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Born the son of eye doctor Paul Sala and his wife Annemarie, Sala studied the piano and organ with a concert career in mind, and in 1927 debuted as a soloist playing Beethoven's Piano Concerto No. 2 at the Tivoli Theater in Greiz. In 1929 he entered
Paul Hindemith's master class in composition at the Musikhochschule in Berlin.
At the radio broadcast research station, he became acquainted with Dr. Friedrich Adolf Trautwein who had invented a new monophonic electrical instrument called the Trautonium, first exhibited on July 18, 1930, in
Hindemith's Sieben Triostücke für drei Trautonien (Seven Trios for Three Trautoniums) with
Hindemith playing the upper voice, piano professor Rudolf Schmidt the bass voice, and Sala the middle voice.
The first Trautoniums, marketed by Telefunken between 1932 -- 1935, were based on a neon tube oscillator and were able to continually alter timbre. On a fingerboard was a horizontally stretched wire, which was pressed against the metal rod beneath it, marked with a chromatic scale; the electrical resistance controlled frequency over a three-octave range. A foot pedal controlled volume and the sound was broadcast through loudspeakers.
Between 1932 and 1936, Sala enrolled at the University of Berlin in order to further his knowledge of physics and mathematics. In 1933, he learned to play the Trautonium, and in 1935 undertook the building one for the radio; he broadcast a 15-minute program Musik auf dem Trautonium.
In 1938 he built a concert Trautonium and went on tours of many European cities from Budapest to Florence. The first version of this two-manual instrument, using Thoraton electric tubes, was constructed in 1936 for Harald Genzmer's Konzert. In 1942,
Richard Strauss used Sala's improved Trautonium to simulate a gong in his Japanese Festival Music (1942). In 1947, Sala played the Trautonium in Honegger's Jeanne d'Arc au bûcher.
From 1949 until 1952, Sala constructed his microtonal Mixturtrautonium based on subharmonics for which he patented a circuit. A version with updated technology was built in 1988 by students at a Berlin vocational college. Currently, he is the only human being on the planet who owns and can play this instrument.
In 1958, he equipped his first independent studio in Berlin-Charlottenburg to produce concert, industrial, and film scores.
The high point in his film work was when he was asked to create bird sounds and other effects for Alfred Hitchcock's classic The Birds. Hitchcock wanted "something exceptionally strange with which to terrify people," and, on a tip from Remi Gassmann who had studied composition with Sala, Hitchcock sent Gassmann to Berlin with an edit of the scene of the surprise attack on the house. "I made a test version; it was created from the barebones. There were not only gulls, but also windows, doors, cabinets, hammer and nails and all sorts of things going on; a kind of work test of the synchronization technique. I must have passed the exam, because Gassmann came back with the complete film."
To date, Sala has created over 300 film scores and sound pieces.