Yevgeny Murzin
Russian engineer and inventor (1914-1970)
Yevgeny Alexandrovich Murzin (Russian: 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.
“Yevgeny Murzin” enters the record as russian engineer and inventor (1914-1970). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Yevgeny, Murzin and Russian can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Nov 6, 2024. The linked authority identifier is Q4308022. VIAF identifies the subject as 29018092. The Library of Congress control number is n2009001393. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1914, 1970, 1941 and 1938.
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