Introduction - Text 1
To make audiences feel, in an understated manner, elements such as cold, fear or joy, or to make them question what is happening on screen, film crews may employ sound. The addition of sound (music, sound effects, dialogue) makes it possible to transform what the audience perceives in a film. And since cinema began to speak, verbal expression has been intrinsically tied to film, with a few rare exceptions.
During the so-called “silent” period, many means were employed to accompany a film being projected in public: lectures, gramophone recordings, orchestras from one to more than 100 musicians, complete silence, etc.[1] Once “talking cinema” became widespread (1926-1934),[2] the technological evolution of cinema sound has taken the form of three major periods.[3] These three periods overlap, because one technology will continue on before another becomes widespread. In this parcours, we will see, chronologically, what took place in the evolution of sound technology, mainly by comparing the experience of France and the United States.
The first period is that of “optical sound,” which began to be used widely in the late 1920s. We will leave aside sound “on disc,” typical of the period from the 1900s to the late 1920s, from the Chronophone to the Vitaphone. Although connecting an electrophone and a projector made it possible to achieve synchronous sound in feature films from 1926 to 1931, the simplification introduced by optical sound brought competition to the Warner Bros. Vitaphone. The lateral optical track on 35 mm film stock made it possible to avoid numerous de-synchronization problems and to replace worn-out discs regularly. Optical sound dominated until the 1950s. It can be used both to record and to reproduce sounds using a lateral track running alongside the images on 35 mm prints.[4] In 1931, sound mixing systems made possible the post-production of sounds.
