The art of sound pictures (1930)

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SOUND EFFECTS 195 The best they can do is to help the producer who is grasping the aim and scope of sound. To understand the fundamental difference * between silent pictures and the talkies, you must first have a clear grasp of an important psychological law. Here it is. The less our senses receive, the more our personalities must contribute to the understanding and appreciation of the object presented. This will probably sound either hopelessly commonplace or altogether too deep, according to your own familiarity with the workings of the human mind. At the risk of offending the intelligence of some readers, we must go into explanations here. Let us suppose that you are out walking in a mountain country where you can look across wide valleys. You see some little black dots moving on a slope ten miles away. That is all that your unaided eyes can see. What are those dots? Are they deer, or antelopes, or bears, or people, or birds, or drifting leaves, or what? Your mind becomes alert, you study the situation, you guess, you analyze, you do all sorts of things intellectual and, let us say, you come to the conclusion that the moving dots are antelopes. Now, nine-tenths of this decision comes from your total personality, by which we mean your whole range of personal and private memories, all of your habits, all of your familiarities with objects of all sorts, and, to a certain extent, all of your dream life and fantasy. The less your eye registers, the more this personality of yours determines what meaning shall be given to the moving dots. This is one of the chief reasons why dreams are such private and personal affairs. While you sleep, your senses are at low ebb. They register poorly. But still they do