The Creation Of Musicals: The Jazz Singer

The coming of film sound also had a prominent effect on genre and film characterisation, aside from the aforementioned stylistic film changes. The creation of musicals was formed through the coming of film sound in 1927, when Warner Bros cemented the demise of silent films, by releasing The Jazz Singer. A film considered to be one of the first feature-length motion pictures with synchronised sound. Despite many previous attempts to convert sound into filmmaking, such as the Kinetophone, which produced sound that overlaid the films images and ultimately lacked the amplification required to fill a film theatre. The Jazz Singer’s sound was produced using the Vitaphone, a form of sound-on-disc technology produced in 1925 by company Western Electric and Bell Telephone, and later adopted by Hollywood studio Warner Bros. One reviewer, following the film’s release in 1927 wrote“‘The Jazz Singer’ was one of the few subjects that would lend itself to the use of the Vitaphone.” However, The Jazz Singer became one of the many subjects that did lend itself to sound in film. During the time the film was released however, many theatres were not suitable for sound productions, which limited the production of sound releases.
Synchronous sound refers to sound which is matched to the images and movement within a scene, such as a character opening a door. Toward the end of the 1920s, the definition of a silent feature becomes more problematic. Films were released with synchronised scores of music and effects, and then with talking sequences. ‘The conversion of sound cinema is commonly characterised as a homogenising process that quickly and significantly reduced the cinema’s diversity of film styles and practices’
Two categories of sound diegetic and non-diegetic. Diegetic refers to sound which is heard within the world of the film itself, such as characters dialogue and