Impossible Synchronism - Text 1
From 1896 to 1903, at the patent offices of Paris, London and New York, numerous patent applications were filed for inventions related to the principle of “synchronism.” But how many of these projects were actually carried out? Very few, given the scientific obstacles confronting them. These had been known since Antiquity.
Lucretius (c. 98-95 to 55 BC), in De rerum natura, compared sight to hearing. He provided a response to the famous question asked three centuries later by Porphyry concerning the fact that we see lightning before we hear thunder. The following text is quite astonishing for its time and is a good illustration of the extent to which knowledge around the reception of acoustic and visual phenomena is similar to our knowledge of them today:
The reason our ears hear the thunder after our eyes see the lightning is that sounds invariably travel to us more slowly than the images that provoke vision, as you may perceive from the following illustration: If you observe someone from a distance chopping down a huge tree with a two-edged axe, you will see the stroke before the sound of the blow enters your ears.
Similarly, we see the lightning before we hear the thunder, even though the latter is emitted at the same time as the flash and from the same cause, having been produced by the same collision.[1]
Even today sound still lags behind sight! Sound travels through the air at 340 metres per second, while in that time light will travel around 299,792,458 kilometres, meaning that sound is nearly a million times slower than light. In addition, sound is often an effect and not a cause (it is the axe hitting the tree which makes the sound). There is a delay, therefore, between seeing and hearing, even if this is imperceptible, which makes any attempt at complete synchronism between the two pointless. We can thus understand the difficulties faced by the pioneers who, many centuries after Lucretius, tried doggedly to create an impossible synchronism. In sum, they were struggling against a “natural” problem, for as Michel Chion remarks, “the seeming sound and image ensemble is thus just an approximation of human perception.”[2] In the end, even the most modern technologies, such as digital sound recording, cannot resolve what Chion describes as the “delayed sound effect and the delay in hearing it.”[3]
Alongside this perceptual delay lies a great difficulty: the impossibility of reconciling moving images and speech given the very nature of their movements. Even though each consists in a continuous movement in time, the acoustic vibrations necessarily had to be recorded without interruption and in their entirety, whereas the recording of objects in motion was carried out discontinuously. Only projection restored an impression of continuity. Thomas Edison tried to overcome these obstacles by inverting sound’s relation with the image: to start with the former in order to think about how to reproduce the latter. He wrote: “The phonograph first suggested the motion picture camera. I had been working for several years on my experiments for recording and reproducing sounds, and the thought occurred to me that it should be possible to devise an apparatus to do for the eye what the phonograph had done for the ear.”[4] Here lay the beginnings of the Kinetoscope Parlor.
