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16 SOUND MOTION PICTURES
senses is a field of enterprise our record already demonstrates beyond quibble.
Now our stock-in-trade would seem to be doubled. Within the limitations of nationality to which I have already referred we shall in the next decade be enabled to add to our appeal to the patron's eye the powerful auxiliary of all the possibility for enjoyment that waits in his ear. To a certain degree we have always attempted this. From the lone piano of the "store show" era to the symphony orchestra of to-day we have provided an accompaniment of pleasure not visual. In addition, we have simulated the sounds of hoofbeats, of railway engines, of taxi horns, to tease the mind into further acceptance of the eye's illusion.
To these elementary effects now are added the mechanical agencies of an epoch of machine making. Outside the theatre our audiences have been made ready for the acceptance of contrivances appealing to auditory reception. The talking machine has established its own realism. In spite of the fact that Caruso is no longer among us, we say that we are still "hearing" him "sing" from La Boheme; we mention the record only in passing. During the recent campaign we "heard" the candidates, who spoke sometimes half a continent away. We have come to respond to the mechanized sounds as to the original, because of that basic illusion, bred in us from childhood, that we can "converse" with a distant person over the miracle whose household name is the telephone.
This acquiescence in a mechanically produced sound as a real, original sound prepares the race for something new in entertainment. Some people speak warningly of "a necessary period of public education." It will be a brief one. It is already almost a finished one. The public are with us. So, too, are the artists of the word spoken or sung. Performers, writers, composers — they flock anew to our studios for unprecedented rewards in exchange for