Miklós Rózsa was the first film composer to use the theremin in the West, in the otherwise orchestral scores for Alfred Hitchcock’s psychological thriller Spellbound (1945) and Billy Wilder’s drama about alcoholism Lost Weekend (1945). It made its soundtrack debut in a 1931 Soviet film called Odna (“Alone”), for a sequence in which a woman gets lost in a furious snowstorm.
The earliest and best known of these pioneering instruments is the theremin (developed in 1920), which produces a distinctively eerie tone shifting up and down in pitch according to the position of the operator’s hands in relation to a pair of magnetised antennae.
It can be heard on Edward Artemiev’s score for Andrei Tarkovsky’s sublime Solaris (1972).
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Later, the clavioline (1947) was the first electronic keyboard instrument to reach a mass market, boasting a five-octave range derived from a single tone generator its rich buzzy timbre can be heard on Joe Meek’s classic single “Telstar” (1962) and the work of jazz maverick Sun Ra.Īmong the more obscure instruments, the ANS synthesizer (1937) was perhaps the most unusual: created by Russian engineer Evgeny Murzin, it modified sine waves photo-electronically by means of five glass discs, through which light shines as the player scratches patterns on an outer surface coated with non-drying black mastic. Among the earliest electronic instruments were the Ondes-Martenot (invented in 1928), which produced a characteristic quivering sound by varying the frequency of oscillation in an array of vacuum tubes, and the trautonium (1930), a monophonic synthesizer-like instrument in which sound generation was based on neon tubes and modulated by the action of fingers on a metal resistor wire. Electronically produced sound has been available to adventurous film composers since the silent era.
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