summary, he aimed to transfer to film more accurate representations of the complexity of musical sound and timbres. In 1935 he wrote

It is important now to conquer and increase the smoothness of tone colours, flowing rainbows of spectral colours in sound, instead of monotonous colouring of stationary sounding fixed geometric figures [wave shapes], although the nature of these phenomena is not yet clear. The premises leading to the expansion of these phenomena - life inside the sound spectrum - give us the nature of the musical instruments themselves …

As Smirnov observes

Yankovsky went much further than other researchers. Of all the early Graphical Sound pioneers Yankovsky alone pursued the approach of spectral analysis, decomposition and re-synthesis. His curves were ‘spectral templates’, semiotic entities that could be combined to produce sound hybrids, based on a type of spectral mutation.

Soviet Graphical Sound in the Press 1935-1936

Outside the Soviet Union, little appears to have been known about the efforts of Avraamov, Voinov, Sholpo and Yankovsky until 1935. Only a small amount of brief press coverage with little detail can be found before 1935 in English speaking contexts. For example, Amy Croughton in the Courier-News [New Jersey 5-9-1931 p.6] ‘Some Say’ film column mentions Avramof (sic.) and Sholpo’s ‘carefully worked out musical sound’ for the film The Five Year Plan in an article on Soviet cinema.

German radio pioneer Otto Kappelmayer in a half-page feature - ‘Drafting Musical Compositions’ [Radio Craft (USA) September 1932 p.192B] - provided a short overview of how light-sensitive cells had been used in musical composition. He briefly noted ‘A. E. Scholpo’ had been producing ‘designed compositions’ on film soundtracks in Leningrad. Then, after a passing mention of Hindemith’s compositions for mechanical pianos, and Eric A. Humphriss and American sound technicians’ drawn speech attempts on film, Kappelmayer explains the technical processes involved in designing sound and music on film, and enthusiastically concluded,

The designed composition will not have its starting point from the world of music; instead it will need to look for entirely new paths of sound expression in the world of human emotion and feeling … this new medium … will produce in us strange sensations, quite different from anything we have previously known … in later years, when the creators of music will have established rapport with the new means of producing sound, they will have become free from the limitations of the present forms of sound expression. The final step in our appreciation of this new art will be achieved when our senses revel in stage presentations of “designed” music.

In April 1933, The Daily Worker [Chicago 29-4 p.2] reported that

Sholpaw (sic.) who has been experimenting in the production of synthetic sound by drawing the sound tracks by hand, has finished a production embodying his method, “Symphony of the World.” The film, which is in color, has a musical score by Rimski-Korsakov.

In June, a slightly longer news article, ‘Music By Drawing’, appeared in the Voice [Tasmania 3-6-1933 p.6]. Subtitled ‘Interesting Soviet Experiments’, Avraamov’s work at the ‘Film Research Institute (NIFKI)’ and Sholpo’s in Leningrad is briefly covered, explaining in quite a vague manner

They tried painting squares, circles and other geometric shapes, then [listened] to them. They took sine curves and other algebraic formulas and put them on paper. A professor of chemistry, specialising in electronic movements, created for them a musical pattern which gave the “music of the electrons”

The news item then reports that the Russian film critic Alexander Andrievsky (‘a mathematician, lawyer and cineaste’), author of the 1931 book Construction of the Tone Film, had begun work on directing The Artificial Man, based on Karel Capek’s play R.U.R.. For the film

Andrievsky wanted music and sounds for this which would be completely an artificial cinema creation, and unlike anything heard before. He bethought himself of Avramov’s experiments and has now gone seriously to work to perfect the process.

This ambitious science fiction film was eventually released in 1935 as Loss of a Sensation that in its finished form appears to have instead used traditional composition and instrumental techniques.

Apart from the above examples, little has been found that indicates Soviet experiments in graphical sound were in any way familiar to audiences in the UK, USA, Canada, Australia and other countries with an English language press before 1935. However, this changed in August of that year. On 11th August the New York Times [p.147] in its ‘The Week in Science’ section featured a news item on Soviet ‘Synthetic Music’ with Waldemar Kaempffert discussing the ‘acoustic design’ work of Voinov, Sholpo, Avraamov and Yankovsky with illustrative photographs. Kaempffert commented

It may be that in what the Russians call “acoustic design” we have the beginning of a new art which supplements that of the animated cartoons. It is not likely that the richness of a Beethoven symphony or of a Wagnerian opera can ever be put down in black-and-white sawtooth silhouettes. On the other hand it may be possible to create just the bizarre effects which a Walt Disney may want and which may lie beyond the scope of any instrument - even of the versatile electron tube.

The content of the New York Times article was much the same as in the full-page illustrated feature, ‘Triangles Trill, Noses Make Music, Pictures Sing - in this Weird New Art’, that simultaneously appeared as a syndicated news feature in several US newspapers (e.g. Danville Register and Bee, Tacoma Daily Ledger, Salt Lake Tribune and others)

The author of the article is unnamed, and it isn’t clear what the origin of the article was, or how the images of Sholpo, Voinov and Yankovsky’s methods and soundtrack illustrations were sourced. In the text, only Yankovsky and Voinov feature, with the latter seen working at his desk. Yankovsky is described as having produced the most interesting and novel results in graphical sound. The article outlines how, after early ornamental sound experiments where he sketched silhouettes of faces, cars and people onto soundtracks, Yankovsky moved on to assiduously investigate natural musical sounds, and began ‘retouching’ recordings of musical instruments such as the violin. Eventually he is described as developing a more complex process that allowed him to refine the timbres of existing musical instruments.

