ABSTRACT
Warner Brothers’ 1926 Don Juan was the first commercially released film to include even a rudimentary soundtrack. Interestingly, the audio disk was recorded in a studio long after the motion picture itself was filmed, by actors and musicians playing directly into the horns of the insensitive recording devices of the day. Most modern films have been distributed using an approach called sound-on-film, which physically places the sound and corresponding images on the same piece of film media. Sound-on-film has a number of advantages over techniques that encode sound on a second media. Not only does sound-on-film make it difficult to separate, lose, or confuse the audio and video components of a film, but perhaps more importantly, it physically locks the time relationship of the sound and image tracks, ensuring consistent synchronization. The revolutionary new films with synchronized sound and images were initially known as talkies and caused the pre-existing films to forever be remembered as silent films.
