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Finding his voice : an animated cartoon synchronized to voice & sound

192910 min 39 sec39 shots

In this animated cartoon, a professor teaches two characters called Talkie and Mutey how synchronized sound motion pictures work. Studio microphones turn speech into an electrical current, and vacuum tubes amplify that current about ten million times. A light valve then varies a beam of light to photograph the sound as a track on film moving at the same speed as the picture film.

After development, the separate sound and picture negatives are printed together on a single strip for projection. A lamp scans the soundtrack, a photoelectric cell converts the changing light back into electrical vibrations, and an amplifier sends the signal to loudspeakers behind a perforated theater screen. This arrangement keeps sound in step with the picture and makes voices seem to come from the people on screen; after Mutey gains a voice, the two characters end by singing together.

Provenance and rights

Original producer: Western Electric Company, Inc.
Collection: Prelinger Archives
Original title: Finding his voice : an animated cartoon synchronized to voice & sound
Date: 1929
Original link: Open on Internet Archive
Rights: public_domain