Contemporary and late 20th Century movies are built from complex mixes and sub-mixes (predubs) necessary to build the dramatic impact audiences expect from digital high-resolution multi-channel surround sound. Students can get access through the web to materials that demonstrate how popular blockbuster movies are prepared for a mix. These are fascinating, and there’s nothing we can add to that canon of sound study.

By comparison, previous generations put just a handful of audio pieces together for studio mixers to handle, and this could occur in the film editing process, well before the specialty artists called sound editors and sound designers existed. These elegantly simple decisions were made by the collaboration of directors and film editors in the process of making a first cut; And then just a few refinements could be made to the tracks before a final mix. While we enjoy the breakdown analyses we see of modern 5.1 and Atmos mixes and their editorial preparation, no such learning material exists for the first half-Century of sound movies. We draw on our experience editing movie soundtracks, and on critical listening, to make informed speculation about what the directors and film editors had in mind when they put track and picture together.

The art of Silent Cinema was still evolving when the first attempts at mass-marketing sound films interrupted their history. But sound film technology could not work smoothly without some new ideas about craftsmanship. The early Sound-on-Disc systems resisted editing and mixing. When optical Sound-on-Film systems developed (picture and track had near-perfect synchronism and pretty good audio quality in theaters), the simple editing of the picture exposed the noisy, chunky audible collision of recorded tracks.

Filmmaking crafts had to learn, through the ‘Thirties decade, to replace discontinuous chunks of sound with the same kind of fluid motion that had made the silent camera become virtually an Omniscient Eye. We had still to invent the Omniscient Ear, and that was never a matter of technology. Students understand that the early sound films had to isolate the camera and operator in a hot, sealed room to allow for optimal sound recording outside of that proverbial sweat box, so the complicated movements that added grace and fluidity to Silent Cinema were impossible. What is exposed when we study the early Talkies is the obvious discontinuity of recorded dialogue. From shot to shot, we can hear the differences caused by each shot’s very different placement and distance of the microphone. New techniques of editing the optical tracks and mixing them would have to evolve before restoring anything like the silent camera’s fluidity. Good directing and clever editing could move a story along as well as possible, but it is fun to watch sound movies slowly mature over the decade.