History - Text 4
Although there were a variety of applications, both in science as well as art, the reason these adoptions were possible and why they brought these concepts to converge is because at bottom there was a shared paradigm: capture/preserve/reproduce. This paradigm itself was the source of scientific research into capturing and reproducing sound. The same was true of combinations with the kinematograph. As long as the sound and image were not on the same base, as long as the phonograph and the projector were separate, the performance of phonographic listening remained. For, in this configuration, viewers took their places in a physical sound space – the film exhibition space – facing a silent virtual space depicted on screen. All that would change.
Beginning in the late 1920s, with the systems for synchronizing sound and image, a new model gradually took hold. Research into the photographic recording of sound culminated around 1927-28 in an achievement which was later termed the “optical track” and whose purpose, this time, was much more precise: the synchronism of the film’s sounds with its moving images. The introduction of the optical track into the relations between sound and moving image was an epistemological break. The mythical paradigm of the reproduction of sound was replaced by a new paradigm, that of capturing/preserving/transforming, and involved another sense: sight. Because sounds and images were joined on the same base, sound now had to be transformed for it to be better adapted to the principle of continuity, which enabled viewers, in the words of Georges Méliès, to “follow the continuity of the principal action involving the leading characters without tiring.”[2]
