¿CINEMA WITH OR WITHOUT SOUND?

The silent cinema consisted in the production of an amount of images without synchronized sound, like dialogues. The period before the occurrence of the sound in the cinema was considered as " mute era" or " the silent period" but is better known as " the age of the silver screen".

The first mute movie was filmed in 1888, it was a short film of only two seconds, "the scene in the Roundhay garden" realized by Louis Le Prince, it was about two people walking in a garden.

At the end of 1920 the cinematography reaches it fulfilling maturity before the occurrence of the sounds movies. A lot of people who know about this world declare that the quality of this type of cinema work down during several years even the directors, the personal and the agents of production have been adapted to this new type of cinema.

At the beginning the silent cinema used classic music directly to attend the images. The actors realized actions highlighting in an exaggerated way the gestures and the facials expressions. It results too much exaggerated to the actual preferences.

Gloria Swanson and Rodolfo Valentino, in a film in 1922

At the beginning of 20th century it was begun to introduce the sound in movies, it was considered as global phenomena. Hollywood was consolidated as one of the cultural and commercial systems more important around the world.

Nevertheless at the beginning there were several problems like the synchronization due to the fact that the images and the sounds were recorded and produced with different instruments, there were too a lot of problems with the gadgets of sound that were made of a low quality, the cameras and the production equipment were very noisy so it difficulty more the work.

Some actors of the silent cinema didn´t have attractive voices it carried a serious preoccupation for the vocal quality since they were needed actors, which had talent as singers.

Since the appearance of the sound cinema, the sound has been tied with the image. They were always known as sound the dialogues and the sounds effects.

A part of the strength in the scene of a film is acquired thanks to the sounds effects. They have the capacity to make us perceive the image in one way or in another giving to them different interpretations.

We can stand out several qualities of the sound as for example the level, in the cinema the sound level is manipulated constantly to give more protagonism to some actions or characters, it is used too to cause different sensations like agony, anxiety, happiness or homesickness.

With the timbre, as it describes the texture of the sound giving a tonal quality, the tone was varied so much in the music and in the soundtrack. Finally another of the big qualities of the sound is the tone it is known as the frequency of the vibrations, it is used when we want to difference various objects between them.

This tree qualities act interacting between itself  in the cinema to define the sound texture of the film and with it we can differentiate the sounds in movies.

Sounds effects are a couple of techniques that had been used in the cinema an in the theatre to create audio-visual illusions. As always a lot of the biggest creators don´t revel their secrets but nowadays we know for example that we can get the sound of the fire burning crinkling and smoothing out a piece of thickness plastic, the sound of the wind is caused shaking a table which has a tide rope,  we can get the sound of the rain thanks of an American invention,  it was taken a trunk of cactus, in it were inserted prickles or small wood sticks making a labyrinth, it was enters seeds, and finally the extremes were closed with straps of leather and they were making fall.

To finish we know that the noise of a storm was caused waving a plate of brass or we can get it introducing in a barrel an amount of big rocks and making it roll.

Here I attach a video about the sound in the movies that i think is very interesting.

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

1. ABC. "Un estudio revela que la inmensa mayoría del cine mudo se ha perdido para siempre".[http://www.abc.es/cultura/cine/20131205/abci-cine-mudo-perdido-siempre-201312042119.html]
2. [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATMBMs05tow]
3. World cinema history. [http://www.cypruscinema.com/article_world-cinema-history]
4. [http://hyperphysics.phy-astr.gsu.edu/hbase/sound/timbre.html]