Early Additive Synthesis in Film Making

In the 1930s, Russian ``futurists'' used ``syntones''' to synthesize film soundtracks by means of a sum of sinusoidal components [239]. (Fourier transforms for analyzing periodic sounds had to be carried out by hand.) Artificial synthesis of film soundtracks employed professional animators to ``draw'' sounds directly to produce photographic masks.

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About the Author: Julius Orion Smith III
Julius Smith's background is in electrical engineering (BS Rice 1975, PhD Stanford 1983). He is presently Professor of Music and Associate Professor (by courtesy) of Electrical Engineering at Stanford's Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), teaching courses and pursuing research related to signal processing applied to music and audio systems. See http://ccrma.stanford.edu/~jos/ for details.