Dolby

“ At the end of the dinner Dolby was eager to introduce me to the game and show me what he could do. We adjourned to the billiard-room and he framed the balls in a flat pyramid and told me to fire at the apex ball and then go on and do what I could toward pocketing the fifteen, after which he would take the cue and show me what a past-master of the game could do with those balls. I did as required. I began with the diffidence proper to my ignorant estate, and when I had finished my inning all the balls were in the pockets and Dolby was burying me under a volcanic irruption of acid sarcasms. ”

“ The tickets for the first four readings in New York (the only readings announced there also) were on sale yesterday, and were all sold in a few hours. The receipts are very large indeed; but engagements of any kind and every kind I steadily refuse, being resolved to take what is to be taken myself. Dolby is nearly worked off his legs, is now at New York, and goes backwards and forwards between this place and that (about the distance from London to Liverpool, though they take nine hours to do it) incessantly. Nothing can exceed his energy and good humour, and he is extremely popular everywhere. ”

“ The cure for the trouble is brought about by the introduction of materials such as carpets, tapestries, and the like, which act as absorbers of sound and reduce the time of reverberation.
When music is played in an auditorium with a prolonged reverberation, the tones following one another blend and produce the same effect as that of a piano when played with the loud pedal in use. A reverberation is more advantageous for music than for speech, since the prolongation and blending of the musical tones is desired, but the mixing of the words in a speech is a distinct disadvantage. ”

“ Almost every motion picture theatre has its orchestra, pianist, or mechanical piano. The perfect photoplay gathering-place would have no sound but the hum of the conversing audience. If this is too ruthless a theory, let the music be played at the intervals between programmes, while the advertisements are being flung upon the screen, the lights are on, and the people coming in.
If there is something more to be done on the part of the producer to make the film a telling one, let it be a deeper study of the pictorial arrangement, with the tones more carefully balanced, the sculpture vitalized. ”

“ He discovered first, that a musical sound is very rarely a simple tone, but is made up of several tones, sometimes as many as ten or fifteen, having different degrees of intensity and pitch. The lowest sound, which is also the strongest, is called the fundamental; and it is this tone we mean when we speak of the pitch of a sound, as the pitch of middle C upon a piano, or the pitch of the A string on a violin. ”

“ The action is the same on the voice of the speaker. The sounds he utters are complex and as they reach the walls certain components are reinforced and the quality of the sound is changed. This action of resonance may also be caused by the air in a room. Each room has a definite pitch to which it responds, the smaller the volume of the room the higher being the pitch. A large auditorium would respond to the very low pitch of the bass drum. ”

“ Several methods have been devised for recording sound and reproducing it in connection with the exhibition of motion pictures. A familiar one is the disc system, by which the sound vibrations are mechanically recorded upon and reproduced from discs by a stylus, which receives the sound vibrations for recording and transmits them from the disc to a loud-speaker in reproducing the sound.
Another method, important here, is the photographic film system, in which the sound vibrations are recorded upon a photographic record. ”

“ It seems as if no musician had ever been interested in the question as to why one instrument should give out a sound so different from another one, even though it was [85] sounding upon the same pitch. No one can ever mistake the sound of a violin, or a horn, or a piano, for any other instrument; and no two persons have voices alike. This difference in tone, which enables us to identify an instrument by its sound or a friend by his voice, is called quality of tone, or timbre. ”

“ But if the disk be turned a little, an unperforated portion of the disk comes under the tube, the current of air being then intercepted. As the disk is slowly turned, successive perforations are brought under the tube, and whenever this occurs a puff of air gets through. On rendering the rotation rapid, the puffs succeed each other in very quick succession, producing pulses in the air which blend to a continuous musical note, audible to you all. Mark how the note varies. When the whirling table is turned rapidly the sound is shrill; when its motion is slackened the pitch immediately falls. ”

“ Then, with a final check over the entire apparatus, she switched on the machine to lowest voltage.
Slowly the tubes warmed up, then there came a slight crackling from the loudspeaker, developing swiftly into a hum that rose and fell in a musical pattern. The green bands on the oscilloscope danced in time to the hum from the loudspeaker, and on the television screen an image began to form. By stages it grew, at first seeming to be a wavering white pillar, then a ghostly form, like a sheeted figure in a graveyard, then suddenly it began to clarify. ”

“ Any sound that is made in front of the large orifice will not meet any response, unless it be that particular one which the globe can naturally re-enforce, when it will be plainly heard. Suppose, then, one has a series of twenty or more of these, graduated to the proper size for re-enforcing sounds in the ratio of one, two, three, four, and so on. Take any instrument, say a flute: have one to blow it upon the proper pitch to respond to the largest sphere, then take each of the spheres in their order, applying them to the ear while the flute is being sounded. ”

“ An artist is at this moment engaged at the instrument, but you hear no sound. I place this violin upon the end of the rod; the violin becomes instantly musical—not, however, with the vibrations of its own strings, but with those of the piano. I remove the violin: the sound ceases. I put in its place a guitar, and the music revives. For the violin and guitar I substitute this plain wooden tray: it is also rendered musical. Here, finally, is a harp, against the sound-board of which I cause the end of the deal rod to press: every note of the piano is reproduced before you. ”

“ Our churches and theatres are yet much too large, though we do not need pipes or speaking tubes. If we rub our moistened finger along the edge of a drink-big glass, or draw a bow across the strings of a violin, we can in both cases procure sounds which remain undiminished in intensity as long as the operation by which they are excited is continued. If we strike two bells, one of lead, and the other of brass, the sound of the former is feeble and momentary, compared with that of the latter ; so we see, that, though bodies all sound, yet the sounds produced are not all alike. ”

