Sound and Sound Effects

Sound and Sound Effects
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Sound and Sound Effects
Before the advent of sound and sound effects in film, the movie industry was dominated by silent motion picture. The first public presentation of a projected film upon screen in 1895 did not include any sound or sound effects and initiated the era of silent films. Silent films were regarded as an art form and many audiences, in America and elsewhere, accepted them as a resolute form of entertainment. However, although silent films did not include sound or sound effects, they were not entirely “silent” when played in theatres but often included piano accompaniment or live organ (Wilmering et al., 2020). Consequently, although silent films did not include sound as part of film, theatres recognized the integral value of sound in the filmmaking process by including live organ or piano accompaniment to increase the viewing experience. For instance, the silent film era that lasted between 1884 and 1927 was marked by the sight of pianists and sometimes whole orchestras at film screenings. Nevertheless, the first major development in the evolution of sound and sound effects in film can be traced back 38 years before the first sound film debuted in 1927.
In 1888, Thomas Edison attended a lecture by the British photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, who had built a zoopraxiscope to study fast-occurring actions like boxing or fencing, which are complex and challenging to capture in detail. Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope could take pictures of moving images, a concept that inspired Edison to consider merging moving pictures with his phonogram sound invention. Edison integrated Muybridge’s experiments with his phonograph to come up with the kinetoscope in 1894 (Weis & Belton, 1985). The kinetoscope was the first personal viewing device to synchronize sound and film: Edison achieved this feat by marrying his phonogram sound technology with film to provide more riveting video experiences for a single viewer. Although this first attempt at synchronizing sound and film was far from refined and differed markedly from the film experiences we know today, it was the first actual attempt towards sound film (Mchugh, 1979). For instance, in 1894, Edison’s phonograph mechanism resulted in the first video footage in the history of sound film. Edison’s personal viewing device employed several pulleys and gears to lower footage before a viewing port, while playing sound in sync with the moving images.
However, Edison’s idea of a phonograph mechanism was not an immediate success in the film industry and many other inventors attempted to improve the process of synchronizing sound with film. For instance, at the Paris Exposition in 1900, several inventors had developed “talking films” such as the production of Cyrano de Bergerac by Sarah Bernhardt and Benoit Coquelin. Many of these sound experiments, which relied on disk systems, still encountered the technical challenges of sound harmonization and augmentation. Inventors eventually managed to solve the two issues using the sound on films method, but these sound films were poorly received by American audiences (Groot, 2018; Belton, 1992). Millions of viewers were already used to silent films and major film production companies were unwilling to gamble on a technology that had failed several times in the past. However, the invention of the Vitaphone in 1926 marked the second major development in the history of sound and sound effects in film. Sam Warner invented the first standardized format for integrating film with sound.
The Vitaphone system was developed in collaboration with Western Electric and Bell Telephone Company to gain a foothold in the film and sound technology sector. Warner was heavily invested in the Vitaphone and began producing all of his films with the disk-based system. For instance, the release of Don Juan in 1926 marked the first feature-length film to integrate sound with film. The film did not include any spoken dialogue but featured a soundtrack. While this effort by the Warner Brothers at marketing the Vitaphone system was met with positive acclaim, the film industry was hesitant in making the switch from silent films to sound films. Both film producers and the audience were skeptical of sound film: the silent film had developed its own cult status and many artists had already established their careers from being seen but not heard (Ruoff, 1993; Tan, 2019). Many film producers resisted sound films for economic reasons: it was risky investing in sound films when silent films were regarded as an art form and already accepted by the American audience as a resolute form of entertainment. However, the industry was more convinced of sound films after the release of The Jazz Singer in 1927, which was the first production to synchronize dialogue with soundtrack.
Both the audience and film producers were finally persuaded of the cinematic possibility of synchronizing sound with film and the importance of moving away from silent film towards sound film. The 1927 film helped usher in the “talkie” era or films that integrated soundtrack with dialogue. One of the most notable impacts of The Jazz Singer film was the prevalence of musical stories (Guynn, 2010). The period after 1927 was marked by the production of numerous musicals, a majority of which grossed millions of dollars. These musicals included huge extravagant sets, troupes, and costumes: the film industry now incorporated various sound stages and employed a variety of professionals including dialogue writers, speech teachers, musicians, sound engineers, English instructors (who trained foreign speaking performers), voice coaches, and singers, among other sound professionals (Cuadrado et al., 2020). The box office success of these musicals convinced the audience and the film industry at large that the era of silent films, which was previously believed to be a foregone conclusion, had come to an end.
Other Hollywood film companies, including the Warner Brothers, decided to invest heavily in sound equipment and professionals who had exploitable sound production skills. By the end of 1929, thousands of theatres had stopped showing silent films and had purchased the necessary equipment to show sound films. Moreover, the Warner Brothers had succeeded in improving their film system to match the capable Vitaphone disk system. The sound quality of the film system was comparable to that of the Vitaphone disk system thereby allowing the film industry to standardize all sound systems. During this first phase of the sound film era, all sound recordings (including music, spoken discourse, and extra sound effects) were created during film shooting (Cuadrado et al., 2020). However, the individual elements of sound recordings could not be fixed or edited in case of errors and the entire film footage as well as sound recording had to be redone again. There was still a need to separate the process of sound recording from the process of visual filming. It was not until two years later that the film industry managed to improve the sound film production process by synchronizing film and sound effects separately.
Walt Disney’s 1929 Steamboat Willy, was the first production to integrate sound with vision in a manner that allowed easy editing of dialogue along a linear timeline. The film proved that sound and film did not have to be synchronized simultaneously but could be done independent from each other. This third development in sound films meant that film producers could edit film sounds by merging different sound layers to come w...