Author: James LastraPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231115179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
-- Review of Communication
Sound Technology and the American Cinema
Author: James LastraPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231115179
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286
Book Description
-- Review of Communication
Cinema's Conversion to Sound
Author: Charles O’BrienPublisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253217202
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 222
Book Description
A groundbreaking look at the transition to sound in the French Cinema.
Music, Sound, and Technology in America
Author: Timothy D. TaylorPublisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822349469
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 428
Book Description
This reader collects primary documents on the phonograph, cinema, and radio before WWII to show how Americans slowly came to grips with the idea of recorded and mediated sound. Through readings from advertisements, newspaper and magazine articles, popular fiction, correspondence, and sheet music, one gains an understanding of how early-20th-century Americans changed from music makers into consumers.
Static in the System
Author: Meredith C. WardPublisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520299477
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 250
Book Description
In this rich study of noise in American film-going culture, Meredith C. Ward shows how aurality can reveal important fissures in American motion picture history, enabling certain types of listening cultures to form across time. Connecting this history of noise in the cinema to a greater sonic culture, Static in the System shows how cinema sound was networked into a broader constellation of factors that affected social power, gender, sexuality, class, the built environment, and industry, and how these factors in turn came to fruition in cinema's soundscape. Focusing on theories of power as they manifest in noise, the history of noise in electro-acoustics with the coming of film sound, architectural acoustics as they were manipulated in cinema theaters, and the role of the urban environment in affecting mobile listening and the avoidance of noise, Ward analyzes the powerful relationship between aural cultural history and cinema's sound theory, proving that noise can become a powerful historiographic tool for the film historian.
Film Rhythm After Sound
Author: Lea JacobsPublisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520279654
Category : MUSIC
Languages : en
Pages : 280
Book Description
The seemingly effortless integration of sound, movement, and editing in films of the late 1930s stands in vivid contrast to the awkwardness of the first talkies. Film Rhythm after Sound analyzes this evolution via close examination of important prototypes of early sound filmmaking, as well as contemporary discussions of rhythm, tempo, and pacing. Jacobs looks at the rhythmic dimensions of performance and sound in a diverse set of case studies: the Eisenstein-Prokofiev collaboration Ivan the Terrible, Disney’s Silly Symphonies and early Mickey Mouse cartoons, musicals by Lubitsch and Mamoulian, and the impeccably timed dialogue in Hawks’s films. Jacobs argues that the new range of sound technologies made possible a much tighter synchronization of music, speech, and movement than had been the norm with the live accompaniment of silent films. Filmmakers in the early years of the transition to sound experimented with different technical means of achieving synchronization and employed a variety of formal strategies for creating rhythmically unified scenes and sequences. Music often served as a blueprint for rhythm and pacing, as was the case in mickey mousing, the close integration of music and movement in animation. However, by the mid-1930s, filmmakers had also gained enough control over dialogue recording and editing to utilize dialogue to pace scenes independently of the music track. Jacobs’s highly original study of early sound-film practices provides significant new contributions to the fields of film music and sound studies.
Electric Sounds
Author: Steve J. WurtzlerPublisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231136778
Category : Mass media
Languages : en
Pages : 424
Book Description
The 1920s and 1930s marked some of the most important developments in the history of the American mass media: the film industry's conversion to synchronous sound, the rise of radio networks and advertising-supported broadcasting, the establishment of a federal regulatory framework, and the birth of a new acoustic commodity in which consumers accessed stories, songs, and other products through multiple media formats. The innovations of this period not only restructured and consolidated corporate mass media interests while shifting the conventions of media consumption. They renegotiated the social functions assigned to mass media forms. In this impeccably researched history, Steve J. Wurtzler grasps the full story of sounds media, proving that the ultimate form technology takes is never predetermined but shaped by conflicting visions of technological possibility in economic, cultural, and political realms.
The Talkies
Author: Donald CraftonPublisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520221284
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 656
Book Description
This text offers readers a look at the time when sound was a vexing challenge for filmmakers and the source of contentious debate for audiences and critics. The author presents a view of the talkies' reception, amongst other issues.
Talkies, Road Movies and Chick Flicks
Author: Heidi WilkinsPublisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474406904
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 216
Book Description
The representation of gender in film remains an intensely debated topic, particularly in academic considerations of US mainstream cinema where it is often perceived as perpetuating rigid, binary views of gender, and reinforcing patriarchal, dominant notions of masculinity and femininity. While previous scholarly discussion has focused on visual or narrative portrayals of gender, this book considers the ways that film sound "e; music, voice, sound effects and silence "e; is used to represent gender. Taking a socio-historical approach, Heidi Wilkins investigates a range of popular US genres including screwball comedy, the road movie and chick flicks to explore the ways that film sound can reinforce traditional assumptions about masculinity and femininity, impart ambivalent meanings to them, or even challenge and subvert the notion of gender itself. Case studies include His Girl Friday, Easy Rider and Bridesmaids.
Designing Sound
Author: Jay BeckPublisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813564158
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 275
Book Description
The late 1960s and 1970s are widely recognized as a golden age for American film, as directors like Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese expanded the Hollywood model with aesthetically innovative works. As this groundbreaking new study reveals, those filmmakers were blessed with more than just visionary eyes; Designing Sound focuses on how those filmmakers also had keen ears that enabled them to perceive new possibilities for cinematic sound design. Offering detailed case studies of key films and filmmakers, Jay Beck explores how sound design was central to the era’s experimentation with new modes of cinematic storytelling. He demonstrates how sound was key to many directors’ signature aesthetics, from the overlapping dialogue that contributes to Robert Altman’s naturalism to the wordless interludes at the heart of Terrence Malick’s lyricism. Yet the book also examines sound design as a collaborative process, one where certain key directors ceded authority to sound technicians who offered significant creative input. Designing Sound provides readers with a fresh take on a much-studied era in American film, giving a new appreciation of how artistry emerged from a period of rapid industrial and technological change. Filled with rich behind-the-scenes details, the book vividly conveys how sound practices developed by 1970s filmmakers changed the course of American cinema.
The Sound of Things to Come
Author: Trace ReddellPublisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452957363
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 649
Book Description
A groundbreaking approach to sound in sci-fi films offers new ways of construing both sonic innovation and science fiction cinema Including original readings of classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Blade Runner, The Sound of Things to Come delivers a comprehensive history of sound in science fiction cinema. Approaching movies as sound objects that combine cinematic apparatus and consciousness, Trace Reddell presents a new theory of sonic innovation in the science fiction film. Reddell assembles a staggering array of movies from sixty years of film history—including classics, blockbusters, B-movies, and documentaries from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—all in service to his powerful conception of sound making as a speculative activity in its own right. Reddell recasts debates about noise and music, while arguing that sound in the science fiction film provides a medium for alien, unknown, and posthuman sound objects that transform what and how we hear. Avoiding genre criticism’s tendency to obsess over utopias, The Sound of Things to Come draws on film theory, sound studies, and philosophies of technology to advance conversations about the avant-garde, while also opening up opportunities to examine cinematic sounds beyond the screen.