SISSLE AND BLAKE: DeForest Phonofilm (1) 1923.

NOBLE SISSLE AND EUBIE BLAKE in 1923, fresh from the success of their first Afro-American Broadway musical “SHUFFLE ALONG“ (1921) singing two songs for experimental talkie DeForest Phonofilms. These have been preserved in the Library of Congress, but have previously been uploaded to Internet with a host of faults, hopefully corrected with my current filtering. I’ve removed hum, sprocket noise, some hiss, distortion and a lot of bumps in the frequency response. The frequency analysis ’waterfall“ graph of the soundtrack was used to precisely locate, analyse and eliminate these deficiencies. I’ll be posting another song short filmed by Sissle and Blake on Phonofilms in 1923, unfortunately surviving in poorer condition, over the next couple of days. The soundtrack problems in films of this extreme age, as you might imagine, are quite severe.