Yevgeny Cholpo, Russian Pioneer of Optical Synthesis

The text and video excerpt below document the book by Philippe Langlois, Les cloches d’Atlantis, musique électroacoustique et cinéma archéologie et histoire d’un art sonore, éditions mf, Paris, first quarter 2012.

Optical synthesis appeared in the USSR almost in parallel with the research of Pfenninger and Fischinger in Germany. The idea of producing synthetic sound on film therefore germinated jointly in two distinct parts of the world, without any direct relationship between the two discoveries being established.
From 1932, Yevgeny Cholpo took up the idea of working on optical sounds at the Leningrad Conservatoire – Len Film – with G. M. Rimsky-Korsakoff, starting from the oscillography of natural sounds.

Cholpo went on to develop his own method of sound production, even inventing a machine that mechanises the animation of sound. He called it the “variophone”: a photoelectric device that produces optical soundtracks from hollowed-out cardboard discs, turning along an axis and exposing the film’s optical track mechanically.

From 1932, the year of the first model, to 1948, Cholpo invented three versions of the variophone. The second came into being within the animation laboratory of the Len Film studios, and it was with this device that Cholpo made the greater part of his work: La Danse du corbeau (1932),

La Symphonie du monde (1933), La Cinquième variation de la sonate pour piano de Beethoven, La Chevauchée des Walkyries and Rachmaninov’s Prélude (1934).