“ Clearly my new film must not be rigid. I thereupon made a film of composition, as thin as possible, and stretched it upon the frame of my instrument, as a diaphragm behind the wires, hoping that the sound-waves would pass between the wires, and vibrate the diaphragm, which, being made of composition, would undoubtedly glow, but not more than the film had done. This, I concluded, would not interfere with the image on the wires, owing to the brilliancy of the latter. ”

“ HOME-MADE MUSIC
"Why do you call this the music-room?" asked Patty; "there's no piano in it, nor any musical instrument that I can see."
"That's just the reason why," replied Nan. "I christened the room myself, and I called it the music-room because it hasn't anything musical in it. I get so tired of seeing music-rooms filled with pianos and banjos and mandolins and guitars. This is a refreshing change. And besides, when we want music we can sing." ”

“ In a later investigation6 Sabine showed that the reverberation depended also on the pitch of sound. As a concrete example, the high10 notes of a violin might be less reverberant with a large audience than the lower tones of the bass viol, although both might have the same reverberation in the room with no audience. Again, the voice of a man with notes of low pitch might give satisfactory results in an auditorium while the voice of a woman with higher pitched notes would be unsatisfactory. ”

“ Let us inquire in this Talk what the piano has to do in our music-thinking. What relation is there between the music in the mind and the tones produced by the piano? It seems really as if the piano were a photographic camera, making for us a picture of what we have written,—a camera so subtle indeed, that it pictures not things we can see and touch, but invisible things which exist only within us. ”

“ As a scientific proposition it is easy, but the results are not good enough at present, and, if we can improve, let us first consider the loud speaker.
The talking cinema will come as a matter of course. It is so easy to record sounds upon the film by [Pg 30] photography with reproduction by the selenium cell or the neon tube; it is easy to photograph the wave; it is easy actually to impress the sound wave upon the film with the picture, or to use a gramophone; but reproduction is not like a human voice. Neither as yet is any reproduction ever like the voice itself. ”

“ It is scarcely imaginable that a piano and a cornet should be mistaken for one another. Now, if the tracing instrument had been at work while the notes were made successively it would have recorded a wavy line, each wave of exactly the same length as its fellows, but varying in its outline according to the character of the note’s origin. We should notice that the waves were themselves wavy in section, being jagged like the teeth of a saw, and that the small secondary waves differed in size. ”

“ As the violin gives a very great number of overtones, even up to the limits of audibility, it is plain that if such an instrument should not change in its quality of tone in the least degree, yet to a man who played upon it for a number of years it would seem to change by subtracting some of the higher overtones from the sound ”

“ Experiments and observations show that wires are of practically no12 benefit, and sounding boards can be used only in special cases. Wires stretched in a room scarcely affect the sound, since they present too small a surface to disturb the waves. They have much the same effect on sound waves that a fish line in the water has on water waves. The idea has, perhaps, grown into prominence because of the action of a piano in responding to the notes of a singer. The piano has every advantage over a wire in an auditorium. ”

“ The pitch of a sound depends wholly upon the number of vibrations per second that produce it; and if one of two sounds consists of twice as many vibrations per second as the other one, they differ in pitch by the interval called in music an octave, this latter term merely signifying the number of intervals into which the larger interval [65] is divided for the ordinary musical scale. The difference between a high and a low sound is simply in the number of vibrations of the air reaching the ear in a given time. ”

“ The sound technician thus plays an important role in determining the quality of the amplified sound that reaches the audience.↑ In pertinent part, the Use Guidelines provide:↑ The court invalidated certain other aspects of the Use Guidelines, but those provisions are not before us.↑ As noted above, there is evidence to suggest that volume control and sound mix are interrelated to a degree, in that performers unfamiliar with the acoustics of the bandshell sometimes attempt to compensate for poor sound mix by increasing volume. ”

“ The articles represented on this plate are numerous: but, however numerous the objects—however complicated the arrangement—the Camera depicts them all at once. It may be said to make a picture of whatever it sees. The object glass is the eye of the instrument—the sensitive paper may be compared to the retina. And, the eye should not have too large a pupil: that is to say, the glass should be diminished by placing a screen or diaphragm before it, having a small circular hole, through which alone the rays of light may pass. ”

“ Were the employment which Nature herself assigns to the instruments of an orchestra preserved to them, a variety of effects and a series of infinitely diversified pictures would be produced. But they are all thrown in at once and used incessantly, and they thus overpower and indurate the ear, without presenting any picture to the mind, to which the ear is the passage. ”

“ It has a plain interior, sealed entirely in wood, and with almost no ornamentation to impair its resonance. The courage of the projectors who dared to build this hall for a purely musical purpose and not for display is already vindicated. It is no doubt the best auditorium in the country. As age darkens the wood, the interior grows rich, and it is discovered that the effect of the seasoning of the wood or of the musical vibrations steadily improves the acoustic properties, having the same effect upon the sonorousness of the wood that long use has upon a good violin. ”

“ The Kinetophone consists of a series of films projected from a booth like an ordinary motion-picture film, and of a large electrically operated phonograph, with six-minute records, set on the stage or behind the screen and synchronized with the film by means of tiny stout black cords running over pulleys attached to the walls or the ceiling of the intervening room. ”