DEVICE FOR BETTER SOUND ON FILMS

Hawke's Bay Herald-Tribune, Volume 81, Issue 67, 11 December 1937, Page 10

DEVICE FOR BETTER SOUND ON FILMS

Vastly-improved sound effects from talking pictures are anticipated from a stereophonic film process demonstrated in New York before the eonvention of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers, says a writer in The Christian Science Monitor. Highly interesting to cinema technicians assembled from the chief research and production cenlres of A merita, the new method of recording sound is lield to promise more realistic speech better musical reproduction and less effort 011 the part of audi'ences. ' ' One-ear" hearing, which must be suffered under the present system of recording sound on a single track along one edge of the film, is overcome by tLe stereophonic, or "third dimensional sound," system, according to Mr J. P. Maxfield, a research engineer in the Bell Telephone Laboratories in which the process originated after years of study. "In present-dav pictures we have only the iilusion of sound," Mr Maxfield told fellow engineers. "By' making two sound channels on the film instead of one, however, and then reproducing them from two sets of loudspeakers at opposite sides of the screen, the effect of 'two-ear' or normal hearing is. obtained. Stereophonic pictures pick sounds up in two channels and record them on separate sound tracks, Mr Maxfield explained. In the theatre the output of these tracks is fed separately to the loudspeakers. Demonstration of stereophonic film ahowed, an orchestra. whose various players could be located by the individual sounds of their instruments. Another strip of film was of a pingpong game in which the sound effect appeared to follow the ball instead of emanating from a single place on the film. Mr Maxfield suggested the term tliird-dimension sound as appropriate for a method of recording which is intended to project sounds from both sidewise and up-and-down positions. Like the stereoptican process which makes photographs more realistic, engineers said, the new method of recording sound attacks one of the major problems of the screen — that of obtaining more faithful reports of actual speech and sounds. The Bell Telephone Laboratories have not been alone in their investigations, apparently, for three years ago Dr. Lee DeForest, pioneer radio engineer, stated that the use of dual sound tracks and "two-ear" hearing might bring the next great advance to radio and the motion picture screen. Dr. DeForest at that timo was experimenting witn dual receivers. TTnusually good reeeption could be obtained, he suggested, by the make-shift of installing a reeeiver in separate rooms and tuning eack to the same pro-* gramme.