Google Doodle Celebrates: German electronic musician ‘Oscar Sala’s” 112th Birthday

With its forthcoming doodle, which will go live at midnight. Google is honouring German electronic musician Oskar Sala’s 112th birthday.

This revelation is flagged by Google at around 6:30 p.m. today on their @google doodles Twitter profile.

Oskar Sala was a German physicist, composer, and progenitor of electronic music who was born in Greiz on July 18, 1910, and died on February 26, 2002. He used the Trautonium, a synthesizer’s prototype, as his instrumentation.

Sala improved the Trautonium in 1948, creating the Mixtur-Trautonium. The Mixtur-Trautonium made it possible for the first time in the history of music to play sounds that had only ever existed in theory since the Middle Ages. A unique tuning developed as a result of Sala’s idea, which opened the realm of subharmonics, the symmetric counterpart to overtones.

In 1952, Sala unveiled his brand-new instrument to the public, and its circuits would soon be granted worldwide licensing. Harald Genzmer provided the music for the inaugural Concert For Mixtur-Trautonium And Grand Orchestra in the same year.

He contributed to a lot of cinema scores throughout the 1940s and 1950s. In Berlin’s Mars film GmbH (4th incarnation), he opened his studio there in 1958. There, he created electronic music for movies including Fritz Lang’s Das Indische Grabmal (1959), Rolf Thiele’s Rosemary (1959), and Veit Harlan’s Different from You and Me (1957). (1959).

For Alfred Hitchcock’s movie The Birds, he produced the soundtrack without any music. His cinematic scores won several accolades, yet he never won an Oscar. Additionally, he contributed significantly to several German ads, including the one known as “HB’s Little Man.”

He had the title of Berlin’s honorary sen.

Take a beat to celebrate German electronic composer Oskar Sala's 112th birthday. He developed & played the mixture-trautonium, which introduced a unique sound to television, radio & film.

Learn about his legacy & instrument in today’s #GoogleDoodle → https://t.co/YC1kOPZFxe pic.twitter.com/r1wXsrDoLW

— Google Doodles (@GoogleDoodles) July 17, 2022