Dis. 104
Matthew Gonzalez
The Modern Sound
A History of Sound Recording in Cinema
The first feature film with sound was, indeed, The Jazz Singer, which won an honorary Academy Award for its historical achievement. But it took decades of experimentation to make this feat possible.The very first ever recorded sound was done with a phonautogram by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville in 1860. The phonautogram was not meant for playback, so the original result was double the speed; only in 2008 was it remastered by Patrick Feaster.
http://www.firstsounds.org/sounds/scott.php
Of course, during the Gilded Age, industrialists had the best access to expensive new technology and pricey experiments. The famous inventor Thomas Edison created his phonograph from a project to improve his company’s telegraphs. This 1877 recording was meant for playback, and Edison said: “Mary had a little lamb.”
Much inspired, Edison assigned his senior associate, William Kennedy Laurie Dickson, to synchronize sound with motion pictures. Dickson’s team developed the “kinetophone” to attempt to combine the phonograph with the kinetograph, which provided the cinematic visuals. Because the team did not understand that true synchronization required the two machines to be consistently cranked, the hand-cranked 1895 movie was only fully completed in 1998.
Interest in films with sound dwindled during the first two decades of the new century, which was also the golden age of silent film. Overseas, in the meanwhile, three Germans invented a sound-on-film system, aptly named Tri-Ergon. A year later, Hollywood businessman William Fox bought the rights to Tri-Ergon in 1920, which competed with another version of the sound-on-film, the Phonofilm by Lee de Forest and Theodore Case. This competition highlighted the ongoing economic and technological tensions after the Great War.
In an effort to maintain their status in the Hollywood studio system, Warner Bros. invested in yet another rendition of sound-on-film, the 1926 Vitaphone made by Western Electric. Successful, they were finally able to creat that famous talkie in 1928, starring Al Jolson as the titular Jazz singer.
Initially, the Hollywood industry rebuffed the talkies as a fad, especially since recording sound created such a hassle inside the studios as depicted in Singin’ in the Rain, and projecting sound was such a burden on cinemas that did not have the amplifying technology. However, after Arnold Pousen and Axel Petersen developed a proper synchronization machine in 1930, sound could be recorded separately or even dubbed, allowing the art of cinematography to continue no longer hindered.
With this transition from silence to sound, movies stylistically evolved as well. Multiple cameras shot numerous angles simultaneously to accommodate actors who had to be stationary near early microphones; after the invention of the boom stick to increase the microphones’ mobility, camera angles had become stylistic choices to clarify the narrative point of view. Actors, in turn, had to train their voices to be most appealing; they often adopted an elite, British-like accent for classical Hollywood style films. And since music could also be recorded into the film, the most aethetic solution to incorporate orchestration into the storyline was the genre of musicals.
For discussion:
How did the studio system solidify as a result of the invention of talkies?
In what ways were films with sound a mode of modern art?
Works Cited
Allen, Bob. "Let's Hear It For Sound." Let's Hear It For Sound. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.By the Time It Completed the Vitagraph Deal, Warner Bros. Had Taken on More than Five Million Dollars in Debt. "Vitaphone Vaudeville, 1926-1930." Home. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
"Dickson Experimental Sound Film 1895." Dickson Experimental Sound Film 1895. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
The Dickson Experimental Sound Film. Perf. WKL Dickson. 1895.
Garrettfoster886, ~. "The Introduction of Sound in Cinema." Web log post. Film History Fall 2013. N.p., 09 Dec. 2013. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
Gomery, Douglas. "Tri-Ergon, Tobis-Klangfilm, and the Coming of Sound." Cinema Journal 16.1 (1976): 52-53. Web. 12 Oct. 2016.
Hanson, Dion. "The History of Sound in the Cinema." The 1997 Bernard Happé Memorial Lecture (1997): n. pag. Print.
Keystone-France. Petersen And Poulsen, Inventors Of The Synchronizing Sound And Image Machine 1930. Digital image. Getty Images. N.p., 1930. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
"Old Site - Lee De Forest in Hollywood." Old Site - Lee De Forest in Hollywood. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
"The Phonautograms of Édouard-Léon Scott De Martinville." FirstSounds.ORG. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
Sundell, Spencer. "The Pre-History of Sound Cinema: Thomas Edison and WKL Dickson." Spencer Sundell. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
"Talking Motion Pictures." Talking Motion Pictures. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
"Thomas Edison and the First Phonograph." Thomas Edison and the First Phonograph. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
Vitaphone System Diagram. Digital image. Vitaphone System Diagram. N.p., n.d. Web. 13 Oct. 2016.
