We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.
Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.
Of Noise
• Pioneering in an entertainment world is as different from that of the stage or pictures as if it were on another plane, Norman, with the aid of the hundreds of sound devices he creates, plays more roles than any actor. He is the Jove who wields the thunderbolt in radio storms; the deus ex machina who creates a hissing snake, an airplane's roar, the thud of a falling body, the splash of a brooklet, the squeak of an awning, the crash of dishes in a domestic row or the creepy sound of torn toms in a jungle, just as the playwright orders.
When the possibilities of radio drama first began to dawn upon those who were adventuring in this art a few years ago, one of the first things they learned was that microphone drama, in order to "get over" must not copy the stage. Just as ether dialogue now follows its own technique, Norman's work as sound effects engineer at NBC is far different from that of the stage hand who sits in the wings at the theater and rattles sheets of iron to make thunder, turns an electric switch to produce lightning, and pounds the good old cocoanut shells on the floor to announce the approach of the hero's trustry steed.
• Incidentally, those cocoanut shells are almost the only sound effect which radio has inherited from its elder sister, the theater. Included in the big cupboard in the Pacific Division headquarters, where Norman keeps all the varied apparatus and queer-looking devices he uses, are several sets of shells. But few of the other curious arrangements in the cupboard would be recognized by a stage technician.
The microphone's trick of magnifying sound, which was shown in the recent test whereby the sound of a pin dropped in the National Broadcasting Company's New York studios reverberated through loudspeakers all over the land like the boom of a cannon, makes the use of stage sound effects impractical in radio. Realism is achieved, not by using the real sound, but a miniature representation of it.
A real revolver, fired at Lord Loofus by the ether melodrama heroine, would sound like a tremendous explosion or earthquake, to listeners.
"You have to curb 'your own sense of humor, and that of the people around you, too," explains Norman. "Sometimes I have to experiment for several hours in order to get an effect, and if you think it's easy to spend sixty minutes dropping a pile of folding chairs, then picking them up and dropping them all over again, as I had to do recently, just try it some time.
"The effect I wanted was the crash of an airplane. It had to be a big one and real
(Continued on Page 43)