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A brief overview of the prehistory of sound film, from Thomas Edison through the work of Lee DeForest, noting that most of these early films were marked by musical performance. The origins of the Warner Bros. studio and, ultimately, its marketing of the Vitaphone sound system. Early sound films: Don Juan and Vitaphone, Giovanni Martinelli, Al Jolson, George Jessel. The rival studios begin work of their own. The culmination of this early period with Warners' The Jazz Singer, the success and impact of which have sometimes been misunderstood.

1928 was the year when sound film was genuinely established. As the early part-talking films were produced, the studios scramble to mount the sound-film bandwagon while audiences were compelled to readjust their viewing habits. Lights of New York, an inept melodrama, triumphed as the first all-talking film. Al Jolson's second feature film, The Singing Fool, was a far greater success than The Jazz Singer, and its success was integral to the sound-film juggernaut (although it is today an unwatchable relic). Other companies began producing their own sound films, sometimes with music, as with Universal's forgotten The Melody of Love. Audiences, while enthusiastic, also still enjoyed the more tenable artistry of silent film, despite such audible works as Fannie Brice in My Man.

The Broadway Melody, produced by MGM, is the first true musical film. Unlike other films preceding (and following it), it was constructed with meticulous care directed toward both the technology and the audience. The film's huge success can be seen as the watershed that established sound film as viable entertainment, instead of a Jolson-style showcase or stunt. The film's use of early two-color Technicolor was extremely influential, as was its use of a newly-written musical score by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed. Its central performance, by Bessie Love, was vital in forging new paths for vocal acting on the screen. While its backstage story spawned scores of imitators, it would retain a powerful hold on its audiences' affections.

Chapter 2 examines several major theories that emerged during the transition to sound film, when even the definition of the sound film was contested. The theories of sound film that arose during the transitional decade from 1926 to 1935 focused on the closely related forms of recorded theater and silent film and worked to articulate how sound film differed from them. They also gave considerable attention to asynchronous sound in part because it was a figure specific to sound film (or in any event more difficult to produce in other art forms) and in part because asynchronous sound had affinities with montage. The chapter focuses on five important theorists who wrote prolifically during the transition years: Sergei Eisenstein, Vsevolod Pudovkin, Béla Balázs, Rudolf Arnheim, and Harry Potamkin.

Sound and image are perceived as an utter unity, disavowing the effect’s basis in artifice. This situation has dissuaded much in the way of serious questioning of film as more than simply a visual medium. This chapter provides some technological and historical information but also concentrates on outlining aesthetic procedures and addressing the psychology (and neuropsychology) of synchronizing sound and image. It argues that a Gestalt-inspired approach provides more insight into the unity of sound and image into an illusory whole, and as such is more useful than the cognitive psychology-inspired framework that dominates the study of film. So, rather than deal with the process through a notion of atomized packages of information processed by a separated ‘Descartian’ mind, the book adopts an interest in physical perception as the central reality of interface between the film as audiovisual object and the audience.

This chapter examines the nondiegetic soundtrack as registrant in the early sound film. In theory, the sound camera can capture the last audible breath or spoken utterance, and it can produce the medial equivalent of such a stop. The body has an acoustic “off” switch, and the continuity of sound can be suddenly muted. But the theory of an instant does not translate well to screen practice: final words are reinforced by the slide to bodily inertia, and sudden silence leaves an echo. This chapter analyzes disembodied death sounds in films such as The Jazz Singer, Applause, and Frankenstein and the role played by the disembodied voice in ending life onscreen. It also considers the microphone as a death technology and how dying can be heard from the external space surrounding it. Finally, it explains how offscreen sounds of singing, talking, and crying registrants affect the fundamental flow of the deathwatch.

