Synchronization as a Sound-Image Relationship

4 Clocking

Besides the needle sound systems, there were a variety of independent practices for speakers, musicians, sound-makers, etc. to accompany the silent film.^[15] For a history of synchronization techniques they become relevant and interesting in particular when techniques for standardizing their temporal relation intervene in mixtures of film and notation (letters, musical notation) in the form of mechanically driven timing.^[16] Worthy of mention in this respect are music films (e.g., the Beck system or Notofilm) in which the music for the screening was specified by means of conductors copied into the image or musical notation streaming through it.^[17] What is remarkable in this context, however, is also the clocking of the entire audience, for example by means of a bouncing ball that jumped from syllable to syllable of the lyrics of the song to be sung together in the cartoons, called Song Car-Tunes, made by the Fleischer brothers.^[18]

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5 Sound-on-Film: An Art of Time

15
 See Rick Altman, Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), and Corinna Müller, Vom Stummfilm zum Tonfilm (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2003), 85–107.  
16
 Cf. Michael Wedel, “Okkupation der Zeit,” Der Schnitt: Das Filmmagazin 29 (Winter 2003), 11f.  
17
 Wedel, Okkupation der Zeit, 2003, 10–15. and Michael Wedel, “Messter’s Silent Heirs,” Film History 11, no. 4 (1999) (Special Domitor issue: Global Experiments in Early Synchronous Sound), 464–476.  
18
 Max Fleischer, Song Motion Picture Film, US Patent 1573696, issued February 16, 1926, applied for June 4, 1925. Cf. Leonard Maltin, Of Mice and Magic: A History of American Animated Cartoons (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1987), 91, and http://www.atos.org/Pages/Journal/Koko/Koko.html (accessed February 10, 2009) after an article by Harry J. Jenkins in the magazine Theatre Organ Bombard, October 1969. The Song Car-Tune Tramp, Tramp, Tramp from 1926 is available online at http://www.archive.org/details/tramp_tramp_tramp_1926 (accessed February 10, 2009)  