Efecto de abono e inoculación en vivero para trasplante de G. sepium

While discussing the introduction of digital technology in film sound, it is worth taking a look at the music industry, which adopted digital tools two dec-ades earlier than the film industry. The introduction of digital technology in the music industries dates back to the 1970s when companies such as BBC and Decca started to use digital recording tools. Only at the end of the decade, and especially during the following one, digital audio started to be employed for popular music on a larger scale. The successful Compact Disc, for instance, was developed jointly by Philips and Sony and was put on the market in the

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early 1980s. Along the way an animated debate between supporters of analog or digital audio took place from concert halls to living rooms. Today, almost everybody listens to music that has been produced using both digital and ana-log technoana-logies at some point of the production chain. Nevertheless, there are still musicians who find it important to declare that their music has been produced in a digital-free environment.²⁷

Looking at the difference between analog and digital audio, it can be stated in the first place that audio is an analog phenomenon. Analog audio records waves, whereas digital audio translates these waves via encoding into binary numbers. The audio waves, produced for example by an actor, a sing-er or an instrument, are convsing-erted into digits and stored on a ^carrier, e.g. a Compact Disc or a hard disk, via an encoded digital format, e.g. PCM, WAV, MP3. At the end of the chain a decoder will convert the encoded digits back into a(n analog) sound wave.

Digital audio entered filmmaking when the technology became competi-tive with the existing magnetic tape recorders (usually referred to with their brand name NAGRA, as the standard in motion picture and television record-ing from the 1960s). Only in the 1990s did digital technology slowly start to take over part of the motion picture sound reproduction process. Magnetic tape recorders started to be replaced by digital recording devices making use of Digital Audio Tapes (DAT), launched by Sony in 1987. DAT is still a stand-ard in the professional circuits today. Only recently have devices that record uncompressed audio directly onto hard disks been gradually introduced.²⁸

Digital tools have been introduced in the practice of mixing film audio but, until this day, they have often coexisted with analog steps in the chain. In practice, the process of producing sound for film has not changed much since the introduction of digital recording devices. As noted by Sean Cubitt:

Sound effects are still largely produced by the established analogue means of Foley editing, although there are specific examples in which the effect is dependent on digital equipment. (Cubitt, 2002: 18)²⁹

With respect to the reproduction of sound in cinemas, the conversion to dig-ital started in 1992, with the introduction of Dolby Digdig-ital. Batman Returns (USA, 1992) is considered to be the first film to make use of a Dolby Digital soundtrack.³⁰ In Dolby Digital the space between the perforations of a film projection print hosts the digital sound information; a decoder built in the film projector reads the information while the film is shown and a digital pro-cessor converts it back into sound. A similar system was more recently devel-oped by Sony, the Sony Dynamic Digital Sound (SDDS), where the sound data are inscribed on the outside edge of the projection film print.

| 37 A slightly different system, the Digital Theater System (DTS), was used for a limited number of films, the first of which was Jurassic Park (USA, 1993). DTS uses a separate Compact Disc that provides digital sound in synchronization with the film print thanks to an optical time code printed on the film. The film print carries a redundant analog soundtrack for cinemas without DTS or as a backup in case the Compact Disc should fail. This system is reminiscent of early sound systems developed in the late 1920s, such as Vitaphone or Movie-tone, where a sound recording would be played in synchronization with a mute film print.³¹

Also in film exhibition analog and digital sound technologies coexist. A good example of this coexistence is that of a typical projection print provided with Dolby Digital audio or SDDS. On such a film print two types of sound-tracks are present, namely, a digital track between, and an analog track along the perforations. The presence of two tracks allows the film audio to be played also in theaters that are equipped with an analog sound system only, and it offers an alternative in case of technical breakdown. These are two issues quite strongly related to the economical aspects involved in technological change as they guarantee compatibility with different kinds of equipment (analog and digital) and back-up in case of technical failure.³² It should also be noted that the digital soundtrack is photochemically printed on the projec-tion print, which means that it has to rely on the tradiprojec-tional analog reading head placed in the film projector.³³

Although the high quality of recent cinema sound systems is often attrib-uted to digital technology, this is not always the case. Trademarks such as THX, for example, are not digital recording technologies, but a quality cer-tification for playback systems for cinemas, home cinemas and even for car sound systems.³⁴ THX sets standards for the type, number and location of speakers and other spatial aspects for the cinemas or other environments where the sound is played back. Both digital and analog formats can be heard in THX-labeled cinemas.

We can conclude that the introduction of digital in film audio at this point has only partially changed the practice and, as Cubitt points out:

[…] digital sound as a whole is still dependent on analogue and imitates it even more closely than visual effects. Thus there are no plans in hand for digitally synthesized voices, even though synthespians, virtual actors existing only in computer, are being developed as a commercial proposi-tion. (Cubitt, 2002: 18)

On the other hand, it should be pointed out that in a larger context the audio-cultural perception has indeed changed and our ears have been retrained by

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this pervasively digital audio environment (e.g. CD, MP3 and DVD). So, even if digitally synthesized voices are not commercially developed and digital sound for film imitates analog sound, as argued by Cubitt, it cannot be denied that digital quality has become part of today’s sound in a broader sense, certainly in users’ everyday experience.

Also, this brief overview of the introduction of digital technology in film audio shows quite clearly that, at this point, everyday practice deals with a hybrid technology where analog and digital tools coexist at every step of the production chain, from production to exhibition. The situation is similar with respect to film restoration practice.

The impact of digital audio on film restoration has been larger than one would think based only on the limited reflection that this technological change has produced.³⁵ Film audio, indeed, is a field that has been significant-ly less addressed than other aspects of film, in particular the image. And this remains true also with regard to the transition to digital. This could be sur-prising as almost all films produced over the last fifteen years, and also many film restorations of archival films, have gone through digital. One reason for this lack of reflection could be the fact that sound in film has never been intel-ligible without a transcoding step (in other words, sound in film is not isomor-phic), not even when it was completely analog, and, therefore, it is harder to grasp. In this respect the shift to digital in sound is significantly less dramatic than in image. Even if audio is not the object of this research, the kind of theo-rization I propose in this work may be useful for further reflection on it.