For the first time since it was invented, the rich, eerie, mournful music of the trautonium, the 90-year-old synthesiser and one of the world’s first electronic musical instruments, will be heard live in concert outside of Europe.

German musician Peter Pichler, the only touring artist in the world who performs live with the instrument, will take the trautonium on tour to Australia in April.

Invented by Friedrich Trautwein at the Berlin Music University in 1929, the trautonium was developed essentially as a fretless electronic string instrument. It looks like two small keyboards set into a wooden box, and is played by the musician pressing their fingers on wires that connect to a metal plate. Pressing the wire to the plate closes an electrical circuit, which produces a sound; changes in pitch can be made by shifting or sliding the finger along the wires. The sounds can also be filtered to change tone.

The trautonium is most famous for its use in the soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock’s 1962 horror film, The Birds. Hitchcock commissioned musician and trautonium expert Oskar Sala to create the sound of the menacing flock, which the director described as “maybe not a realistic sound, but more or less impressionistic sounds of birds screaming.”

The trautonium was promoted by the Nazis when Hitler came to power due to its being a recent German invention. Yet attempts to mass-produce and mass-market the instrument to the public in the early 1930s failed, and it remained a rarity on the musical landscape.

The original design of the instrument was later modified by Sala, who expanded its capacity for subharmonic sounds.

For 70 years, Sala was the only person who performed concerts with the trautonium. Pichler, a multi-instrumentalist who has studied the trautonium since he was very young, took over the mantle of trautonium expert after Sala’s death in 2002.

Pichler and the trautonium will be in Australia from 8 April, performing in Perth and Melbourne.