Souvenir Programme  ·  Price Ninety-Nine Cents

Untamed Audio has the honour to present

Reel

Motion Picture Sound

The microphone  ·  The tube  ·  The optical print  ·  The projector  ·  The theatre

Sound from the other side of the screen.

Crimson curtains parting on a beam of projector light in a movie palace

Reel is a motion-picture sound machine. A ribbon microphone, a tube stage, an optical print, a projector, and a cinema - one plugin, the whole chain computed in the order the sound was actually made. Not a tape emulation dressed up as a movie effect, and not a crackle loop laid over the top.

Now showing  ·  The trailer, in one reel

The Programme

  1. Wearthe transport

    Wow off a warped reel, flutter off the sprocket and the scrape of the transport - and all of it moves together, because it all comes off one machine. This knob is the mechanism getting old.

  2. Tonethe optics and the electronics

    A ribbon microphone with its proximity bump and presence peak, a tube behind it, the period limiter, and the roll-off the optical track was actually cut to. Narrow, weighted, unmistakably film. This knob is how 1950 the system is.

  3. Dirtthe surface of the print

    Hiss, grain that rides on the signal rather than under it, and a dense weather of tiny clicks - no two alike, because a uniform click is the single loudest tell that a thing is fake.

  4. The Projectorthe slide

    Opens the booth door. Projectors lived behind glass: with the booth closed you hear the print, and when you open the door the machine joins the soundtrack - motor, claw, a little beautiful machinery leaking into the room.

  5. The Foottap to bypass, and hold

    Hold it and the film jams. The motor dies against its own inertia, the pitch and the level sag together like a tape stop, and when you let go it catches up and runs briefly sharp.

  6. The Jewelnot listed in any programme

    Press it and you are at the drive-in: a four-inch speaker hooked on the car door, the picture's sound arriving a moment later from across the lot. Not a filter - another playback system.

  7. The Bodya knock

    Strike it and the machine eats a little film. The motor sags nearly by half with a wobble in it, everything riding on that motor goes down with it, and about two seconds later the splice snaps the transport home with a soft pop.

Scenes & Places

A projectionist threading a carbon-arc projector
The booth. Sealed, hot, and the reason a print hisses instead of rattling.
A picture palace auditorium seen from the balcony
The house. One channel, glued, and meant to be heard from the middle of it.
A projector with its housing swung open, claw and sprockets exposed
The machine itself, with its side off. Throw the slide and it joins the soundtrack.
Film spilling off a projector while the projectionist lunges for it
And when it goes wrong. Hold the foot and the film jams.
A drive-in theatre at dusk with a window speaker on a car door
And the other house - four inches of speaker on the door glass. Press the jewel.

Production Notes

The chain is the real chain, in the real order. A ribbon microphone, a tube stage, an optical print, a projector transport, and a room - each one computed, each one standing where it actually stood. Nothing here is a reverb impulse of a cinema or a loop of crackle laid over the top; the noise and the instability arrive from the parts that would have made them.

The breathing is the tell nobody puts in. Optical noise reduction gated the hiss down in the quiet, so a real print inhales when the music starts. Once you have heard it you cannot hear a print without it.

Wound all the way down, it does nothing at all. At zero on all three the signal passes untouched - the whole chain fades in rather than merely running quietly, which means the pedal has an honest off inside its on.

Everything mechanical shares one motor. Jam the film and the claw ticks slower, because the tick comes off the same motor state the programme's pitch does. Knock it and both stutter together. There is no arrangement of the controls that lets the picture and the sound disagree.

The numbers are the machine's own. Twenty-four frames a second times four perforations is ninety-six flutter events a second - it could not have been any other number. The optical roll-off is the published Academy characteristic: flat through the middle, eighteen decibels down by eight kilocycles.

Fits any pedalboard. Requires no splicing, no carbon, and no projectionist. Nothing recorded, nothing pasted on - just the machine. Ninety-nine cents.

Now Booking

Tickets on sale soon - Mac · iPad · PC
THE
BOOTH

Strike the arc, then pick a reel - or plug your own instrument in and run the machine yourself. Drag the knobs. Hold the footswitch and let the film jam.

Presented by Untamed Audio · Written and built by Joshua Rideout · The entire signal chain computed in C++ · Ribbon proximity and presence after the measured curves · Optical density after the published Academy characteristic · Crackle after Godsill & Rayner, Esquef, and Moliner & Välimäki · Transport arithmetic after the machine itself · Patrons are reminded that the management cannot be responsible for pitch during a jam · Kindly hold the footswitch down anyway