Lauren Rosati at Artforum:
IN THE SUMMER OF 1917, the Russian engineer and inventor Evgeny Sholpo (1891–1951) wrote “The Enemy of Music,” a polemical science-fiction essay describing a colossal instrument he called the Mechanical Orchestra. Combining miles of slatted black paper tape with a network of electrical wires, pipes, levers, tuning forks, sine wave oscillators, and horns, this fictional sound machine allowed a piece of music to unfold automatically, rendering the musical performer obsolete. “Now,” Sholpo proclaimed, “we will receive ready-made pieces of music according to a specific recipe.” Years later, while working at the Central Laboratory of Wire Communication, a Soviet film lab in Leningrad, Sholpo attempted to bring this speculative project to life, incorporating elements of the fictive Mechanical Orchestra into a functional device called the Variophone, a proto-synthesizer used for scoring films that could reproduce—theoretically—any spoken or musical sound using abstract visual forms cut from paper. The Bureau of Realization of Inventions at the state-run film production company Lenfilm Studios agreed to fund the project; Sholpo built the first prototype in late 1931.
more here.
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