HOW TALKIES ABE MADE.

Putaruru Press, Volume VII, Issue 306, 19 September 1929, Page 3

HOW TALKIES ABE MADE.

ENTRY OF SCIENCE. ] Constant Improvement. It is remarkable how many stage actors you see in Hollywood these I days, writes Peggy Wood, the famous New York stage star. She goes on to deal chattily with several notables she had seen lately, and then with some other aspects of life and conditions in the “hub ” of the picture world. , Among the new words one hears commonly in Hollywood to-day -or which the talkies are responsible, is the word “ mixer.” A mixer is a new term and a new face m the studios. He sits in a room placed about halfway up the height of the sound stage and looks out of a bay window, made of two thicknesses, of glass, with an air well between, v watching the scene as it progresses, ) , twirling knobs and keeping one eye -on the compasslike needle in front

of him, which shows the fluctuations of the sound as the actors talk or the music plays or whatever. A loud- [ speaker in the room gives him about j the comparative volume of the voices 1 as they would sound in a theatre. | He can so twist knobs that if a sud- j den rise in pitch is required it will not blast the microphone, or if a whisper is necessary, ne can Key tne recording to it. Of course, he has to know the scene, see it rehearsed, j head it spoken both down on the stage and later through the mike, when he sits up in the monitor room —as it is called. He must know to the second what to expect and anticipate it. Functions of “ Mixers.” Most of the mixers come from the radio business or from one of the electrical companies, such as the Western Electric organisation, the latter being responsible for talking pictures in the last analysis. This company sold the idea to Warner Bros, some fbur years ago after every other produced had turned it down. It seems that the Western Electric Comnany had been experimenting Jn the laboratories for years with sound in the telephone business, and was <

therefore in a position to handle the recording of sound i i the studio and the reproduction of sound in the j theatre. j There is a good reason why these I men are called mixers. They combine I the recording of the sound with the pictorial act.on. They are gods n a way; they can make or breax us—the scene, the picture, or the director —by toning the recording tco high or too low. And besides, when the mixer is all through, and the picture cut and finished, there is stdl another mixer at the theatre where the picture is shown, who also has the power of the high, the low and the midd e justice, for he can twirl knobs too, and make the actors roar or mouth as he chooses. “ Tuning the Mike.” This business of tuning the mike is hard on the actors, sometimes, for if there should be a scene where one person must play in a high key while the other must barely make an answer, we are up against a technical difficulty which may *be solved, but certainly is not now. The microphone cannot be tuned to both levels of voice without losing one entirely

or making the loud one so loud it is silly. So the actors have to bring the pitches of their voices nearer together, whether it is dramatically j true or not. One will have to raise his voice and the other lpwer his unt : l some sort of recording level can be reached. I suppose I had better not be so final in my statement of what the microphone can or cannot do for by the time this appears that little impediment to the marriage of the true minds may have been removed. Perhaps by next week new gadgets will have been invented to make this infant obstacle-proof. Certainly we have learned in the past three or four years that nothing is impossible and when we hear the sound engineers laugh deprecatingly at their efforts of two months ago, we are face to face with that now element in the entertainment business science. Salesmen and efficiency men we have heard of before in show business, but this invasion of physicists and scientists is, as Montague Glass says, something else again. Plastering Out the Sounds. Some years ago I remember a re-

search laboratory where an experimenter was conducting investigations j in connection with the sound proof plarters. He had one room plastered •n the ordinary way—a large room with a fairly low ceil ng— and when I spoke or sang in that 'room, I wa, deafened by the rev rberat ons. N .*x : to this room he had the extra repl ca of the first room, but plastered w:th some of the experimental p aster, md when I spoke or sang there, rhe •esult was perfectly normal—that is, here were no echoes and no reverberations. I recall thinking at the time that that was a fairly silly way to spend a fortune—to fool w th plaster. Sudden'y, the o'her day, I thought about that plaster and asked our mixer what he knew about Jt. “ We’re using the plaster right here ” he sa d. “ In fact, the Western Electric Company st the Bell Laboratories conduct experiments to determine the various sound properties of different kinds of plaster, and have re-r-nmmer)Hod kind used h°-" ” Sometimes studios use cotton cloth painted to look like tinted walls. That ] cloth was stretched taut over frames; pictures were hung by placing a bat-

• ten sit the back for the hooks to screw J n to, and where it was absolutely j necessary to have something solid under the cloth, that solidity was i..od lied by bor ng hundreds of inch and two-inch holes all over the wooden back ng to let the sound go through rather than be reflected.

Contribution of Engineers.

Nothing is too much trouble for the ound engineer either. Their experience in the telephone business with the Western Electric Company has doubtless he ped to make them very particular in judging the human voice and ts proper transmission without distortion. It is the same in the studios. Oftentime; a bit of dialogue which sounds perfectly proper to the players is halted by the sound man because of certain defects m enunciation which his ear was quick to catch, and which is alarmingly conspicuous in the playback. However, engineers, like the property people, are untiring in the willingness to co-operate with stars in making an effective picture, and many bits of advice have been picked up from these new comer to the picture industry.