BETTER SOUND EFFECT

Southland Times, Issue 23377, 8 December 1937, Page 8

BETTER SOUND EFFECT

NEW SCREEN DEVICE SUCCESSFUL EXPERIMENTS IN AMERICA Vastly improved sound effects from talking pictures are anticipated from a stereophonic film process demonstrated in New York before the convention 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 centres of America, the new method of recording sound is held to promise more realistic speech, better musical reproduction and less effort on the part of audiences. “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 the stereophonic, or “third dimensional sound,” system, according to J. P. Maxfield, a research engineer in the Bell Telephone Laboratories in which the process originated after years of study. “In present-day pictures we have only the illusion 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. TWO CHANNELS 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 sterophonic film showed 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 third-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 theii- 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 time was experimenting with dual receivers. Unusually good reception could be obtained, he suggested, by the makeshift of installing a receiver in separate rooms and tuning each to the same programme.