Sound and Sound Effects

Sound and Sound Effects
Student Full Name
Institutional Affiliation
Course Full Title
Instructor Full Name
Due Date
Sound and Sound Effects
Before the advent of sound and sound effects in film, the movie industry was dominated by silent motion picture. The first public presentation of a projected film upon screen in 1895 did not include any sound or sound effects and initiated the era of silent films. Silent films were regarded as an art form and many audiences, in America and elsewhere, accepted them as a resolute form of entertainment. However, although silent films did not include sound or sound effects, they were not entirely “silent” when played in theatres but often included piano accompaniment or live organ (Wilmering et al., 2020). Consequently, although silent films did not include sound as part of film, theatres recognized the integral value of sound in the filmmaking process by including live organ or piano accompaniment to increase the viewing experience. For instance, the silent film era that lasted between 1884 and 1927 was marked by the sight of pianists and sometimes whole orchestras at film screenings. Nevertheless, the first major development in the evolution of sound and sound effects in film can be traced back 38 years before the first sound film debuted in 1927.
In 1888, Thomas Edison attended a lecture by the British photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, who had built a zoopraxiscope to study fast-occurring actions like boxing or fencing, which are complex and challenging to capture in detail. Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope could take pictures of moving images, a concept that inspired Edison to consider merging moving pictures with his phonogram sound invention. Edison integrated Muybridge’s experiments with his phonograph to come up with the kinetoscope in 1894 (Weis & Belton, 1985). The kinetoscope was the first personal viewing device to synchronize sound and film: Edison achieved this feat by marrying his phonogram sound technology with film to provide more riveting video experiences for a single viewer. Although this first attempt at synchronizing sound and film was far from refined and differed markedly from the film experiences we know today, it was the first actual attempt towards sound film (Mchugh, 1979). For instance, in 1894, Edison’s phonograph mechanism resulted in the first video footage in the history of sound film. Edison’s personal viewing device employed several pulleys and gears to lower footage before a viewing port, while playing sound in sync with the moving images.
However, Edison’s idea of a phonograph mechanism was not an immediate success in the film industry and many other inventors attempted to improve the process of synchronizing sound with film. For instance, at the Paris Exposition in 1900, several inventors had developed “talking films” such as the production of Cyrano de Bergerac by Sarah Bernhardt and Benoit Coquelin. Many of these sound experiments, which relied on disk systems, still encountered the technical challenges of sound harmonization and augmentation. Inventors eventually managed to solve the two issues using the sound on films method, but these sound films were poorly received by American audie...