‘This New Noise’ Women working in the transition between silent and sound cinema'

The coming of broadcast sound, in radio and cinema, was a highly gendered process in every aspect of its manifestation – from invention, through to production and realisation of the new technology to its mass dissemination - initially through radio and gramophone and finally through popular film and TV. For the first time in history, the voice and image were capable of unification in the representational arts. This presentation examines the ways in which women became increasingly marginalised as both recorders and presenters of the new sound technologies in cinema and broadcasting and the reasons for this marginalisation, which remains an issue in the contemporary film and TV industries, where women sound technicians are numerically under-represented.