Phono-kinematographic Scenes, Kine-phonographic Scenes and Phono-scenes - Text 10
As long as recording remained acoustic, or pre-electric, the grooves cut gave a mechanical image of the sound wave, but this sound wave was not yet a construction of the human voice, a manipulation. The technical mediations, from the simple microphone to mixing on several tracks, increasingly distanced it from the idea of a raw recreation. The sound signal – amplified, expanded, cut, superimposed on other sounds, in short reworked, even transformed – was no longer anything more than the staging of its representation. Another history began: that of the optical track, for which we will provide a brief archaeology. Georges Demenÿ had solved the problem of photographing the movement of the lips by getting around the scientific obstacle of synchronizing sound and image: in Alain Masson’s description, “he brought the time of the image to that of sound.”[8] To do so, he aligned successive portraits of a man pronouncing a word, simply by visualizing the sound; this “figuratively” inaugurated the process adopted definitively in the 1930s: optical recording and the sound track.