Voinov’s system of paper sound is described, and the article outlines how he had begun to form a library of designs (or templates) that he could access and reuse to speed up his process. These comb-like images are photographed singly and in combination onto the film soundtrack ‘as many times as necessary’. Although Sholpo is not mentioned, a visual sample of his ‘Musical Discs’ is included with the explanation

When these musical discs are revolved as the film moves through the camera, they reproduce music. The pattern of a disc governs the timbre of the resulting notes - and its speed regulates the pitch.

On 18th August a similar article, ‘Seeing Music and Hearing Pictures’ appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, using some of the same images, but seemingly ‘re-written’ by a different author, and with some additional details. Further short news stories appeared, such as the Vancouver Sun [12-10-1935 p.19] article ‘Synthetic Sounds Sought for Films’ that featured Yankovsky.

In November 1935 [p.34], Electronics magazine had a full-page feature on Voinov’s paper sound process, with some of Yankovsky’s ornamental illustrations included. Then in February 1936, Modern Mechanix and Inventions also had a full-page feature ‘“Sketches” Sound; Files It For “Talkies”’, mentioning Voinov and Sholpo, and Yankovksy’s experiments (though not his name).

Later in 1936, Moscow based Vladimir Solev wrote an article aimed at cinéastes and film-makers that appeared in specialist magazines in the USA [American Cinematographer April p.146-8, 154] and the UK [Sight and Sound July p.48-50 - in shortened form]. Alongside providing a detailed overview of Voinov, Sholpo and Yankovsky’s methods (describing the latters Timbrograms as the basis of ‘Music of the Future’), Solev considers the ‘Musical Horizons’ that their methods potentially opened up.

Solev argues that the often heard call for new sounds and new timbres had not as yet been achieved by graphical sound workers in what he terms ‘designed sound’. However, he suggests Voinov and Sholpo have attained ‘intermediary timbres’ that sit between existing instrumental sounds. These synthetic sounds may become useful in smoothing the transition between different instruments in a symphony orchestra. Solev envisions a time where

The violin will walk across the viola and the cello directly beyond the double bass. The lowest sounding brass wind instrument, the tuba, will rise above the highest brass wind - the trumpet. Triangles will sing, not ring. The piano, preserving the crystal clearness of its sound, will sound as prolonged as the harmonium, with its sound rising from the most tender pianissimo to colossal force. The flute will go down beyond the bass clarinet … There will be smooth modulations from the violin to the clarinet, to the horns, to the percussion. The gaps between the violins to the clarinet, the wood, the brass wind instruments … will be done away with. The “multiplication” orchestra of the future can be clearly foreseen even now, in the form of an unbroken continuation of timbres.

Solev also discusses the removal of instrumental noise to create purer tones, and how designed sound would allow glissandi in the use of any instrument and, therefore, the possibility of quarter tone music. He also discusses how designed sound will be ‘re-recorded’ to create polyphonic music by mixing designed sounds onto phonograms.

And then - silence. As Smirnov indicates, after 1936 only Sholpo and Yankovsky were able to sustain their work in graphical sound, and I have so far found nothing in English language press coverage until 1941. In June of that year a short Reuters news item appeared in a number of British newspapers, including the Liverpool Echo [17-6 p.6] and the Gloucestershsire Echo [17-6 p.4]. In the Liverpool Echo, in an article titled ‘Magic Music - Russian Scientist’s Novel Invention’, Dr. Sholpo in Moscow is reported to have performed music without instruments. Sholpo is (hyperbolically) described as having

invented a contrivance that records on an ordinary motion-picture film impressions that musical instruments would produce were each note perfectly played. The audience, it is declared, listened to Chopin’s Nineteenth Prelude for the pianoforte, and Liszt’s Sixth Rhapsody, played to a point of perfection never before attained. By the help of this invention Dr. Sholpo promises intonations totally beyond the scope of existing instruments, and the potentialities of orchestration it offers, he says, may lead to the composition of symphonic works of an entirely new type.

Conclusion

Therefore, as can be seen, there is no doubt that news of Soviet efforts in graphical sound did travel beyond the USSR’s borders by 1935-36, with general and specialist audiences potentially encountering descriptions and images of Sholpo, Voinov and Yankovsky’s work in the newspaper, magazine and journal articles I have identified. As outlined in previous posts, John Mills (1935), Carlos Chavez (1937), and John Cage and Edgard Varèse (1940) all viewed drawn sound/optical sound techniques as a path to future musical innovation. Due to the media coverage outlined above, it seems likely they all knew something of the work taking place in Russia and/or Germany, even if they failed to directly reference it in their own work. Therefore the ‘prophecies’ of Mills, Chavez, Cage and Varèse were in different ways all influenced by work that had already been taking place in optical sound from 1929 onwards. However, like Solev’s predictions in American Cinematographer and Sight and Sound, their assumptions concerning the technical form of future music were soon superceded with the introduction of increasingly complex electronic musical instruments and magnetic tape recording from the late 1940s. Despite this, Norman McLaren for one carried on the legacy of the earlier innovators in his later experiments in drawn sound.