SOUND AND LIGHT

Less than one hundred years ago, someone managed to synchonise a soundtrack with the flickering images of early cinema film and the talkies were born. “You ain’t seen nothing yet!” as the line so famously went, and, of course, we hadn’t.

Well, obviously people had been seen walking and talking in reality for centuries prior to that, in full colour and in 3-D, sometimes even on a stage, but in terms of cinema and storytelling, a new medium was born and, once we’d got over the limitations of the technology that led to a certain amount of rather “stilted” and “over-emphatic” performances due to the actors needing to be very close to the primitive microphones, pretty soon the “talkies” developed the vocabulary to become the entertainment medium that has become so popular to audiences all over the world for almost a century.

A few years earlier we had finally achieved wireless telegraphy just in time to hear the Titanic calling out in her distress, and about fifty years before that, a Morse message was finally successfully transmitted across the Atlantic from southern Ireland to Newfoundland and the world got a little smaller.

That world was still mostly lit by candles, oil lamps and gaslight and remained a very gloomy place once darkness fell. Early experiments with the mysterious force known as “electricity” led to arc lighting in public places, but that remained far too bright, expensive and downright dangerous for the average domestic living room. Later on, the filament led to the lightbulb and all of our lives eventually got a lot brighter, but even so, in the early days, such things were objects of wonder and amazement and people would go out of their way to witness early public demonstrations of this new fangled electric lighting, and these so-called “illuminations” could refer to even something that we would consider very unimpressive in our modern world.

Electricity became eventually something that we could control enough to start lighting our homes with extreme comfort and safety and, whilst the lighting in the average home is still about 500 times less intense than that of the great outdoors, we were no longer tied to the seasons and the natural cycle of the night and day and so our lives got infinitely more complicated (some might suggest better...) as we had far more hours to get stuff done in.

In the 1950s technology had come on in leaps and bounds and whilst the two world wars had managed to develop huge leaps in the name of science, our control over electricity was still rather clunky, with all those dials and tubes and great big switches to deal with, but somehow the world managed to work despite the lo-tech nature of it as it may seem to those brought up in a world where wireless has a truly different meaning to the meaning it had to my parents’ generation. I sometimes think about the almighty leap between those wax cylinders and those tiniest of iPods and wonder whether such an object would really seem like magic to someone from the Victorian era.

Movie makers, of course, were quick to embrace the advent of sound when it came in, and yet, rather strangely, almost overnight, the universal language of the silent era was lost to the world. Before sound came in, with just a piece of celluloid, a piano and a few caption cards in the language of choice, film entertainments could be shown almost anywhere in the world and the same laughter and heartaches could be experienced by almost anyone, anywhere. This strangely tragic side-effect is something that it has taken the motion picture industry almost ninety years to finally address in the rather wonderful movie “The Artist” which won all those awards recently, but that was really only the beginning, and developments in the technology used to make the sound and light show that we now think of as being movie magic are, quite frankly, astonishing.

The young people of fifty years ago would be amazed if someone told them what we can now do with pictures and sound, and yet many of them have lived to see it. When you compare a modern television set with one of its forebears of only sixty or so years ago, they barely resemble the same technology. The same goes for home music which has moved on from wax cylinders to records to tape to compact discs to just sitting there in a tiny box without any visible means of transmission at all...

As I said... Magic!

Nowadays we can pretty much listen to our sound and watch our vision pretty much anywhere and it’s difficult to imagine just how much “better” it can get but I do wonder what people from fifty years from now would tell us, if they could, about the primitive devices that we’re all carting about with us...

And if I could even begin to predict what those devices might be and how they would look, or even how they might work, well, I suspect that I wouldn’t be sitting here droning on about the past, but I’d be out there conjuring up those next miracles which, I’m almost certain, won’t resemble the future as we see it in one way at all. After all, even the most forward-thinking minds of the last century would have struggled to believe that we could have music players with no moving parts that can be about the size of a tie-pin, carry a whole library of music and sound like an orchestra, or a television the size of a wall and about as deep as a small box of chocolates, or that we could pluck power from mid-air, or make ceramics and fibres that are stronger than steel.

It’s truly a world of miracles we live in, and, if we do all need to keep looking and listening to all that sound and light, sometimes we also need to stop and think, because it’s the thinkers and visionaries who will bring us the next big thing and when they do, I’m sure the rest of us will all still be wondering how on Earth they managed to come up with it.