One of the strangest soundtracks in film history was born not from keys, not from strings, not even from electronic circuits in the usual sense — but from lines scratched into soot-blackened glass.
Imagine that engineer Yevgeny Murzin abandoned his undertaking sometime in 1948. Got tired, turned to his day job, forgot all about it. The АНС (ANS) synthesizer never appeared. Now the question: what would the ocean of Solaris have sounded like in 1972?
Tarkovsky would still have had Bach — the F minor chorale prelude (BWV 639, “Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ”), which first sounds in the film in its original organ form and then — in Artemyev’s electronic versions — becomes one of the score’s central pillars. There would still have been electronic music as it existed by the early seventies: Moog and Buchla synthesizers, Soviet “Ekvodins,” and other keyboard instruments. But a keyboard synthesizer is still an instrument played by pressing keys, producing one note after another. It is tethered to a discrete gesture, to the human finger. The ocean of Solaris is a thinking substance that has no idea what a finger is. It needed a sound free of the traces of human motor skills, free of the familiar “press — release,” free of equal temperament. A timbre that crawls, flows, lives not as melody but as matter. That was precisely what the ANS could do — and, in essence, it alone. No other instrument of the time could generate a continuous spectral landscape in which 720 microtones coexist simultaneously, without a keyboard grid, without steps.
Of course, Artemyev would have found a way out — a gifted composer always does. But it would have been a different way out, a different texture, a different film. Solaris sounds the way it does because Moscow had the only machine in the world that turned graphics into acoustics.
Murzin began thinking about this machine in the late thirties, and the idea swiftly took documentary form: in 1938, at twenty-four, fresh out of the Moscow Institute of Municipal Engineering, he brought the ANS project to the music acoustics laboratory at the Moscow Conservatory. War lay ahead, and a real education in artillery: from 1942, Senior Technician-Lieutenant Murzin at NII-5 brought ground-artillery fire-control devices and air-defense systems up to field-test and combat conditions. The connection between artillery and music may seem anecdotal at first glance, but it was entirely real: both involved signal processing, optics, precision mechanics. Murzin understood that a sound wave is a spectrum, a set of sine waves, and that if you learned to assemble that set from scratch, bypassing the string, the reed, and the vocal cord, you could get any timbre at all, including nonexistent ones.
The key idea came from cinema. In optical sound recording — the kind used on film stock — sound was turned into a graphic trace, and in playback, light passing through that trace became sound again. Murzin reversed the process: what if you drew the soundtrack by hand, consciously constructing the spectrum? Then you needed neither orchestra nor instrument — only a hand, glass, and light.
Almost twenty years passed from idea to functioning prototype. The patent was published in 1957. Two decades — enough time for some engineers to become disillusioned three times over. Murzin did not. He built the machine alongside his regular work — not a solitary hermit, but an engineer adept at using official resources, his standing in the Soviet defense industry, and the goodwill of management: he assembled the first working model by 1957 at his dacha. That is what gets me: not a flash of genius, but a twenty-year, daily decision not to quit.
He named the machine after the initials of Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin — the composer who, back at the start of the 20th century, dreamed of synthesizing sound, color, and light. Scriabin designed a “light keyboard” for Prometheus, dreamed of a “Mystery” in which all the senses would merge. Murzin was no mystic; he was an engineer — but Scriabin’s idea that sound could be seen and images heard became a working hypothesis for him, one he tested with a soldering iron and a lathe.
The ANS, roughly speaking, is an optical projection device crossed with a bank of generators and a photoelectric readout system. Let’s break it down.
At its core are five glass discs in the machine’s second and final version (the first dacha model had four discs). Printed on each disc are 144 concentric tracks of sine waves at different frequencies. The discs rotate, and light passing through them is modulated — each track generates its own pure sine wave. That makes 720 discrete pitches across a range of 10 octaves, in steps of 1/72 of an octave — around 16.67 cents, far smaller than a semitone on a piano (100 cents). A piano divides the octave into 12 steps; the ANS divides it into 72. This is the territory of microtonality, where sound becomes continuous, like a color gradient.
In front of the discs sits a glass plate coated with a layer of non-drying black mastic. The composer takes a sharp implement — essentially a stylus or needle — and scratches lines into the mastic. The plate’s horizontal axis is time; its vertical axis is pitch on a logarithmic scale. The scratch exposes transparent glass, and light from the rotating discs passes through it. On the other side of the plate is a vertical row of 20 photocells, each connected to an amplifier and a band-pass filter. The photocells read precisely which frequencies the scratch has allowed through and convert the light signal into an electrical one — that is, into sound.
