Dickson Experimental Sound Film
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The Dickson Experimental Sound Film was a film made by William Dickson in 1895. The running time is 17 seconds. It is the only known example of the Kinetophonograph, an attempt by Dickson and Thomas Edison to create a sound film, and in its newly digitized and restored form may be considered the first example. It is unknown if it was ever successfully shown in its original formats.
The movie features Dickson playing a violin into a recording cone for an off camera wax cylinder. In front of him, two men are dancing to the music. The movie was designed to be displayed on a kinetophone, an early Edison wax cylinder phonograph.
Unfortunately, this experiment failed because they didn't understand synchronization of sound and film. The Library of Congress had the film. The wax cylinder soundtrack, however, was believed lost for many years. Tantalizingly, a broken cylinder labeled "Violin by WKL Dickson with Kineto" was catalogued in the 1964 inventory at the Edison National Historic Site. In 1998, Patrick Loughney, curator of Film and Television at the Library of Congress, retrieved the cylinder and had it repaired and re-recorded at the Rodgers and Hammerstein Archive of Recorded Sound, Lincoln Center, New York. Since the Library did not possess the necessary synchronizing technology, Loughney - at the suggestion of producer Rick Schmidlin - sent film editor Walter Murch a videotape of the 17 seconds of film and an audiocassette of 3 minutes and 20 seconds of sound with a request to marry the two. By digitizing the media and using digital editing software, Murch was able to synchronize them and complete the failed experiment 105 years later.
This film has been selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry and is available for download at the Internet Archive.
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