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Everything with a sound looks like...
An artist might picture it this way,
but a musician sees it differently.
The sound engineer has an oscilloscope to help him see sounds.
Let's have a few notes on the guitar.
And here's another way these notes can be seen.
The vibrating strings set up vibrations in the air which travel to the microphone,
and then an electronic device translates them into vibrations of light.
This narrow beam of light is photographed on movie film
and gives you the soundtrack which doesn't appear on the screen.
But let's bring it out of hiding where we can see it.
Come on!
All right, now give us that guitar again.
So that's a picture of the guitar notes.
Well, can you show us some other instrument?
What else can you do?
Not bad, try again.
You know that's a mighty fine looking voice?
What you could do with my voice? Shall we try it?
This... is... my... voice.
Eh, wait a minute!
Let's all us look at it again.
So that's how my voice looks. Like every other sound, it has its own distinct
pattern of light and dark running down the side of the film.
Well, if a sound would make
a pattern on film, a pattern on film will make a sound. You can even create your own
sounds by drawing directly on the film.
Norman McLaren, the motion picture artist,
has been making some hand-drawing sounds and now he's going to hear them for the first time,
played on a moviola, a sort of miniature movie projector.
It's not just guesswork, the sound of any
of these patterns of lines can be calculated. The size controls the loudness. A row of small
marks would sound like this.
Larger marks are louder sound.
That's simple enough.
Then there's the tone quality, it's controlled by the shape of the marks.
This series of thin straight lines gives a sharp rather unpleasant sound.
But these round dots are a bit smoother.
The marks can be any shape you like, now how about these?
Using the brush, Norman tries a row of small triangles.
These sharp angular forms, what would they sound like?
The distance the lines are apart controls pitch,
with the lines far apart, a low pitch note.
A medium.
And a high note.
Now, what can they be used for these hand drawn sounds?
Well, Norman McLaren finds that they are a perfectly
natural accompaniment to some of his hand drawn motion pictures.
Each movement of the screen
can have its own specially designed sound.
Making movies this way, the artist has direct personal control
at every stage of the films production.
Sound and picture are planned and closely related to each other as they are drawn.
Now Norman is checking
to make sure that each bit of sound
is perfectly matched to its accompanying screen action.
Finally, the picture and the sound
would be printed together on one length of film, and color will be added during the process.