Vladimir Davidovich Baranoff-Rossine, born in 1888 was a revolutionary Russian-born French painter, inventor and an avant-garde artist. Apart from his excellence in Art, Vladimir Davidovich Baranoff-Rossine is also known as the inventor of the Optophonic Piano, pointillist or dynamic military camouflage.
The first among these was a synaesthetic instrument invented by him in 1924 that was capable of simultaneously producing sound and colourful light projection. The device was intricately designed, for every time the keys of the piano on it were played, the music was converted by coloured disks into light rays that kept projecting on a screen. The first demonstration of this Optophonic Piano was made by him at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow. Soon after that, Vladimir left for France where he constantly experimented for several years, trying to collaborate the art of colour with the technique of camouflage. However, his life came to a tragic end when he was deported to a German camp in his later life, where he breathed his last in 1944.
