Friedrich Trautwein

Friedrich Trautwein (born August 11, 1888 in Würzburg , † December 20, 1956 in Düsseldorf ) was a German engineer . Trautwein developed the Trautonium and is therefore considered a pioneer of electronic music in Germany.

Life

Friedrich Trautwein learned to play the organ in church as a child . He studied electrical engineering at the Technical University of Karlsruhe, later law and physics in Berlin and at the University of Heidelberg. In Karlsruhe he became a member of the Teutonia fraternity in 1906 .

In 1911 he passed the trainee examination for the higher postal service. In the First World War he was a lieutenant and led a mounted radio squad. After the assessor examination in 1919, he studied physics in Heidelberg and Karlsruhe, where he did his doctorate in engineering. In the following year he accepted a position as a postal advisor at the Telegraph Technology Reichsamt . In this function he was involved in the establishment of the first German radio station, which was based in the Vox House in Berlin. At the same time he dealt with electrical sound generation. He received his first patent for this in 1922 (DE 462980).

In 1929 he accepted a lectureship at the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, within the framework of which the development of the Trautonium named after him began. This was completed in 1930. He was involved in the further development of the instrument until around 1933, later Oskar Sala continued to work on it independently. In 1933 he became a member of the NSDAP (membership number 1,774,684), later the SA .

In 1949 Trautwein worked at the BIKLA image and sound academy in Düsseldorf , but it soon ceased operations. Trautwein and his students went to the Düsseldorf Conservatory (now the Robert Schumann University of Düsseldorf ) as the “Tonmeisterausbildung” department and thus formed the basis of a degree in audio and video technology that still exists today. 1952 followed in Cologne the development of another musical instrument, the electronic monochord , which represented a further development of the Trautonium and allowed dynamic variations of the sound envelope shape.

literature

• German Biographical Encyclopedia (DBE)
• Peter Donhauser: Electric sound machines. Böhlau, Vienna 2007
• Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume II: Artists. Winter, Heidelberg 2018, ISBN 978-3-8253-6813-5 , pp. 690-692.

Web links

Commons : Friedrich Trautwein  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Literature by and about Friedrich Trautwein in the catalog of the German National Library
• Institute for Music and Media, Robert Schumann University of Applied Sciences Duesseldorf (with photo by Friedrich Trautwein)
• Music and electricity part 3: Three big ones from the 30s at Bonedo.de