Term: Sound

Sound is the audio portion of a film. This includes dialogue, music, and effects.

Early Sound

There were attempts to add sound to film at the very beginning of cinema. The earliest surviving sound film has been identified as Dickson Experimental Sound Film. Produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company sometime between 1894 and 1895, the film is apparently a test for the “kineto-phonograph” (also called the “phono-kinetograph”). However, the technology–which involved the synchronization of image and sound by a mechanical belt–was not commercially viable.

There were experiments with sound in the early twentieth century. Gaumont, for instance, experimented with synchronizing sound films with his invention the Chronophone.

Silent films shown in movie palaces would have orchestral accompaniment, and those screened in smaller theaters would use a piano. Other common methods of adding sound to silent cinema involved placing people or objects behind the screen, to make noises at specific moments.

The Modern Sound Era

The birth of the “modern” sound era is traced to 1927, with the release of the Warner Bros. film The Jazz Singer. In this film, only the musical numbers have a recorded soundtrack; the dialogue sequences use the conventional method of films of the period, subtitles. The technology that was employed to add sound to The Jazz Singer, photographing sound directly onto film, was in fact patented by 1900, so it took almost thirty years before this technology was implemented commercially.

The earliest sound cameras, in the 1920s and ‘30s, were virtually immobile because they had to remain in soundproof booths while filming. Until filmmakers learned to control the noise of the camera, advances in camera movement were briefly slowed. On the other hand, sound added additional dimensions to film, such as spoken dialogue. Comedies and gangster films were two early examples of genres in which the richness of spoken dialogue was clear.

Technical Advancements and Aesthetic Innovations

Sound technology wouldn’t advance significantly until the 1950s, with the advent of magnetic tape as the principal means of recording sound. Stereophonic sound, which used magnetic tracks and multiple speakers, increased the appeal of wide-screen cinema.

During this period, filmmakers continued to experiment with the aesthetic potential of sound in film. Some interesting examples occur in the films of Jacques Tati, Robert Altman, and Wim Wenders.

Combining sound with the visual aspects of a shot–such as depth of field–Jacques Tati draws our attention to the background of a scene while actions occur in the foreground. We see an example of playing sounds and visuals against one another in Tati’s Mr. Hulot’s Holiday.

Robert Altman models his films on a multi-track recording technology commonly used in the music industry. This often creates in his films a free-for-all of overlapping dialogue and simultaneous speech.

The use of sound to enter a character’s mind is another example of the aesthetic possibilities of sound and cinema. In Wim Wenders’s Wings of Desire, as a camera tracks along past people in a library we hear their thoughts.

Recent Technical Advancements

More recent developments in technical sound include Dolby, which reduces background noise, and THX, which allowed sound systems in theaters to have the full range of Dolby stereophonic sound by using right, left, and center speakers, along with a subwoofer and 22 surround speakers.

Digital sound, another advancement, converts sound into a series of binary numbers, placing them in a computer’s memory without deterioration.

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