ABC in Sound
László Moholy-Nagy, 1933
Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, another Bauhaus artist who was then interested in the combined possibilities of photography, photomontage and cinema, produced a description of Alexander Laszlo’s light organ [1] He is also said to have worked on the making of synthetic sounds and to be using them in a film entitled Tonende ABC (ABC of Sound), described as an “audiovisual experiment”.[2] In an article in the Revue Musicale devoted to sound film, Arthur Hoérée mentions such a film without specifying its author or source:
“Finally, identical work [on synthetic sounds] is attributed to a German scholar, applied to the letters of the alphabet and their combinations; so that he was able to create from scratch a human voice that did not exist.” [3]
Announced as a lost film in Les cloches d’Atlantis. I am pleased, on this companion site, to be able to show a digital copy of this film, which has resurfaced although many researchers who have looked into ABC of Sound, Thomas Levin, Marcella Lista and Thomas Tode, had considered it either lost or even perhaps never to have existed. ABC of Sound was screened at the Société du Film in 1934 and, contrary to what had been imagined, is not one of the first auditory experiments attempting to reproduce the graphic form of the letters of the alphabet directly on the optical track, but the sound transcription of simple graphic symbols, like Oskar Fischinger in Ornemental Sound (1930). Symbolically, the film is nonetheless a way of announcing in its title that this alphabet lays the foundations of a new sound language which it is henceforth appropriate to explore and extend.
[1] MOHOLY-NAGY, Laszlo, Painting, Photography, Film, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1969. p. 22.
[2] Curtis, David, Experimental Cinema a Fifty-year Evolution, London, Studio Vista, 1971, p. 30.
[3] HOERE, Arthur, Le travail du film sonore, op. cit. p. 73.