In Search of Lost Sound. Experimental Sound Culture in Russia and the USSR in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

A monograph by the Theremin Center founder Andrey Smirnov, In Search of Lost Soundis devoted to the history of the art of sound and music technology in Russia and the Soviet Union in the first half of the twentieth century. That era’s developments in the field of sound, which for a long time remained unknown to the general reader, are striking even today, almost a hundred years later. Contemporary practice confirms the integrity of the undeservedly forgotten experimenters. The leitmotif that runs through the book is a look at the history of Russian sound culture from the point of view of media archeology.

“The fate of the culture of revolutionary experimentalists is sad. Many projects that did not fit into the paradigms of the totalitarian culture of the 1930s to the1950s  have been forgotten, instruments and other material evidence of the era have been destroyed, key documents have been lost, and the surviving ones are separated and scattered across various archives. In fact, we are forced to excavate the ruins of the culture of the 1920s. So many inventions that seemed utopian were recreated decades later, some of them we use today, not knowing their origins, with a lot of ideas still awaiting a second birth, probably,” says Andrey Smirnov.