Jan Philip Müller

Audiovision and synchronisation. Seeing, hearing and simultaneity in the sound film

Sound films are not merely an addendum to the history of cinema. The advent of sound films is the occasion for a far-reaching discourse about the relationship between seeing and hearing; about what ‘audiovision’ actually is, could, and should be. And even more generally, one could discuss the fact that sound films are one of the first big projects of the convergence of technical media which appears today – perhaps particularly in the light of the computer – to be a central aspect of media history. The emergence of the sound film in cinema is thus traversed by other lines than just the increase in realism achieved by adding sound to moving pictures. An attempt will be made here to trace some of these lines by assembling various arrangements of people, things and devices in which hearing and seeing and an issue relating to their simultaneity occur. When, for example, knowledge about human perception is produced in the experimental psychology lab of Wilhelm Wundt, the problem of the simultaneity or non-simultaneity of seeing and hearing is called a complication. When the attempt is being made to link moving pictures and sound technically, it is called synchronization. When film theory discourse discusses what is to be done with this new medium, the sound film, it is called asynchronism. Following the thesis that the senses are divided up in the 19th century, there will be heterogeneous things happening at some point in these arrangements. But at what point? And what is the meaning of this simultaneity of unlike things which constitutes audiovisual objects?