Google Doodle commemorates 112th birth anniversary of German music composer Oskar Sala

Today's fascinating and intricately designed Google Doodle is dedicated to the legacy left behind by the German physicist and music composer Oska Sala. The music pioneer is best known for his mastered art and the composition behind Alfred Hitchcock's The Bird, in which he used his synthesizer to create eerie bird sounds. Recognized for producing sound effects on a musical instrument called a mixture-trautonium, Sala electrified the world of television, radio, and film. The Google Doodle today commemorates what would have been his 112th birthday.

Who is Oskar Sala?

In 1910, Sala was born in East Germany's small town of Greiz. From a young age, he was immersed in music, focusing on instruments like organ and piano. Sala had inherited his talent for music from his parents. "His mother was a singer and his father was an ophthalmologist with musical talent," Google said in its blog post on Sala. Sala began creating compositions and songs for instruments like the violin and piano by the age of 14.

Young Sala became mesmerized after he came across the trautonium. "When Sala first heard a device called the trautonium, he became fascinated by the tonal possibilities and the technology the instrument offered," Google added. For the unversed, trautonium is an electronic musical instrument that helped produce noise and sounds. It was invented by Friedrich Trautwein in 1930s in Berlin, Germany.

Sala developed Trautonium with his physics knowledge

Sala would go on to dedicate himself to the instrument and perform at the Berlin Philharmonic with what is widely considered a precursor to today's synthesizer.  Enchanted by the tonal possibilities and the technology of a Trautonium, Sala's life mission became mastering the musical device and developing it further later inspired by his studies in physics and composition at school. He improved on the instrument to create a customised version to generate sounds through saw-tooth oscillations of low-voltage neon lamps and filters controlled by rotary switches. With his education as a composer and an electro-engineer, he created electronic music that set his style apart from others, thus, making what today is called the 'mixture trautonium.'

"The mixture-trautonium’s architecture is so unique that it was capable of playing several sounds or voices simultaneously," Google said.

Sala went on and composed musical pieces and sound effects for many television, radio, and movie productions, such as Rosemary (1959) and The Birds (1962). The instrument created bird cries, hammering, and door and window slams. Noticed for his immense contribution to the field of subharmonics, Sala was accorded several awards. In 1995, he donated his original mixture-trautonium to the German Museum for Contemporary Technology. During his lifetime, Sala also developed the Quartett-Trautonium, Concert Trautonium and the Volkstrautonium. "Happy birthday, Oskar Sala!" Google wrote.

(Image: @GoogleDoodles/Twitter)