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

Yevgeny Alexandrovich Murzin
Евгений Александрович Мурзин
BornOctober 25 (November 7), 1914
Samara, Russian Empire
DiedFebruary 27, 1970
Moscow, USSR
The ANS exhibited at Glinka Museum (May, 2013)

Academic life and military service

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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

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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

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