Speech in cinema

Talkies—motion pictures with speech synchronized to the picture—made their feature film debut on October 6, 1927, with the premier of The Jazz Singer (although it only had limited dialogue sequences, including Jolson’s “…You ain’t heard nothin’ yet!”). In 1929, the year the ASA was founded, the 2nd Academy awards were presented. Since then, soundtracks in motion pictures have progressed from a single monophonic track to immersive formats capable of reproducing 3-D sound fields, with dozens of sound objects, in auditoriums with different dimensions and quantities of loudspeakers. Speech, known as dialogue in cinema, is mixed with music and effects, to produce the movie soundtrack. While the perceived acoustics of the scenes are created using artificial reverberation during mixing, the dialogue itself is recorded in an acoustic space, either on a set or outdoors. Despite the best microphones and tools available to the sound mixer and cinema auditorium technical teams, the dialogue is often hard to understand in the local Bijou. How the dialogue is manipulated (and compromised), from the production recording to final mix is discussed, as is the importance of the local cinema’s audio B-chain and the room acoustics on the dialogue intelligibility.