From analogue to digital: Synthesizers and discourses of film sound in the 1980s

Abstract

The chapter considers the adoption of digital synthesizers by film sound professionals in the early 1980s. Drawing on the notion of ‘transectorial innovation’ evoked by Paul Thèberge (Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology, 1997), Spring first explains how the design of early digital synthesizers, inherited largely from the industries of audio recording and engineering, appealed to film composers and sound editors alike. The chapter then examines how discourse in contemporaneous trade industry magazines reflected and shaped readers’ understandings of the relationship between the new technologies and traditional practices of post-production film sound. Prominent subjects of discussion in the trade papers included the authenticity of synthesized sound, the role of human creativity in relation to computer technology, and the perceived conflation of two previously distinct post-production practices: music composition and sound editing.