High in the gallery of the West Australian Museum's grand Hackett Hall, musician Meg Travers is bent over an instrument that looks and sounds like it belongs in an episode of Doctor Who.

The Trautonium was one of the world's first electronic instruments.

It uses subharmonic synthesis and frequency shifters and is played on a ribbon controller, which Ms Travers runs her fingers up and down to release sound from the machine.

Ms Travers built her Trautonium as part of a PhD at the West Australian Academy of Performing Arts.

"It's an instrument that was invented in 1929 in Germany by a gentleman named Dr Friedrich Trautwein, and then taken over by a man called Oskar Sala," she said.

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"What I'm interested in is preservations of those electronic musical instruments that have gotten to a state where they are obsolete or unplayable, because we lose the pieces of music that have been written for them."

Although it is less than 100 years old, Ms Travers discovered that the only Trautoniums left were preserved in German museums and not available to players or audiences.

That was when she set about building her own.

She was able to learn how from someone who had done repairs on Sala's Trautonium and tried to not make her version look exactly like the originals.

"Mine is a very much a 21st-century version of the instrument," she said.

Meg Travers' Trautonium is a jumble of dials and wires. ( 720 ABC Perth: Emma Wynne )

Having built the Trautonium, Ms Travers then had to learn to play it — a task she has been working on for the past six months.

With no teachers to turn to, she has had to rely on looking at old videos and listening to recordings.

"There's one other person in the world that plays it — a chap named Peter Pichler, who lives in Berlin and took it up a few years ago," she said.

"I'm finding it challenging.

"It's not so much about mastering the figuring, the playing is pretty simple, but the sculpting of the sound is the difficulty.

"I'm learning things about how it works and the chaos of how you construct the sounds with it all the time."

The score Ms Travers will play in the first WA performance of her Trautonium. ( 720 ABC Perth: Emma Wynne )

The sound produced by the Trautonium is eerie and almost supernatural.

Its best known use was on the soundtrack for Alfred Hitchcock's 1963 film The Birds.

Ms Travers hoped that by making a Trautonium available to play in Australia, a revival of interest in the instrument would occur.

She will give the first public performance of a Trautonium in Western Australia on Saturday at an event to mark the closing of the WA Museum for a four-year renovation.