Dickson playing violin in the film
Have you wondered about what the first movies with sound looked like?Looking back at some of the earliest attempts at making sound films offers a glimpse into the very beginnings of cinema. One of the more interesting examples of an early sound motion picture is The Dickson Experimental Sound Film (1894-1895). It is a film that was created by William K. L. Dickson at Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio in New Jersey for the Kinetophone (an early attempt to synchronise film and phonograph).
The entire film is only 17 seconds long. In it, Dickson plays the violin into a large recording horn, and two men dance while a third person walks across the background. The sound was recorded on a wax cylinder that contains approximately two minutes of sound, of which about 23 seconds is the violin music that matches the film. This is an early attempt to create sound for motion pictures.
A silent 35mm print was preserved by the Museum of Modern Art in 1942. The wax cylinder was inventoried at the Edison National Historic Site in the early 1960s and found to be broken in two when examined in 1964. The cylinder was repaired and its audio recovered in 1998. Digital synchronisation of the film and sound was then carried out by acclaimed editor Walter Murch (with producer Rick Schmidlin), and the restored version with synchronised sound was first publicly projected on June 1, 2002, at the Black Maria Film Festival.
In 2003, The Dickson Experimental Sound Film was added to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress because of its significance to the history of cinema. Though this film is only 17 seconds long, it represents the very beginning steps of sound films leading up to what we now refer to as "talkies".
Reference and video source:
Dickson, W. K. L. (Director). (1894-1895). The Dickson experimental sound film [Film]. Thomas Edison’s Black Maria Studio. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dickson_Experimental_Sound_Film