I really liked how you mentioned that audiences were initially resistant towards "talkies," and that they only became popular after implementation methods became easier. It really shows the human propensity towards stagnancy and our reluctance towards change. However, this idea also reveals a lot about how we think of entertainment. One might think that entertainment that is constantly changing is the most interesting and popular to the people. The slow emergence of "talkies," though, shows that sometimes, the same thing is found to be more entertaining than the new.
ReplyDeleteI really liked how you mentioned that audiences were initially resistant towards "talkies," and that they only became popular after implementation methods became easier. It really shows the human propensity towards stagnancy and our reluctance towards change. However, this idea also reveals a lot about how we think of entertainment. One might think that entertainment that is constantly changing is the most interesting and popular to the people. The slow emergence of "talkies," though, shows that sometimes, the same thing is found to be more entertaining than the new.
ReplyDeleteI think this speaks well to the persistence of American inventors in the later part of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries. It was as if they could predict the entertainment that the public would enjoy, even when the public didn't know itself. I think there is also something to be said here about connecting the worlds of scientists and entertainers. In history, entertainers were painters, musicians and dancers. Now in this industrial age entertainers were technicians as well. I would have loved to see you connect this a bit more to the concurrent rise of modernism because I think the entrance of the scientist to entertainment affected the artists view of him/herself. I think this topic was a great pick overall!
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ReplyDeleteKara,
ReplyDeleteI really like your choice of topic because it highlights a key aspect of Modernism in general and within that of Modern art, which is that of experimentation and the new. While sound was obviously nothing new in itself, the notion and action of putting it on the screen with visuals was groundbreaking. These creators took something known to everyone and shifted peoples' perspective of sound and what it could do, which is a quintessential part of Modernism.
- Lindsey Pfeiffer
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ReplyDeleteWoah! The first film with sound before 1900, crazy! Definitely a gem of cool trivia. It's very intriguing how boomsticks can influence the narrative point of view. It's understandable how the invention might effect how movies are shot more generally, but the artistic intent to alter the telling of the story is quite a quirky endeavor. This is a crucial point you made about how technology can influence voice. Further, the British accent the actors adopted reminded me of what the professor (or a student, I can't recall) mentioned about the British accent being a voice of authority. It is fascinating how narration is being shaped by the moulds of authority and technology simultaneously, so very interesting! Thank you for sharing. Your post shed a new dimension of light on the Modernist era.
ReplyDeleteYour post is very interesting, considering we spend a considerable amount of time in class discussing voice. We talk about how literature conveys voice from a time when people had never heard voice conveyed in a piece of art before. After the dawn of this technology, people could actually hear and experiment with real audible voice, something that had never been done before. I think this type of advancement is notable when we talk about voice from literature during this era.
ReplyDeleteIt's crazy to think that the distinctive voice of vintage film was actually an artificial accent, especially one that actually be came widely accepted and even expected of actors. We associate an entire generation to this accent, and if we watch an outtake from one of these movies, we can hear the huge difference between the actors' onscreen and offscreen accents.
ReplyDeleteIt's interesting to see how technology as an end in itself has a very deep influence in the way people interact within a society. Specifically, the invention of a sound capturing device revolutionized the way in which our society tells stories and seeks entertainment. Even with a modern form of entertainment like the silent movie, it fascinates me how the creation of better sound capturing technology revolutionized an already revolutionary industry like the movie industry.
ReplyDeleteYour blog post is very informative and I like how you mentioned the different improvements that occurred within technology during the modernist era within American culture. It helps to give a background on how developments such as those mentioned in your blog helped to influence other forms of expression during the modernist movements such as literature and painting.
ReplyDeleteI think the "invention of sound" is such an amazing feat. I am still baffled by its mechanics. The doors it opened in the world of cinema were astonishing and I think that in this day and age, we take the amazing invention for granted. Obviously this topic was very important to modernist writers and founded the basic themes of much of their work. Very interesting, and often over-looked topic.
ReplyDeleteI thought it was curious how elitism was perpetuated in talkies. The actors chose to use posh accents and played largely upper-class characters. Immigrant workers were instead mocked and played as comic reliefs. Therefore, the many other voices of America were marginalized for the white, upper class, and English one.
ReplyDeleteI really like how your post illustrated the ways in which the development of sound and film technologies were intrinsically linked! It's also interesting how developments in these fields helped to create new genres of film, such as musicals.
ReplyDeleteYour post was really interesting. I never realized that the technology of sound recording went further back than film technology. I think that these developments in the sound industry impacted Modernist authors because they cared about the sensorial aspects of their works, so the presence of sound technology probably made them emphasize the importance of noise. This is particularly evident in Nella Larsen's novel, as she even includes the phrase "chatter, chatter, chatter" on one page to create an atmosphere of background noise. Thank you for your interesting article!
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