The Electric Ear: Early Film Sound Technology and Acoustic Spaces – From a Box of Insects to a Tomb of Make-Believe

Abstract

The transition from the ‘silent’ film era to that of the sound film is an area well researched and widely discussed. Although it is commonly acknowledged that all manner of musical and spoken performances accompanied ‘silent’ films, what is perhaps less well-known are early attempts, with varying degrees of success, at marrying film with recorded, synchronised sound. The argument here is that the impediment to the introduction of synchronised sound and film was not just the pitfalls of successful synchronisation but more crucially the lack of adequate amplification. The story of the transition from silent to sound film is also one of the transition from an acoustic to an electric environment. The question is asked ‘what does this mean?’, both for the medium of film and the auditorium, and by implication for the audience and their relation to the audible world. Whilst reading contemporaneous debates around the coming of sound to the film industry in the late 1920s, along with the technical and historical journals and books of the time, I became increasingly interested less in the foregrounding of speech which (understandably) many analyses concentrate upon, than in the more ‘peripheral’ aspects of sound. The effects, noises and texture of sound, and how they were regarded, seemed to suggest a way of thinking about many of the issues around sound and the sound film. What may seem to us as misconceptions of the time may, in fact, be perfectly logical; mislabeled as such because we have absorbed and accepted a mode of hearing which defines them in such a way, not because they are inherently ‘wrong’ or misguided. If this is the case then a reconsideration of such views might shed some light on how the changing nature of the sound environment altered the way we hear, and what we perceive film sound to be. I have used my own experience as a sound recordist, along with trade, technical and other literature of the time in an attempt to do this.