The arrival of sound in film

The birth of cinema was through a scientific invention. In 1893 at Chicago World’s Fair, Edison demonstrated the discovery of a moving image. Pictures moved. Pioneers promptly sensed the coming of a new art form. The Lumiere Brothers and George Melies promptly made films for public-viewing. It was a fascinating subject for the general public. The moving picture was like magic – mesmerising them and transporting them to a different world. The commercial possibility of this art form was also sensed almost simultaneously. Although there are early instances of Cinema being exploited commercially in England and Europe, it was really in America that it took off as an industry. Films showed moving images – that was what Edison had discovered. They did not ‘speak’. Cinema was silent in its formative years.

There are hardly any rules which bind your creativity. However, being a scientific art form, you cannot go beyond the scientific parameters imposed upon your medium. It took years for Cinema to start speaking. It was later discovered that sound could be heard along with the corresponding moving pictures. Films came of age. Cinema was no longer a visual medium but was an audio-visual one – and has remained that ever since.

The most obvious use of sound for the early filmmakers was to hear what the characters spoke i.e. Dialogues. It is very interesting that down the years, it is technical innovation in the equipment that has always brought about a change in the ‘form’ of cinema. Sound, when it first came, brought with it bulky equipment. The early films were treated like photographed stage plays. It was cumbersome to move the equipment around. Also, the pioneers had not yet discovered how sound could be overlapped etc. If you get to see the early sound films, you would be fatigued by the amount of dialogues you will hear. Sound was like a new toy in the hands of early filmmakers. They just played with it throughout the early films. Their characters spoke and spoke and spoke.

The coming of sound brought about sweeping changes both in the way the films were shot and exhibited. Some stars of the silent era were thrown out by the coming of sound. Why? - Because they had bad voices (Beautifully depicted in the Hollywood classic – Singin’ in the rain). The old studios had to be treated for sound i.e. they had to be made Sound proof.

Dialogue- Recording

Sound is not recorded ‘on’ the film. It is recorded separately. Obviously, you need a recording machine and a medium to record sound on.

Initially, sound used to be recorded on a sound negative akin to the film negative. [Some of the very early experiments also used sound drums on which patterns were etched which later played back as sound]. However, around 1928, with the discovery of tape, sound shifted to a magnetic base.

There is a recorder onto which the magnetic tape is loaded and through which the sound gets recorded. To make the sound reach the recorder, a microphone or mike is used. You must have seen mikes being mounted on stands in numerous stage shows. On a shooting set, the mike is mounted on a ‘boom’. A boom, in its simplest form, is a pole which carries the mike. In earlier days, booms were elaborate and heavy affairs resting on heavy tripods. A boom had wires and pulleys so that the operator could change the mike ‘facing’ with steering wheels. Today, with cameras, lights and other equipment becoming smaller and portable, this cumbersome contraption has given way to a light telescopic rod with an attachment on top to hold the mike. This boom is held in the hand by the boom man and moved around as per the movements of the actors.

All the above are in relation to the recording of dialogue at the time of shooting. Since sound is recorded separately from the film, it is obvious that it has to synchronise with the visuals i.e. when the character mouths the words “I Love You”, the sound that’s recorded has to match the corresponding lip movements whenever it’s played back along with the visuals. For a lay person, an argument readily put forward is that “I Love You” is said over 2 seconds so whenever it is played back, it will match the picture. But this is not so. Film [limiting ourselves to the 35mm gauge] has a universally standard speed of 90 feet/minute when run normally. All cameras, editing machines, theatre projectors are manufactured strictly to these specifications. A film recorder therefore also adheres to these speeds. But tape has a tendency to stretch and age. The earlier recorders therefore had sprockets on their rollers and sprocket holes on the tape to keep the speed constant [as the film camera has sprockets and the film negative has sprocket holes]. These recorders were housed in sound proof booths in the studio – ideally from where the recordist could view the shot being taken. A boom man moved the mike to give the correct facing to the actor. [A boom man’s job is very taxing and demanding. He has to watch the rehearsals and plan his movements as per the actors’ - anticipating each minor movement of the face to so that the mike gets the correct ‘facing’. He also has to co-ordinate with the cameraman to avoid the Boom being seen by the camera or any boom shadow spoiling the lighting].

The majority of films till the 1950s were shot inside a studio. With the lights and camera becoming small and lightweight, studios were forsaken for actual live locations. Sound tapes also graduated to small ¼” spools loaded on small recorders which could be actually carried on a sling round the recordist’s shoulders. With the discovery of Crystal Motors, these recorders did not need to be connected by an umbilical cord to the camera. These lightweight recorders are manufactured primarily for cinema and will always match the 24 frames per second [90feet/minute] speed of the camera. As technology advanced, the ¼” magnetic tape gave way to DAT and now to Hard Discs.

The earlier recorders could record sound only on one track. Today’s machines give you the freedom of recording on multiple tracks and the latest recorders also have their own mixers on the shooting spot.