ABSTRACT

Prior to World War II, wire recorders and disc recorders were the only practical means for recording and playing sounds. Optical sound-on-film recording was another technology available in the 1930s. Lee De Forest, inventor of the Audion vacuum tube, was also the developer of one of the earliest optical sound technologies. The De Forest process, called Phonofilm, was introduced in 1919 about ten years before the widespread application of a variety of competing technologies for making movies talk. In the Phono - film process, audio signals were converted to electrical waveforms and photographically recorded on the edge of motion picture film. The soundtrack was made audible again by using a photoelectric cell to convert it during the playback of the motion picture. The quality of optically recorded sound was not substantively better than disc recordings of the time but the two-step recording and playback process and specialized equipment made sound-on-film less practical for composers than other technologies. Still, the art of sound splicing owes its beginnings to the movie industry, where optical sound was used to synchronize audio content with the moving picture. Some limited musical experiments with the direct creation of sounds using optical film recording had been done by John Whitney (1917-95) and James Whitney (1922-82) for their experi mental films in 1940. Some com posers, including John Cage, kept a watchful eye on all such audio recording technologies, hoping for a breakthrough that would make the capturing and editing of sounds possible for creating music. In 1937, Cage spoke of these technologies:

Of the recording technologies available before World War II, the turntable had

Yet disc recorders were more widely available, less expensive, and more amenable to a trial and error process of sound assembly than both wire and optical recording. Despite the limitations of disc recording, or perhaps because “invention is the mother of necessity,”2 several composers were nonetheless compelled to experiment with turn - tablism.