After stepping out of a movie hall, we often hear people exclaiming, “The sound effects in the movie were awesome!” or, “Hans Zimmer is a genius!”. We all enjoy watching movies, but most people remain ignorant about the innumerable factors that make a good film. One facet of films that goes less unnoticed than others, however, is the audio. I’ve used the word audio to refer to all the sounds that we hear when we watch a film – background score, dialogues, and sounds made by the objects in the movie. The aural component of movies, which has a glorious form today, actually had very humble beginnings.

The first commercial screening of a film took place in 1895, in Paris. Films during this time lacked audio – they were silent films. This is because audio recording had not been invented at the time, and producing realistic sounds on a laptop was more than a century away. Nevertheless, the owner of a cinema hall always hired either piano or organ players to play some music during the screening of silent films. Our romantic notions might lead us to think that this was done to induce some emotion in the audience, based on what was being played on screen. The actual reason, however, is far from this – the services of the musician were only needed to drown out the sound of the noisy projector, which could not be kept in a soundproof room, because such a room had not been designed yet.

As the years flew by, music in cinema halls did not disappear, despite the installation of soundproof rooms for projectors. Once it became apparent that background music was there to stay, it didn’t take long for people to start writing movie scores. However, the initial novelty of the motion picture had died, and films were beginning to lose their popularity.

The next breakthrough in the world of films came in 1927 in the form of The Jazz Singer, a Warner Bros. film. It was the first full length sound film, and contained recorded music scores, as well as dialogues. The audience could now hear their heroes speak on screen, and this resulted in the popularity of motion pictures skyrocketing. The rest is history – a few decades later, we managed to paint our movies with color, and regular technological developments in the film industry have led us to where we are today.

With an overview of the early development of sound in motion pictures, we are now at a position to try and understand why things panned out the way they did.

In the days of silent films, an important role that the ever-present music played was that it added an element of realism to the viewers in an otherwise alien affair. Early film critics felt that sound accompaniment, despite being unrelated to the movie, helped bridge the gap between the viewer, and the unnaturally silent objects on the screen.  

The trend of using background scores, which began only a few years after the first commercial film screening, opened up a whole new set of opportunities to the movie director – he now had another weapon in his arsenal to shape the audience’s experience. He could alter their perception of time by making the tempo of the music high, instill emotion, and even make the audience cling to their seats in fear.

The advent of audio recording is one of the most important developments in the industry, losing out on the first place only to video recording itself. The goal of most commercial films is to transport the audience into the world of the protagonist, and make them experience the imaginary world for the duration of the film. Sound is an integral part of any experience, and this is why the advent of audio recording lead to a massive surge in motion picture popularity – the world of the protagonist became more realistic than ever before.  

From the chronologically ordered sequence of developments above, one can infer that they arose out of the need for the industry to survive – new elements of realism had to continually be incorporated in films to retain the charm of an object moving on the screen. As the years passed by, computers arrived, and today we are able to use pre-recorded samples, or even synthesize our own sounds based on our needs. The background score for movies like ‘Dunkirk’ are the culmination of more than a century’s work of sound engineers. One can expect some wonderful new developments in the field, such as 3-D audio, to take our film experience to the next level.