History Of Film’s Soundtrack Technology

As the years progressed with technology, a film’s soundtrack, was usually then recorded separately; an example is where lip movement had to be matched with the same speed as the dialogue and synced correctly for it to come across as believable. Pudovkin claims that sound is more important than just its natural recordings, in which I absolutely agree. The asynchronous sound in film introduces and communicates to us information that we do not get visually.

Conferring to the Soviet filmmaker Vsevolod Pudovkin (1893-1953) in his article, during the transitional period from silent to sound film in 1929; “Asynchronism as a Principle of Sound Film,” He claims that the first function of sound is to augment the potential expressiveness of the film’s content. Formerly in silent films, for example, an image of the ocean was shown without sound, but with the development of sound technology, adding the naturalistic sound of the waves or the breeze blowing, next to this image, may give the audience a more realistic feeling of essentially being at the ocean, or recall from a memory, of being at the ocean and associating that feeling with the viewed on-screen image.

Adding a recorded sound of the ocean and playing next to the image, Pudovkin claims that the audience will still experience the same feeling over a given period. He suggests that more needs to be done by the interplay of action of sound and image in order for the audience to realize the deeper meaning of the unity of sound and image. This something more that Pudovkin talks about is Asynchronized sound. Asynchronous sound usually matches the action that is being performed and do not necessarily matches the synchronous action. This type of sound is used or added to create a heightened tension of feeling for the viewer, in which case they don’t necessarily see, which is sometimes then revealed by the director. This use of sound can sometimes create a sense of chaos in the viewer at that moment in time, making the viewer think as to where this ‘other’ sound is coming from, getting the viewer more tangled in the story. In the movie ‘M’ (Lang 1931), at the beginning when the child was kidnapped, we were only able to hear and not see the kidnapper/murderer talking to the child and his signature whistle made a lasting impression throughout the film, until the end where we get to see his face. The whistle, in this case, is also a great example of off-screen sound, where the audience hears the whistle before essentially seeing anything. This delay increases the suspense.

In silent films, images were juxtaposed next to completely different images, that translate a specific tone or ‘sound’; what do we hear by what we see on screen; which was entirely expressed through the actors. With the advent of sound, a sound piece or music can now cross over from one image into the next by editing, thereby creating rhythm and tempo. There are two forms of rhythm and tempo that are created when sound is added; these are the rhythm and tempo that’s on a sequence of the film, and the other is the emotional elevation and declivity of the rhythm and tempo that the viewer experience. In the movie ‘M’, when the mother was calling out for her child, we don’t see the child, instead, our attention is focused on a rolling ball and a floating balloon.

At that time, the mothers' voice grew weaker as she calls out for her child, giving the viewer the impression that the child has gone further away or in this case abducted. In this case, the sound was not a distracting piece that corrupted our experience of the sequence, sound facilitated the story. The sound worked with the visuals. When sound is added to an image and continues throughout a sequence, it gives the audience an understanding of a characters’ emotional state. Whether the character is at a quiet park or a busy street corner, the use of sound gives the audience a visceral sensation of these places, since the audience will submerge themselves into the story and again draw from similar or elusive experience. An example of the use of continuity of sound is in the movie M, where the police were operating their search.