If audio technology (radio, etc) developed sooner than video technology, how come early movies were silent?
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The “soundtrack” for a film is literally a small section of the physical film reel that encodes sound information for the projector and other equipment to analyze and turn into sound. So although the goal was to make sound, the technological problem that needed to be solved was essentially a “film” problem.
Because the difficulty at the time didn’t come from recording either one separately but getting them to be in synchronisation. Early sound recording was done on one medium, film on another, then the two added together on one film print. To get things like speech looking natural by following lip movements, you need the two to be inside a tenth of a second or so difference.
First of all, radio and movies began about the same time.
One medium was **transmission/reception**, the other was **record/playback**. Sound broke early on the transmission, but was about 20 years later on the recording. Visual began as the recording and took much much longer to get the transmission to anything near worthwhile.
So when sound recording could finally be done, it was nearly impossible to synchronize with the visual medium. It’d be worse than the old dubbed kung-fu movies when the characters mouth move and the words you hear don’t match.
Until the film smart people figured out how to add sound recording to the film itself. That way it was always synchronized.
One of the problems is keeping them synchronized. So while sound films were always possible and they did exist early on, it was a pain in the ass.
Early on records only had a few minutes runtime. What, are you going to make a special record player to play a gigantic shellac 78 or Edison cylinder with a run time that can match an entire film reel just to add sound to a movie? And all of the movie theaters are going to have to also buy these special record players and records?
Before the technology to print the sound data onto the film itself was developed, this was the height of the technology. Look at this huge apparatus just to synchronize sound to the film: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=S1ONEdascKQ
And the filming itself: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b9b6_6ef3cM
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