The historiography of the transition from silent cinema to sound cinema has evolved considerably in the last decade, none more so than for scholars of cinematic sound. A wealth of recent scholarship (Spring 2013; Slowik 2014; Jacobs 2014; Platte 2018; Lewis 2018) has illuminated the coming of sound from a range of different national, cultural and industrial vantage points, bringing the many continuities between silent cinema and sound cinema into focus. As a result, what was once treated as a stark line in the sand—a technological revolution followed by a few years of chaos, as exhibitors fired scores of orchestra players and filmmakers scrambled to learn how to use new sonic resources ‘properly’— is now understood as a complex global process, advancing swiftly in some places and incrementally in others. More than ever before, the decade between 1925 and 1935 appears as a period ripe with aesthetic possibility.