Montage theory remains at the heart of filmmaking and film studies, although many of its original concerns and insights have perhaps receded from view. Sound montage, theorized with the arrival of recorded synchronized sound in films, was the first theory of sound, as well as image, and sometimes explicitly derives ideas and inspiration from music-based theory. Its most influential theorist was Sergei Eisenstein, who also tested and experimented with his ideas in feature films. Montage theory often focused on asynchrony as potentially progressive in aesthetic (and to a degree, political) terms. The crucial notion of sound/music parallel and counterpoint, while perhaps not generating a tremendously robust analytical method, has nevertheless remained an important analytical lens for filmmakers and film criticism. Using this concept, the chapter argues that there has been an unacknowledged persistence of the modes of silent and early sound film in contemporary cinema.

Robert Siodmak and Orson Welles are both central figures in the history of sound film. Siodmak and Welles are also central to the history of film noir. Although Welles’ contribution as a director to the genre is not nearly as voluminous as Siodmak’s, his film noirs encompass almost the entire history of the genre, from Citizen Kane (1941), the ur American film noir as well as the prototype of the modern sound film, to Touch of Evil (1958). At the same time, if it's true that Siodmak is more closely associated with film noir than Welles, none of Siodmak's films has received the sort of critical attention, especially with regard to their sound tracks, that The Lady from Shanghai (1948) or Touch of Evil has. Hence the split in “Split Screen” between subject (Welles/Siodmak) and topic (sound/music). To wit, whereas part one concentrates on the play of silence and ambient sound in what has traditionally been considered both a minor Welles film and marginal film noir, The Stranger (1946), part two, reversing track, rack-focuses on what is arguably Siodmak's most accomplished film noir, Criss Cross (1949), as a way to engage a more inclusive notion of ‘music’. Here, instead of bracketing the score to map the sonic landscape as I do in part one, I bracket the use of ambient sound or acoustic effects in order to explore the notion of musicality understood not simply as ‘background’ or ‘source’ music but as voice-over narration.

This chapter explores the use of new voice technologies in film sound design and shows how the affordances of three-dimensional sound are fully used in computer animation, allowing voices to travel to space. In other films, 3D technology is used more moderately, and always narratively motivated—for instance, to signify “disorientation” or “unreality.” This is also true for voice processing technology. The chapter considers major innovations that have affected the voice, including changes to the mode of delivery, the development of more complex layering techniques, and the introduction of new ways of treating the voice. It furthermore discusses the quest for a perfect voice through digitization, the relationship between voice and body, and the digital voice in the “two-suitcase film.”

Chapter 3 examines theories after the sound film had been codified. The characteristic forms of theory became the grammar and typology: the goal was to map the potential formal relations between image and sound. This chapter considers six theoretical models focusing on the treatment of music and the relationship of the soundtrack to narrative: Eisenstein’s concept of vertical montage and the modes of synchronization that he developed from the concept; Aaron Copland’s typology of functions for film music; Hanns Eisler and Theodor W. Adorno’s response to Eisenstein, their critique of Hollywood practice, and their list of “bad habits”; and the formal typologies offered by Raymond Spottiswoode, Siegfried Kracauer, and Roger Manvell and John Huntley, which all seek to map the conceptual space of the image–sound relationship in film.

This chapter examines cinema’s engagement with ubran-based industrialization, linking its audience and their modes of mechanized production to those that made cinema possible and does so by using Chaplin and Keaton as complementary directors who engaged with mechanization. Cinema’s capacity to engage the increasingly thin line between animate and inanimate entities, between the organic and the mechanical / electric, was rendered even thinner by the technologies that altered labour and vision. The numerous connections between the machine of the factory and the vision machine of the cinema factory/industry system reveal the many roles of visual technology within the cultural politics of the first few decades of cinema, leading to a self-reflexive examination of the status of the image, and cinema’s engagement and thematising of its own power.

Similar to the politics and aesthetics of Alone, Golden Mountains (1931) was immersed in the debate over the ideal Soviet sound film. Caught between the aesthetics of silent and sound film, and the discussions of intelligibility, Shostakovich agreed to work with two other known figures in film culture who were sympathetic to modernism and music: director Sergey Yutkevich and sound designer Leo Arnshtam. Similar to Alone and New Babylon, musical representations of the characters were uncomplicated and attempted to satisfy critics who were continuing to enforce intelligibility as a necessary component of the true Soviet film. Overshadowed by the success of Counterplan, Golden Mountains never became a canonical film; nonetheless, it was a significant work that exhibited how Yutkevich, Arnshtam, and Shostakovich collaborated to create a new kind of symphonic score, while coping with pervasive issues in sound technology and cultural politics.

