Sound effects emerged in the late nineteenth century, as the motion-picture industry experimented with accompaniment to silent films. Theatres brought in live bands, orchestras, lecturers, and hidden actors who stomped and clattered in conjunction with movies; they tested strategically placed phonographs and the Kinetophone, a contraption introduced by Thomas Edison, which attempted to synch sound to movement. Enterprising inventors created effects “traps,” small machines meant to imitate everyday sounds such as a baby crying or a nose being blown. In a recent paper for the academic journal Film History, Stephen Bottomore, a historian of early cinema, cited a 1911 article that griped about the maximalism such devices facilitated: “It is often the case that a youth with no imagination, and with very limited brain power, combined with a spirit of mischief, ‘lets himself go,’ when presiding over the sound machine.”
In 1926, Warner Bros., then a small outfit best known for a movie about a German shepherd named Rin Tin Tin, débuted the Vitaphone, which allowed for synchronized recorded sound. That year, the studio released “Don Juan,” a silent film with a recorded musical score and a handful of sound effects: tepid clicks to accompany swords in combat; clangs and chimes to add weight to wedding bells. Initially, it was impractical for production teams to edit recordings, and dialogue, music, and sound effects had to be recorded in real time, on set. “In a lot of cases, those recordings were still the sounds that musicians used to perform in the theatres,” Emily Thompson, a historian of technology at Princeton, told me. “You’ll hear drummers instead of machine guns, or saxophones when ducks go by onscreen.”
Foley takes its name from Jack Foley, a stuntman, prop handler, and assistant director at Universal Pictures in the late twenties. His breakout was “Show Boat,” which was initially intended to be a silent film; facing competition from Warner Bros., Universal added a soundtrack, which included dialogue, during postproduction. Jack Foley provided sound effects: handclaps, footsteps. He built a small crew, and their workspace became known as “Foley’s room”; other studios eventually developed their own “Foley stages.” Later, a technique known as sound-on-film—in which recorded sound is converted to light waves printed directly onto film strips—made it possible to work with effects separately, something that allowed for more artistic freedom. In the thirties, sound technicians sought “wild” recordings—a literalism that prioritized the grinding rush of an actual train over the smoother, more controllable sound of roller skates cruising over a wood floor. But some directors used sound effects for their suggestive qualities, such as the growing thunder of encroaching shells in “A Farewell to Arms,” or the sinister whistling of the serial killer Hans Beckert in Fritz Lang’s “M.”