According to the video description, sound technicians used modern sounds to create this recording which is based on sound ranging. When World War I was raging in Europe, magnetic tape didn’t exist yet and recording technology was in its infancy, requiring sound to be mechanically produced using a needle and soft wax or metal.
Taking such heavy machinery to the front was not just unpractical but downright dangerous. And still, some people recorded the horrifying soundscape of the front. Special units used a technique called “sound ranging” to try and determine where enemy gunfire was coming from.
“To do so, technicians set up strings of microphones—actually barrels of oil dug into the ground—a certain distance apart, then used a piece of photographic film to visually record noise intensity,” the video description reads.
“Using that data and the time between when a shot was fired and when it hit, they could then triangulate where enemy artillery was located—and adjust their own guns accordingly. At least one bit of that ‘sound ranging’ film survived the War—the film recording the last few minutes of World War I when the guns finally fell silent at the River Moselle on the American Front.”
