When was sound introduced to film

As the needle wiggled, it cut a long wavy groove into a record made of soft wax, which was spun in a circle underneath the needle. After the recording was made, you could play the record back by placing the needle back at the start of the groove and spinning the record in circles again. This time, the needle rode the wavy groove like a roller coaster. As it moved up and down, it recreated the sounds that had been recorded earlier, and it sent them out of the horn for people to hear again.

It seemed almost magical to hear a person's voice coming, not from their own mouth, but from the horn of a machine that remembered exactly what they said and that sounded just like they did.

In the s, Edison invented moving pictures, or movies. A long strip of tiny photographs was captured on film by a special camera, so that each picture was just a little bit different from the ones before and after it. The strip of film was later run through another machine, a projector, that would blend the different pictures together to create the illusion of motion and project the movie onto a large screen in a theater. Edison thought that, if he could unite the sound of his phonograph with his moving pictures, he could create the illusion of life itself—a picture of a person that could move and speak, as if it were alive.

Unfortunately, these two inventions didn't want to work with each other in the way that Edison desired. It was very difficult to synchronize, or "sync," the different machines—to make them work precisely together—so that the recorded sounds of a person's voice would match the movements of their lips seen in the moving pictures. Also, the sound recordings were not very loud, so it was difficult for more than just a few people at a time to hear them. Still, each invention became successful on its own.

People were now able to go the store and buy records of music to bring home and play on their phonographs. They no longer had to sing or play a musical instrument themselves, but could instead just choose a record and let the machine make the music for them.

They also began to go out to new movie theaters, where dramatic stories told through the silent moving pictures became very popular. Since there was no recorded sound to accompany the movies, the words that the characters spoke would appear on screen, in special pictures called "titles" that moviegoers read like in a book.

Most of the time, though, the actors conveyed their thoughts and moods through their facial expressions and their actions, without speaking a word. One of the most famous movie actors was a man named Charlie Chaplin.

Chaplin always played a character called The Little Tramp, a poor but elegant man who often got into trouble even though he had a good heart. The Little Tramp never spoke, but audiences could tell what he was thinking and feeling just by looking at his face and the ways that he moved his body, and people all over the world loved his films.

Since moving pictures like Charlie Chaplin's were silent, theaters hired musicians to play music during the films so that people would have something to hear. The musicians sat in a pit below the screen and played music that fit the mood of what was happening in the movie: sad music when the baby was sick, scary music when the monster approached, and happy music when the lovers got married.

For those who could hear it, the music made the movie more enjoyable. But people who couldn't hear, like the character of Rose in Wonderstruck, were still able to follow the story on screen by watching the actors and by reading the titles.

By the s, many people—hearing and deaf—went out to the movies several times a week to enjoy the show. An Introduction to Film Sound. Answer: B 2 One reason that the writer refers to Humphrey Bogart is to exemplify A the importance of the actor and the character appearing to have similar personalities.

Answer: A 3 In the third paragraph, the writer suggests that A audiences are likely to be critical of film dialogue that does not reflect their own experience. Questions Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage? Questions Complete each sentence with the correct letter below.

A when the audience listens to the dialogue. C if voice, sound and music are combined appropriately. D when the director is aware of how the audience will respond. E when the actor s appearance, voice and moves are consistent with each other. Other Tests. Total questions: Being Left-handed in a Right-handed World. Take Test View Solution. The Motor Car. White mountain, green tourism. Telepathy Science. In Praise of Amateurs News.

In Praise of Amateurs. Describe what is wrong with the practice test: Please enter description. Enter your name:. Enter your email address: Please enter a valid email. Thank you! We will get back to you shortly. Send Close. As a consequence, movies are no longer as international as they were, at least in the sense that American audiences are now less likely to watch foreign films because dubbing and subtitles just seem to most people like inefficient substitutes for plain speaking.

The addition of sound did not simply mean that actors could now talk; it meant big changes in the way that films were produced. Scenarists now had also to be dialogue writers.

Literary types from the other arts were imported to Hollywood to help write the new talkies: Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, William Faulkner, and Ernest Hemingway, for example. Actors now had to be paragons of articulateness and fluency as well as pantomime artists. Certain exotic roles became far less fashionable, in part because foreign accents were harder to understand with primitive microphone and amplification technologies, in part because the fantasy of the Asian vamp or the Italian villain seemed more kitschy with the added reality of sound, and in part because some foreign types began to seem rather stereotypical and xenophobic.

With the exception of Chico Marx, dumb immigrant Italians started disappearing from the screen, along with Jewish shyster lawyers. Native American stereotypes? Some verbal kinds of comedy? A host of comedians came from vaudeville and the stage to help round off the new cast of talking characters: Jack Benny, Bob Hope, George Burns and Gracie Allen, and so on. At least one new comedy genre sprang up at this time: screwball comedy, a combination of romantic comedy and some very silly behavior, that relied on sophisticated banter of the leading couple.

The traces of screwball remain in our culture to the present day in films like Pretty Woman or When Harry Met Sally , and in many prime-time sitcoms. And, of course, at least one whole genre would not have been possible without sound: the musical.

With a volatile history, going in and out of popularity very often, this genre persists in some form to the present day, from the "backstage musical" of the late s, to the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers films of the Great Depression, to the big color MGM productions of the s, to the MTV video, to the rockumentary, to the musical interludes of The Simpsons.

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form. To order the e-book book direct from the publisher, visit the Penguin USA website. You can also purchase this book at Amazon. Short Cuts Though intertitles tended toward the brief and explanatory, the writer or director could choose to be lush or poetic.

This allows for actors to be free and unconstrained—to really perform. We'll record their performance, and that [audio and video] will then go back to the animators so they can add in those personal bits. This is a near degree flip from the early talkies, when actors were required to practice their craft in almost complete service to the recording tech's limitations and capabilities.

According to Motion Picture Sound Engineering , a hardcover compilation of lectures and papers published in , microphones and recording systems were "robots which pick up everything within their range and record it to the best of their ability. In any case the direction of the robot, the provision of a brain for the microphone, devolves upon the sound man. Nuanced, it was not. This scene from Singin ' in the Rain — one of the greatest movies of all time, but also a trenchant look at the logistical challenges Hollywood's transitionary period between silent films and talkies—shows how challenging it was to get a good take.

So, what's next? For every Atmos experience engineered to give you goosebumps—in theaters, at home, even on mobile devices and VR—there's an equally thrilling renaissance happening in the work of crazy ambitious projects by indie auteurs; and they're utilizing a tool you've got in your pocket right now.

Last year, director Sean Baker made headlines with his Sundance debut, Tangerine —the adventures of two transgender sex workers in Los Angeles on Christmas Eve—which was shot entirely on an iPhone 5. This year, Matthew A. Traditionally, the equip ment was always the hardest part to get because it was so expensive, but these days everyone owns an iPhone.

There are apps that allow you to use your iPhone like a mic pack.