Moving Images, Understanding Media

Chapter 3 Sound and Image 85

Nonetheless, as is oft en the case in the history of moviemaking, fi nancial

profi ts led to change. In 1927, the enormous success of Th e Jazz Singer showed

the studios that sound was here to stay.

In that movie, actor Al Jolson spoke during two scenes of the fi lm, and

audiences reacted overwhelmingly to seeing a character talk in an everyday

way up on the screen. Actors had talked in movies before, but with this movie

it occurred in a way that was natural and real to audiences. Moviegoers fl ocked

to see the movie across the country, and Th e Jazz Singer reaped enormous

profi ts for Warner Bros.

Optical Sound

In fact, studio heads had been avoiding the adoption of synchronous sound

for nearly a decade. By the time the Vitaphone was making headlines with the

success of Th e Jazz Singer, viable systems of sound-on-fi lm, or optical sound,

had existed for almost ten years. Optical sound is a system of reproducing

sound visually. With optical sound, audio waves are recorded by a microphone

and transformed into electric impulses that produce a visual pattern which

is directly printed on fi lm. Th e sound track, which runs along the side of

the celluloid between the motion picture frame and the sprocket holes, is

projected onto a photoelectric cell which reads the sound as the motion

picture passes through the projector.

In Germany, the Tri-Ergon process of optical sound was patented in

1919. In the United States, Dr. Lee De Forest developed his own optical
      sound system during the 1920s and showed thousands of sound fi lms from
      1924 to 1927. De Forest off ered his system to the studios, but they were not

Figure 3-5 Basic steps in motion picture audio: sound is picked up by the

microphone, which transforms noise into electric impulses. For optical sound,

the audio track is printed directly onto the fi lm and read by the projector. In

contemporary digital processes, sound and image are stored as digital information,

can be read by laser or from a hard drive, and are translated and projected using

computer technology.

Sound Microphone Electrical Signal Optical Sound

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