The plate is scanned from left to right — manually or with a motor drive. The speed of movement determines the tempo: move it faster and the sound compresses in time; slower and it stretches out. Since all 720 frequencies can sound at once, the ANS is fully polyphonic — in theory, it can reproduce all its microtones simultaneously, creating the densest spectral cluster that no orchestra in the world could ever replicate.
In essence, it is an equalizer in reverse: a normal equalizer cuts or boosts frequencies in an existing sound, while the ANS builds sound from frequencies from scratch. The closest modern analogy is spectral editing in programs like iZotope or Adobe Audition, where you see a spectrogram and can paint on it with a brush, adding or removing frequency components. The ANS did this in analog reality half a century before such programs existed — with glass, mastic, and light.
Eduard Artemyev entered the ANS orbit as a young man. He was studying composition at the Moscow Conservatory, and in the late fifties and early sixties he came to the studio Murzin had organized at the Scriabin Museum in Moscow. The studio was tiny and for a long time survived on the sheer enthusiasm of Murzin and a handful of like-minded people; it acquired legal status later — by an order of the State Committee for Radio Electronics in December 1960, the USSR’s first electronic music studio was created around the instrument. But for young composers suffocated by the academic canon, it became a laboratory of freedom. Alfred Schnittke, Edison Denisov, Sofia Gubaidulina, Stanislav Kreichi worked there — people who, a few years later, would form the vanguard of Soviet music.
Artemyev quickly understood that the ANS was neither an orchestra substitute nor an exotic toy. It was another way of thinking about sound. On a keyboard instrument, you think in notes — discrete events in time. On the ANS, you think in spectral patches, textures, densities. The difference is like typing a text letter by letter versus drawing a hieroglyph in a single gesture. As early as 1961, the first works created on the ANS were heard at exhibitions in London and Paris; that same year Artemyev and Stanislav Kreichi wrote the soundtrack for the film “Space” (in some sources, “Into Space”): the recording was never released, but the very fact tells us that the link between the ANS and the cosmic theme arose long before Tarkovsky.
When Tarkovsky came to Artemyev with Solaris, the task was framed not in musical but sensory terms. The director needed a sound that conveyed contact with a nonhuman intelligence — not “space music” in the science-fiction style, but the sensation of a viscous, unsettling, almost organic otherness. The ocean of Solaris is neither enemy nor friend; it is a mirror, reflecting human memory in distorted form. The sound had to work in exactly the same way: familiar, but deformed; recognizable, but uncomfortable.
It is important here not to fall into myth. The ANS did not compose the entire Solaris soundtrack. The film’s score is a multilayered construction in which ANS electronic textures coexist with Bach’s chorale prelude (F minor, BWV 639, “Ich ruf' zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ”), orchestral fragments, and concrete sounds — noises, processed recordings. Artemyev worked as an architect of sonic space, not as a performer on a single instrument.
The role of the ANS in that architecture was to shape the timbral environment in which the drama unfolds. It is neither melody nor accompaniment. It is — the acoustic atmosphere of an alien planet: slowly mutating spectral masses with no beginning or end, untethered to key and rhythm. When the camera shows the ocean’s surface, when Kris Kelvin confronts the phantoms of his memory, when the Solaris station lives its own nocturnal life — it is the ANS timbres that create the feeling that the air around the characters has changed, that the laws of the familiar world have been suspended. The electronic texture does not illustrate the plot — it creates the space in which the plot takes place.
Bach sounds beside this space — and the contrast lands like a blow. The chorale prelude is the voice of human culture, memory, Earth. ANS electronics are the voice of what lies beyond culture. Tarkovsky built the film on the collision of these two poles, and Artemyev gave him the tools for both. Bach, moreover, was processed too: the electronic reworking of the organ sound blurred the line between the “human” and the “nonhuman,” between memory and its reflection in an alien consciousness.
It seems to me that the genius of the decision lies in rejecting the obvious. By 1972, space science fiction already had an established sonic vocabulary: theremins, oscillators, echo chambers. Artemyev used none of those clichés. The ANS gave him something that was not in the vocabulary: sound born from a visual gesture, from a scratch on glass — sound that had literally been drawn.
