LIBRARY OF SOUNDS

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLIII, Issue 20896, 27 November 1937, Page 14

LIBRARY OF SOUNDS

STRINGS TO THUNDER In the library without books Michael Steinore daily reads hundreds of feet of unwritten lore. He looks at striped lengths of film, without pictures. To the layman they would mean nothing. But through his eyes he “hears” each one. Steinore is head of the sound library at the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer studios. In a little office, the walls of which are

lines of pigeon-holes, carefully coded and indexed, he keeps the collection of filmed sound track. Almost every sound one can imagine is in the collection. It has saved miles of travel, days of delays. A hundred times a day it furnishes some sound needed in a dramatic effect. It started when ocean surf was wanted. It was impracticable to send an entire company on location and build a set at the beach. So a sound truck was sent down to the Santa Monica Palisades and recordings made of the pound of the surf for a scene. This "surf film” was filed away. That started the library. To-day in its film archives one finds music of all kinds, crashes, rain, wind, thunder, bird songs, and train noises, gunfire of every kind from pop-guns to heavy artillery, auto noises, assorted types of street traffic, applause in a theatre, sirens, squeals, murmur of crowds in all languages, the hiss of a steam engine or the roar of a motor boat, even an earthquake rumble. Almost every day some new sound is called for in a film drama, and the ever-busy sound man locates or reproduces it, then files it away, another volume in the sound library. Recording Problems Recording of sound has it problems. Through the abstruse laws of electricity and mechanics some sounds do not sound to the microphone as they do to the human ear.

Strangely enough, the little sounds often are bigger problems than the big ones. And they are infinitely more important. Douglas Shearer, director of recording. explains why. In ordinary life there is no such thing as absolute silence. On the street, everywhere, there are constant small sounds which, heard all the time, are not noticed by the listener. Stop these sounds, such as the wind, footsteps, birds, humming of wires, and it is noticed at once. In the first talkies these unnoticed sounds were hot in the pictures. So people said that sound recording was not perfect. It was not sound that led to this belief, but lack of sounds to which the ear was attuned and the mind accustomed. Shearer calls It “silent sound,’ heard, but not noticed until it is removed.

So now these sounds are put into the picture. In outdoor scenes the songs of birds, the rattle of traffic, the hum of wires, for instance; all from the sound library. In “Romeo and Juliet” delicate tones of ancient instruments such as the virginal and lute were successfully recorded with an orchestra. The new Douglas Shearer double-track recording was used, this capturing all sound coming into the microphone. It is the latest development in recording technique. An attempt to record actual thunder was at first unsuccessful. Thunder is so slow a sound vibration that it just shook the microphone, but did not reproduce anything on the film. That was later overcome. The library now has a track of it. The Unexpected Unexpected and unwanted sounds often cause trouble. A cat, loose on the stage during the filming of “The Good Earth,” hid in the rafters and could not be found for an hour. Its mews picked up, though. Work had to be stopped until pussy was coaxed down with a piece of fish and put outside. When they filmed location scenes in “Rose Marie” the croaking of frogs in a small lake forced them to change an entire location. And still they’re always trying to entrap natural sounds. They say that even the birds cannot have any love life now, because they are apt to find a microphone in their nests.