in Film, History, Music, Technology | August 10th, 2026 Leave a Comment
Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Special Effects, though viewers raised on more recent Hollywood spectacles would hardly find its mechanized and optically printed avian attackers convincing. Still, the picture as a whole has retained its eerie, ominous power over the last six decades, and a decent amount of the credit for that goes to an aspect that hasn’t dated at all: its non-musical “score” by the early electronic composer Oskar Sala. Many of the threatening bird calls on the soundtrack were actually played by Sala on a device called the Mixtur-Trautonium, a pre-synthesizer orchestral electronic instrument of which he wasn’t just the undisputed master, but the only player in existence.
After his acceptance into the Berlin Conservatory in 1929, Sala came into contact with the Trautonium, which had recently been invented by one Dr. Friedrich Trautwein. Inspired to more deeply understand the principles behind the nascent technology of electronic music, and to further it, he went on to study physics at the University of Berlin in the mid-nineteen-thirties.
