8/9/2019 Tom Lecture

1/2

Sound is huge, huge area of lm production. Whereas a writer writes ascript, a director directs artists and a cinematographer lights a scene,"Sound" is more of an umbrella term for the many, many jobs involvedin getting a lm to sound the way it does.

As a brief introduction, I m going to tal! a little bit about the history ofrecorded sound and how we got to where we are today.

In #$%, &douard'()on Scott de *artinville invented thephonautograph and it was the rst device able to record sound. Itrecorded onto a roll of paper but wasn+t actually able to play bac! whatit hadrecorded, it was really just an attempt to capture and view thewaveforms of the sound.

hen in #%%, homas -dison invented the rst device that was able torecord and play bac! sound. It recorded onto a sheet of tinfoil wrappedaround a cylinder but this wasn+t really a practical method of recordingthough, it was just too fragile.

-dison then developed wa cylinders which could be used to storemusic or any other sounds but each cylinder could only play about /minutes of music.

At the start of the /0 th 1entury, a man -mile 2erliner led his patentfor the gramophone, a device that would record onto and play bac!gramophone records. he early discs could only play a few minutes butas technology improved, the discs could hold more and more music.

In the early days of recording, sound was recorded acoustically ontocylinders or discs. What this means is that basically the musiciansstood around a big horn and tried to ma!e as much noise as possible.

he noise was transmitted down the horn and onto a needle that wouldvibrate and etch the sound onto a cylinder or disc.

his was pretty impractical for a few reasons. All the musicians had toplay at the same time and if you made a mista!e you+d have to start allover again.

All this changed with the event of the microphone.

2erliner and -dison each had their rivaling versions of the device, bothpatented around the same time, literally within four months of eachother.

3nce the microphone was established, musicians were able to record4electronically5, allowing for much greater audio 6uality to therecording. At the time, recordings were still being made directly onto

8/9/2019 Tom Lecture

2/2

the disc but the microphone paved the way for virtually every soundrecording techni6ue we have today.

When it comes to lms, sound rst has to be recorded at location, thenany additional sounds needed are created in 7oley or by an e8ectseditor and nally this is all edited together and mi ed.

9ow we re going to loo! a bit at location sound recording: