ABSTRACT
In order to make sense of early film sound, we need to know what sound ‘sounded like’ at the turn of the century. To what other types of entertainment was cinema assimilated, and what kind of sound traditions were identified with those other media? What I hear when I listen closely to the popular music traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is this: music was omnipresent, it was discontinuous, and it was representational. These are the three directions that will be followed here. What we will discover is that the early cinema soundscape was heavily slanted toward audiovisual matching. Sounds that evoked images were highly prized, as were images that suggested sounds. Conditioned by a widely disseminated tradition of descriptive music, early cinema audiences harbored expectations of a connection between the audio and the visual portions of the program.