Yevgeny Murzin died in 1970 — two years before the premiere of Solaris. He never saw his instrument become the voice of one of the decade’s defining films. The studio at the Scriabin Museum did not die immediately: Mark Malkov kept it afloat for several more years, but by 1980 it was shut down, and the sound recordings created within its walls were lost. Murzin was not merely the ANS’s designer — he was its center of gravity, its organizer, the man who secured premises, procured components, persuaded officials. Without him, the experimental milieu that had formed around the instrument began to come apart.
The ANS is a one-off. Murzin left behind no mass production, created no factory, wrote no detailed manual for future engineers. The machine, measuring 170 by 150 centimeters, requires specialized maintenance, while printing the tracks on its glass discs demands precision down to hundredths of a millimeter — something no one today is able to reproduce. When the studio closed, the instrument ended up in a recording studio wedged into the basement of the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University. The ANS archives perished there in a fire — blueprints, schematics, and audio recordings burned — but by a lucky chance, the machine itself survived: no water spilled into its room. In 2003, when the MSU administration decided to reconfigure the premises, Stanislav Kreichi saved the instrument — composer, one of the ANS’s first users, and its longtime keeper. In a single day, he dismantled the machine into modules and carried it to the Theremin Center at the Moscow Conservatory.
Later, the ANS came to the Theremin Center (named after another great Russian inventor of electronic instruments — Leon Theremin) and was eventually transferred to Moscow’s Glinka Museum of Musical Culture (official presentation: October 2008), where it remains today. Access to it is limited: it is a museum exhibit that is still switched on from time to time — for guided tours, for example — but no longer functions as a working studio instrument. You can play it only with the museum’s permission, and the circle of people who have managed to do so in recent decades is extremely narrow.
Recordings made on the ANS came out on the Melodiya label: the album “A Musical Offering” was recorded back in 1971, but shelved — the artistic council deemed it too daring — and released in 1990 (some sources name 1991). Later, material was published by the Electroshock Records label. But the ANS left behind no large body of recordings — too few people had access to it, and the studio’s window of active work was too short.
Interest in the ANS did not die — it shifted into another form. In 2007, programmer Alexander Zolotov released Virtual ANS — a software emulator that reproduces the machine’s principle on a computer screen. You draw on a virtual spectrogram — the program turns the drawing into sound. There is also a console-based open-source emulator — MZ2SYNTH, written in Fortran 2003. The emulators allowed thousands of people around the world to touch Murzin’s idea — and discover that it works, that drawing sound produces timbres no other method can achieve.
At the same time, interest grew among researchers and archivists. The ANS became the subject of musicological dissertations, documentary films, articles in electronic-music journals. A new generation of electronic musicians — from ambient to noise — discovered in it a precursor to their own methods: spectral synthesis, granular processing, visual sound design. The programs used today by thousands of sound engineers essentially reproduce the logic Murzin implemented in glass and light half a century before them.
But between the emulator and the original lies an abyss. Virtual ANS is an excellent instrument, yet it works with pixels on a screen and digital algorithms. The real ANS is physical light passing through physical glass, read by physical photocells. The analog continuity of the process, the slightest nonlinearities of the optics and electronics, the tactile sensation of the needle scraping through mastic — all of this is irreproducible in digital form. The original stands in a Moscow museum, and its fate depends on whether people and funding can be found to keep its optics, electronics, and light working year after year.
Trace the trajectory and it looks almost unbelievable. Scriabin in the 1910s dreams of the fusion of sound and light, conceives a “Mystery” he never has time to realize. Young engineer Murzin in the 1930s takes that utopia and translates it into the language of optics and electronics — not metaphorically, but literally: light passes through glass and becomes sound. Twenty years later, the machine is ready, and a circle of composers gathers around it, people who would define the face of the Soviet musical avant-garde. One of them, Artemyev, in 1972 uses the machine to give voice to a thinking ocean on a distant planet — an image conceived by Stanisław Lem and reimagined by Tarkovsky.
Scriabin’s utopia of total art, the Soviet engineering school, Tarkovsky’s cinema — three worlds that, it would seem, should never have intersected. They did intersect inside a single machine standing in a small studio at a Moscow museum. The ANS is not some forgotten Soviet marvel to mourn. It did its job: it connected an idea a century old with a film that still changes people’s notion of how cinema can sound. Now it stands in the Glinka Museum — the only one of its kind, fragile, aging, with five glass discs whose blueprints burned in the fire at the Faculty of Journalism.