Odd Designs on Film Turn to Music

SYNTHETIC music is being produced in a German film studio by reversing a familiar process. When artists sing and orchestras play "before the talkie microphone, their music is recorded, in one standard method, as a wavy black line upon the sound track of the film. What would happen if an artist were to draw arbitrary shapes, imprint them on sound film, and run it through a reproducer? A German technician, Oscar Fischinger, recently tried the experiment with startling results. A series of concentric circles, drawn in a strip and photographed upon sound film, imitated an electric bell. Eye-like spots reproduced a bassoon, and a pattern of dots sounded like a xylophone.