Moving Images, Understanding Media

Chapter 3 Sound and Image 83

In some ways, these viewpoints in the 1920s are refl ected in moviemaking

styles of the years to follow, but within a short time, there were examples of

fi lmmakers who found a balance between the creative potential of sound in

fi lms and the power of images to tell stories in gripping, lyrical, and informative

ways. When you studied the fi lmmakers from the fi rst decades of cinema,

you observed how certain ingenious creators devised original and expressive

methods and techniques for using the camera to record life and tell stories.

Similarly, we can learn from the imaginative and clever uses of sound in

fi lmmaking when recorded audio was integrated with movies.

Recorded Sound

As you learned in the last unit, Edison fi rst made plans to develop a motion

picture apparatus in order to increase sales of his phonograph. In fact, W. K. L.

Dickson worked on synchronization of the Kinetograph and the phonograph

in the late 1880s and eventually created a device dubbed the Kinetophone.

Th e Kinetophone used Edison’s cylinder phonograph housed inside of the

Kinetoscope with the viewer listening with earphones. Th e music played to

accompany the picture, but it was not a synchronous sound system, and the

company gave up on satisfactorily linking the two.

Alongside the development of early motion picture cameras in the

1890s and 1900s, sound systems and devices were introduced by numerous

inventors, including Demeny and Baron in France, Friese-Greene in England,

and Messter in Germany, who married moving image and sound in various

ways to project before audiences. As mentioned in Chapter 2, the Gaumont

Company of France produced hundreds of chronophone motion pictures

starting right at the beginning of the century. Subsequently, advances with

amplifi ers—such as with the audion tube developed in America by Lee

DeForest—made it possible to reproduce sound in a large space.

Figure 3-3 Capturing sound

in a natural setting. (Courtesy

Kendelyn Ouellette)

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