hurrengoa
trautonium txio-txio koldo almandoz   An ornithologist group recently stated that birds in parks in big cities are now mimicking the call tones of mobile phones. It�s not hard to imagine our little feathered friends learning these new sounds as they perch in the branches above our heads. You can even picture our bearded ornithologist with his eyes glued to them as he brings his microphone with its long reach to record these plumed students tweettweeting their little heads off.
Alfred Hitchcock asked Oscar Sala to do exactly the opposite when he had just finished making The Birds (1963). He hadn�t been able to find the sound that he wanted for the film. The producers of the film referred the master of suspense to this German engineer who had been behind the sound for Goebbels� speeches. He was the very man to give the birds of Bodega Bay the evil edge necessary. Hitchcock sent a scene from the film over to Berlin, Oscar Sala got to work and sent the finished version back to the British director. Two weeks later the whole film was in Berlin. When the finished version had been returned and screened at the Universal Studios in Los Angeles, Hitchcock asked his secretary to get him a plane ticket to Berlin. He wanted to meet the man who had created those sound effects.
The birds in city parks chirp out mobile phone call tones. Hitchcock was able to bring his celluloid birds to life thanks to Oscar Sala and his Trautonium. A telephone company have seemingly discovered all of this and have included different bird calls on their phone call tone menus.

The Trautonium is a monophonic instrument that has a fingerboard consisting of a resistance wire stretched over a metal rail marked with a chromatic scale and coupled to a neon tube oscillator valve. A doctor Trautwein was the man who invented this valve, capable of creating continuous sound waves and harmonies. The sound engineer Oscar Sala very quickly became his friend and student. He came up with a filter that could control the sound waves and he also built a machine that allowed the whole contraption to be controlled by hand. Oscar Sala was the first and probably the only Trautonium virtuoso to ever have existed.
This instrument was able to come up with sounds that were otherwise totally unheard of the time and was definitely the forefather of electronic instruments and electronic music. Cinema was very quick to cop onto the potential of the Trautonium. The first time Trautonium music appeared in a picture was in the 1930 film "St�rme �ber Dem Montblanc" (Storm Over Montblanc), directed by Arnold Fanck and starring Leni Riefensthal. From then on it was used to create sound effects and for the soundtracks for many films.
The never-ending development of the instrument, and the difficulty in playing it meant that Oscar Sala had no-one to take over from him. We would probably be correct in assuming that his death brought an end to the use of the instrument and ensured its future as a showpiece in some dusty museum somewhere.