The Use Of Sound In Film

In this essay I will discuss the historic landmarks in the use of sound in film, technological developments in the practice of sound recording, synchronisation with moving pictures, sound design and delivery and the technical considerations and fundamentals regarding the acquisition and synchronisation of sound for film & television.

The first film with sound was released in 1926 using a vitaphone in the film ‘Don Juan’. This was recorded originally as a silent movie but was then added some synchronised sound effects and a soundtrack. ‘Don Juan’ was released by Warner Brother’s in 1926 because they were not making enough money with silent films so they decided to use the vitaphone and release it with sound, making it the first movie with sound

In 1896 it was the first time a symphonic orchestra accompanied the motion picture. After that in 1900 it was the trials of combining the moving images with the recorded sound. In 1895 a presentation took place of a combination of Edison’s Kinetophone which is a combination of a phonograph and Kinetoscope this is where the moving images were shown inside a cabinet. In 1901 Leon Gaumont, a French inventor developed a Chronophone, this was the first device invented to synchronize sound with the moving picture. The speed of the sound recorded electronically. In 1902 the chronophone went on to be unsuccessful as it was too expensive for poor quality sound, there were too many problems with it. In 1906, Lee De Forest developed a device called an Audion. This was in principle a vacuum tube amplifier which later contributed to the invention of Television and Radio. In 1907, Eugene A. Lauste was granted a patent for ‘improving means and methods for simultaneously recording and reproducing movements and sound’. The development of sound for motion picture could be divided into two main categories: sound-on-film and sound-on-disc. A few years went on and the technological developments of sound have hugely improved. In the 1930s, initialised the standardisation of a motion picture sound track. The invention of electrical recording in earlier years allowed

This is a process where the film and moving image is recorded separately. The sound on film recording where they recorded the sound through the camera was not good anymore as the audience expected the sounds to be better quality. The techniques of dubbing and Foley were introduced to record better sounds and clearer dialogs, which meant that the sound and the image were recorded separately to be synchronised in post-production. As portable magnetic recorders were introduced the use of external recorders on the set created a problem of device synchronization. The first linking of a camera with an external recorder was created via ‘synch-lead’. The camera was the master device. As the speed of both, the camera and the recorder become more stable, crystal lock systems replaced the connection. In both techniques the clapper-board was used as a marking point for the synchronization. Neo-pilot and BBC Half Track are the most popular of those systems. Both devices used a pilot track recorded onto the magnetic tape from the camera. Timecode is a digital signal recorded on the audio and the video tracks, which provides exact timing information. Each frame is electronically synchronised to the time code and each can be found by its own ‘address’, containing exact hour, minute, second and frame