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.
This positioned him well to develop new models of Trautonium, a series that culminated in 1948 with the Mixtur-Trautonium, which, unlike Trautwein’s monophonic original, could sound multiple voices at once. The instrument proved versatile, and indeed commercial: any German who grew up in the nineteen-fifties will remember its sounds from television advertisements.
The chance to work on The Birds, by far Sala’s most widely heard soundtrack work, “presented itself when a former classmate of Sala who worked at Universal Studios in Hollywood heard that Hitchcock wanted synthetically produced bird sounds for his next movie,” says Google Arts & Culture. “Hitchcock, who deliberately wanted to avoid creating traditional movie music, even flew to Sala’s recording studio in Berlin where he was impressed by the sounds made by the Trautonium, which ultimately produced all the movie’s sound effects.” In collaboration with fellow pioneering electronic composer Remi Gassmann, Sala produced a veritable storm of not just avian shrieks and cackles, but also the harsh swirl of the elements and the creaks and groans of failing man-made infrastructure. Or at least that’s what moviegoers may imagine hearing in a soundtrack that often verges on the otherworldly, even the abstract — and Hitchcock knew that the imagination is the place from which real fear arises.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
