“The delicate problem of synchronising music and image became an obsession during the 1920s. Achieving optimal synch was the reason variable-speed projectors were used, since they allowed the image to wait for or catch up with the music . During the silent er at least two machines were perfected to resolve the problem: Carl Robert Blum’s Rhythmonome, an ancestor of the “bande rythmo”, used for voices and music in french auditoriums, and Pierre de la Commune’s Cinepupitre, a machine Honegger used for his musical accopaniment to Abel Gance’s La Roue (1923).”

Film, a sound art, by Michel Chion, p34

The birth of synch found itself using very primal techniques compared to the array of ways synch is produced today. Interesting that it is the sound that dictated the speed of visuals in comparison with todays hierarchy of production.

“the music accompaniment that we hear in the film [City lights, by Chaplin] is not aleatory, but rather it is what the director intended, and composed and synchronised with the images so that it would play - and perhaps more significantly, so that it would not play - at the exact moments he wished it to”

Film, a sound art, by Michel Chion, p35

This is the use of nonsynch as an evocative tool rather than purely establishing a reaction sound.

“And in cinema the very principle of sound effects is based on synchronism: a sound that falls at the same time as a visual movement will automatically stick to it, even if the sound’s consistency, color, and timbre are hardly even coherent with the visual phenomenon it accompanies. This is what I call synchresis - a phenomenon that is independent of reasoning and also of the question of power and causality.

Film, a sound art, by Michel Chion, p38

This is the fundamental base of sound design which underlays the creative potential sound designer utilise.

“But the imaginary of the sound cartoon derives part of its force from the imaginary of radio more precisely from the acousmatic imaginary (a word of Greek origin, applied here to signify sound that one hears without seeing its cause), an imaginary triggered by the novel and enigmatic effects on the public of radiophonic and telephonic sound.”

Film, a sound art, by Michel Chion, p39

Is this nondiegisis?

“In the musical cartoons of the period [1920s-1930s] machines are rare, with the notable exception of the automobile. Of course, as we have already seen, musical instruments - a type of machine after all - and especially the piano, a remarkable instrument in the mechanical provenance of its sound - are omnipresent. In an endless double movement we are shown how music emerges from sources, each more burlesque than the last (skeletons playing their own bones, insect orchestras, steamboat organs), while symmetrically the images that show us each source seem to be fruits of pure fancy that have evolved from listening to a sound - a sound whose real source, we know full well, is not what we are being shown.”

Film, a sound art, by Michel Chion, p42

This is the use of instruments as sychresis.

“the music in today’s audiovisual art is radically separated and cut off from the world of noise. With the disappearance of the direct link between man and machine, music is no longer put forward as the rhythm of the modern world. Our present computerised and electronic world no longer has a pulse that might unite and give rhytm to the multitudinous sound of life. Even the notion of a rhytm of the wolrd has a different ideological meaning now. Associated in the early 1930s with modernism and the idea of technical progress - and the media driven unanimity: the radio and the telephone uniting distant lands and peoples as one sees in Allo Berlin? Ici Paris! (Julien Duvivier, 1931) - it has become a New Age theme, associated with the return to nature.”

Film, a sound art, by Michel Chion, p43

Sound design has altered its appearance and acceptance throughout its near centurary. The cultural testament of different decades has dictated its direction and the sound designers approach.

“Is naturalism therefore the very essence of the sound film? We often hear this idea, but I believe there is also a historical factor involved; cinema was born into an era of naturalism, when fewer plays were being written in verse and more painters, writer, and other artists sought to represent reality. When sound cinema arrived, films followed the existing trend”

Film, a sound art, by Michel Chion, p46

A good sound designer will make sound film unnoticeable as the sound will be perfectly dissolved within the image. The contrary jumps out the the audience instinctively.

   Sound Design Techniques

Audio Dissolves:

“Audio disolves became an obsession in the early sound films. La Chienne goes from a player piano in a cafe to a cuckoo clock in Legrand’s apartment. Much of M and The Testament of Dr. Mabuse relies on audio dissolves. Because sound mixing was still rudimentary, and did not yet allow for the gradations and blending that woud come later, directors sometimes found it useful to match or disolve the last sound of one scene with the leadoff sound in the next.”

Film, a sound art, by Michel Chion, p47