The Introduction outlines the rationale for the book: the relative dearth of studies of the sonic environment of British cinemas in the period before the development of synchronized sound. It highlights the key factors that affected the production of this particular cultural, economic, institutional environment, and its difference from that of the United States, for example. It offers a brief summary of each of the collection’s chapters, and present a useful introduction to the resources available to the researcher at this time.

From its beginnings in the later nineteenth century, film—“moving pictures”—posed problems for critics, philosophers, and others concerned with the nature of art. At one level it was an abstract question: could film, a product of mechanical reproduction, be an aesthetic object at all? At another level, it was a matter of mechanics and effects: what did film do, and how did it do it? At still another level, it was a matter of cultural hierarchy: how did film as a popular art form relate to the very well-established categories of the theater, painting, opera, and so forth? This chapter lays out central issues such as the distinction between representation and reproduction, the nature of the sound film, the proper sound accompaniment for a film, and the question of the audiovisual hybridity of the medium.

This chapter explores the ways in which one particular film, The Shout, employs Dolby sound technology in order to evoke the boundaries of sanity and the edges of everyday, rational experience. The chapter then develops in order to examine the ways in which peripheral – often coastal - areas of Britain are employed in films of the 1970s as a space in which peculiar, uncanny activities are seen to be taking place. These films - such as Neither the Sea nor the Sand, Straw Dogs and Doomwatch - are placed within the contexts of a rapidly modernizing nation. As such, this chapter notices how far events such as the construction of motorways in England apparently shifted widely-held conceptions of the apparent ‘Otherness’ of rural and coastal communities.

This chapter examines rationalizing attempts to intervene in the everyday sounds of early twentieth-century Britain, focussing on two spatial case studies – the industrial workplace and the home – where reformers targeted their attention in the inter-war period. It traces the influence of state-sponsored industrial psychologists who situated their dispassionate expertise about noise in opposition to the noise abatement movement led by the Anti-Noise League. The chapter also examines documentary filmmaking as a third practice where state-sponsored activity sought to shape everyday attitudes to sound. The chapter argues that these activities ultimately legitimated noise as a necessary feature of modern life.

This chapter attempts to examine the ethical relationship between self and other by way of focusing on the theme of estrangement in the New Hong Kong Cinema. In his study of the voice-over in cinema, Michel Chion creates a category of “acousmatic voices” or in French the acousmêtre. The acousmêtre refers to the image-voice relation in which one does not see the person one hears. Chion observes that sound film began with visualized sound but very soon it tried to experiment with acousmatic sound—voices without images, or voices divorced from images. These are not the voices of the disembodied, detached voice-over like that of documentary films because they have no personal stake in the film. This area of research has filled a lacuna in the study of cinema because the voice has often been considered as an inseparable and natural part of the image and thus it has seldom been examined as an independent category.

Film had always been accompanied by sound in one form or another, but the ‘talkies’ introduced the prospect of a wider variety of film genres within mainstream narrative cinema that had not been possible during the silent era: genres that were reliant on language and verbalisation rather than mime and gesture. This development marked a change in film performance and acting style. As noted by Robert B. Ray: ‘Sound and the new indigenous acting style encouraged the flourishing of genres that silence and grandiloquent acting had previously hindered: the musical, the gangster film, the detective story, screwball comedy and humour that depended on language rather than slapstick.’ Although silent slapstick comedy remained in Hollywood, championed by the Marx Brothers, among others, the ‘talkies’ created great demand for a new generation of actors, those who could speak; it also generated a near-panic when these proved to be not that easily obtainable. Writers and directors of screwball comedy seized this opportunity, recognising that the comedy genre needed to incorporate the possibilities offered by synchronised sound.