Anyone who has watched Alfred Hitchcock’s classic horror film The Birds has surely been haunted by the screech of the eponymous feathered foes. However, viewers should be relieved to know that this sound was not actually created by a living bird, but by a unique electronic instrument called the trautonium. In his upcoming book, “Broadcasting Fidelity: German Radio and the Rise of Early Electronic Music,” Myles Jackson, Albers-Schönberg Professor in the History of Science in the School of Historical Studies, delves into the origin, invention, and impact of the trautonium. Created in 1930, the instrument emerged from a multidisciplinary collaboration between German physicists and electrical engineers, and composers and musicians. The book traces how the instrument was embraced by the Nazis and was subsequently used to subvert Nazi aesthetics after the war, revealing how the interplay of science, technology, politics, and culture gave rise to new aesthetic concepts, innovative musical genres, and the modern discipline of electroacoustics.
