ANS synthesizer

Lore & Background

The ANS synthesizer generates sine waves printed onto five glass discs, each with 144 tracks, producing 720 microtones spanning 10 octaves at a resolution of 1/72 octave. The user interface consists of a glass plate covered in non-drying opaque black mastic; the user scratches through the mastic to allow light to pass, creating marks that represent pitches over time. A vertical bank of twenty photocells reads the light, sending signals to amplifiers and bandpass filters, enabling full polyphony.

Reader's Guide

The ANS synthesizer was used by Soviet composers including Stanislav Kreichi, Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Edward Artemiev, who wrote scores for Andrei Tarkovsky's films such as Solaris. Only one ANS exists—the original was destroyed and this is an improved version—now housed at the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow. Its legacy includes recordings on Melodiya and Electroshock Records, as well as software emulations like Virtual ANS and MZ2SYNTH.

Did You Know?

• The ANS synthesizer generates 720 microtones (discrete pitches) spanning 10 octaves.
• The user draws on a glass plate covered in non-drying opaque black mastic to create sound.
• The original ANS synthesizer still exists and is housed at the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow.
• Edward Artemiev used the ANS for the score of Tarkovsky's film Solaris.

A Two-Decade Optical Obsession

Between 1937 and 1957, Russian optical engineer Evgeny Murzin devoted two decades to building a photoelectronic musical instrument that would ultimately bear the name of a long-dead composer. His conceptual foundation drew on a technique already known in the film industry—graphical sound recording, a method developed almost simultaneously in Russia and the United States that rendered sound waves as visible images. Murzin inverted this principle: rather than capturing existing sound, he sought to generate sound from a hand-drawn spectrogram. To make this possible, he personally developed a process for printing sine waves onto five glass discs, each carrying 144 discrete tracks. Together these discs produce 720 microtonal pitches across ten octaves, yielding a resolution of roughly 16.67 cents per step. The modulated light from these rotating wheels is then cast onto the rear of the instrument's interface, where it forms a continuous vertical band of pure tones, low frequencies anchored at the bottom and high frequencies at the top. The result is a machine in which the entire spectrum of sound exists as a visible, touchable landscape of light.

Drawing Sound into Being

The performer's interaction with the ANS is almost painterly. The interface is a glass plate coated in a non-drying opaque black mastic that serves as a drawing surface. By scratching through this mastic, the musician exposes the light beneath, effectively writing a note into the optical field. The horizontal axis represents time while the vertical axis encodes pitch on a logarithmic scale, so that each pure tone occupies a fixed geometric position. Behind the plate, a vertical optical slit aligns with this pitch axis, and on the far side a bank of twenty photocells feeds signals into twenty separate amplifiers and bandpass filters, each with its own gain control—functionally resembling a ten-octave equalizer with two knobs per octave. Because the instrument is fully polyphonic, a single vertical scratch can excite all 720 pitches simultaneously. To actually hear the drawing, the glass plate is scanned horizontally in front of the photocell bank, either by hand or via a gear-motor drive reminiscent of an engineering lathe. The scan speed, adjustable all the way down to zero, governs note duration but has no bearing on pitch.

Scriabin's Ghost in the Machine

Murzin christened his creation ANS in tribute to Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin, the late-nineteenth-century composer who was also an occultist, a theosophist, and one of the earliest advocates of linking color to sound in musical composition. The naming felt almost inevitable given the instrument's own marriage of visual and auditory domains. The synthesizer originally occupied an electronic-music studio perched above the Scriabin Museum on the Arbat in central Moscow, before relocating to the basement of a central university near Bolshaya Nikitskaya. It was Stanislav Kreichi who intervened to prevent the machine from being scrapped, persuading the university to take custody. Under his stewardship and that of fellow Soviet composers—Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina—the ANS became a working studio instrument. Edward Artemiev drew on it extensively for his film scores for Andrei Tarkovsky, most memorably in Solaris, where its abstract, ambient textures evoked an otherworldly sci-fi atmosphere. Today the sole surviving example, an improved version after the original was destroyed, resides in the Glinka State Central Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow.

Echoes Beyond the Glass

The ANS's influence has radiated far beyond its Moscow origins. A 1990 Melodiya compilation titled Musical Offering gathered works by Kreichi, Schnittke, Denisov, and Gubaidulina, though the underlying recordings date to the 1960s and 1970s. Kreichi's own albums Ansiana and Voices and Movement, along with the 1961 film soundtrack Into Space (collaborated with Artemiev, still unreleased), appear on Electroshock Records. In 2002, BBC Radio 4's Soundhunter series featured a programme by Isobel Clouter dedicated to the instrument. The British experimental group Coil released the boxed set CoilANS in 2004, and German electronic musician Carsten Nicolai recorded a live ANS piece for his 2010 album For 2 at the Theremin Center. In the digital realm, Alexander Zolotov's Virtual ANS application, first released in 2007 and available across Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android, simulates the spectogram workflow and gained MIDI controller support in its 2019 version 3.0. An open-source Fortran program called MZ2SYNTH, actively developed on GitHub, takes a 720-row image as input and renders 32-bit stereo audio, offering sine, square, sawtooth, and triangle waveforms.