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The trautonium is a monophonic electronic musical instrument invented ca. 1929 by Friedrich Trautwein in Berlin. Soon Oskar Sala joined, continuing development until his death in 2002. Instead of a keyboard, its manual is made of a resistor wire over a metal plate which is pressed to create a sound. Expressive playing was possible with this wire by gliding on it or create vibrato with small movements.
Paul Hindemith wrote several short Trios for three Trautoniums with three different tunings: bass, middle, and high voice. One of the first additions of Sala was to add a switch for change the static tune. Later he adds a noise and an envelope generator (socalled 'Schlagwerk'), Formant filter (several bandpass filters) and the subharmonic oscillators. These oscillators generates a main pitch and several harmonics, which are not multiples of the basetone, they are fractions. 4 of this waves could be mixed and the player can switch through this predefined settings, since then it was called the Mixtur Trautonium. Oskar Sala composed a lot of music for industrial films, but the most famous was the noises for Alfred Hitchcocks Birds.
The German manufacturer Doepfer tried to recreate parts of the trautonium for the commercial market.
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