Sound Design

“The talking film is not everything. There is also the sound film.” Thus explained the French filmmaker René Clair in 1929. With this statement Clair was challenging us all to push the boundaries of sound design in films. From the primitive synchronization experiments of Lee de Forest and Thomas Edison to state-of-the-art Dolby Digital 10.2 surround sound, there are no boundaries for creating a virtual deluge of sound. Even though one is tempted to hypothesize about the future of sound design, it is only through an educated study of past inventions and their effect on the market that one is led to the next innovation in aural imagery. To truly understand the marriage of sound to motion pictures, one must return to the late 1800s, when The Edison Company under Thomas Edison experimented with the idea. In 1894, under the direction of W. K. L. Dickson, Edison made a short twenty-five second film known today as The Dickson Experimental Sound Film. The film depicts a man playing a violin before a phonograph horn as two men dance about it. The idea of filming a movie and at the same time recording the soundtrack into a phonographic horn on the movie screen seems to primitive today. However, it set a precedent for film with audio. It was blended with the idea of synchronization; if the video film and audio record could be played back on separate machines together then one would be able to have a “talking film”. This gave Edison the incentive to expand on the invention of the Kinetophone, which was a Kinetoscope with an integrated phonograph. One could then look into the Kinetoscope and simultaneously watch a motion picture while listening to the accompanying phonograph with a simple pair of headphones. The picture and sound were synced together by connecting the two with a leather belt. The invention drew vast attention; in spite of this success, Dickson left The Edison Company, which ended any further work on the Kinetophone. Eighteen years later a