Sound
Movies used to be much quieter than they are today, using title cards with text for the audience to read for dialogue and context. Some theaters played accompanying music on a record or even had a live orchestra performing along with the show.
The big switch in theaters from movies to talkies, or motion pictures with sound, took place gradually between 1926-1930. Phonofilm, first invented by Lee de Forest in the 1920's, was the first time sound was recorded onto film. Talkies took advantage of the sound effect that the addition of this new soundtrack on the film, and a series of loud gangster films and musicals were made. Examples include Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), The Jazz Singer (1927), and Sunrise (1927).
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Soundtrack
Jalyn Marks
Image from Hurlbut Academy. Click image for a link to their website.
Stock images from Wix library.
How Sound on Film Works
On set, where the magic happens, microphones are used to capture the sounds, the clamor, the music. All of this noise (sound waves) created on set vibrates a small, metal ribbon inside of the mic, which then sends an electrical impulse down a cable, into a room far enough away from set not to pick up any background noise.
Monitored by a sound technician, an amplifier makes the electrical impulses/sound waves bigger with some bells. The amplified sound waves then travel down an additional cable connected to a recording camera. This recording camera is not recording any images---it records sound, directly onto a celluloid film strip.
Inside of the camera, a small wire a vibrates from the electrical impulses sent over by the amplifier. This vibrating wire shakes a small mirror, also inside of the camera. A small heat lamp, also within the camera, shines onto the mirror. Shaking and reflecting light causes a jagged pattern to appear onto the sides of the celluloid film strip, next to its tracks. We now have the soundtrack.
The soundtrack consists of exposed and unexposed areas of film. What started as the noise of actors, musicians, and everything else on set has been extracted, and a spectrum of sounds is recorded in the order that they happened live. This celluloid film strip was then layered with the image strip so that image and sound were played at the same time, forever changing the way entertainment was experienced.
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The above image depicts the relationship between a person watching a movie (the human actant) and the soundtrack (the technology actant). The human actant and the technology actant each have expectations and concerns, which they give to and get from each other. This model is borrowed from Latour's Actor-Network Theory. The model indicates that technology plays a role in human behavior, and follows an algorithm, or set of rules, implicit in its design.
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