The ANS synthesizer

Arguably the first Russian synth, the ANS, was built and developed around 1938 and finished in 1958 by engineer Yevgeny Murzin (1914-1970).
Murzin was an engineer who worked in areas unrelated to music, and the development of the ANS synthesizer was a hobby which gave him many problems 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.

The ANS was fully polyphonic and generated pure tones from rotating glass discs with 144 optical phonograms. The synth had 5 similar discs rotating at different speeds to produce 720 pure tones, covering the whole range of audible frequencies.

The user interface is a glass plate covered in non-drying opaque black mastic, which creates a drawing surface upon which the user makes marks by scratching through the mastic which allows light to pass through onto photocells that send signals to 20 amplifiers and bandpass filters.

The glass plate can be scanned left or right across the photocell bank, the scan speed is adjustable down to zero giving a continuous held note.

With 720 pure tones it is possible to get a high density synthesized sound with a smooth variance of pitch - the minimum interval is 1/72 of an octave (16.67 cents), or 1/6 of a semitone, which is only just perceptible to the ear.

This precision means that it is possible to synthesize a greater number of sounds per octave than the Western musical scale's 12 semitones.You could, for example, use a scale with 24 quarter-tones like the Indian Sruti scale.

Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (1872-1915)

Murzin named his invention in honour of the composer Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (ANS)

Scriabin was a Russian composer and pianist who was influenced by Frederic Chopin and composed early works characterised by tonal language. Scriabin was influenced by synesthesia (a neurological phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a second sensory or cognitive pathway), and associated colours with the various harmonic tones of his atonal scale.

Scriabin's work Prometheus: The Poem of Fire (1910), includes a part for a machine known as a "clavier à lumières", which was a colour organ designed specifically for the performance of Scriabin's tone poem. It was played like a piano, but projected coloured light on a screen in the concert hall rather than sound.

Theosophist and composer Dane Rudhyar wrote that Scriabin was "the one great pioneer of the new music of a reborn Western civilization, the father of the future musician", and an antidote to "the Latin reactionaries and their apostle, Stravinsky" and the "rule-ordained" music of "Schoenberg's group.

Eduard Nikolaevich Artemyev (1937-)

Eduard Nikolaevich Artemyev is an acknowledged leader of Russian electronic experimental music. In 1960 he met Yevgeny Murzin and used the ANS in his compositions for Andrei Tarkovsky's films Solaris, The Mirror and Stalker.

Artemyev found that the synthesiser is a possibility "to compose sound, timbre, to sculpt it, to lend form, colour, energy, duration. A most fascinating task for the musician with a creator's imagination, a colourist's talent and an inventor's intuition!"

The Virtual ANS - Spectral Synthesiser

Although there is only one example of the original ANS synthesiser, we are lucky that a free software simulator of the unique ANS synthesiser exists at warmplace.ru developed by Alexander Zolotov

The app is cross-platform and available for iOS, Android, Windows, Linux and OSX. The illustration below shows how it works.

Interface description (main window; ANS sonogram editor):

Here is a video that introduces the Virtual ANS