Classical Hollywood cinema
The beginning of the sound era itself is ambiguously defined. To some, it began with "The Jazz Singer", which was released in 1927 and increased box-office profits for films, as sound was introduced to feature films. To others, the era began in 1929, when the silent age had definitively ended. Most Hollywood pictures from the late 1920s to 1960s adhered closely to a genre—Western, slapstick comedy, musical, animated cartoon, and biopic (biographical picture)—and the same creative teams often worked on films made by the same studio. For instance, Cedric Gibbons and Herbert Stothart always worked on MGM films; Alfred Newman worked at Twentieth Century Fox for twenty years; Cecil B. DeMille's films were almost all made at Paramount Pictures; and director Henry King's films were mostly made for Twentieth Century Fox. Similarly, actors were mostly contract players. Film historians and critics note that it took about a decade for films to adapt to sound and return to the level of artistic quality of the silents, which it did in the late 1930s.
George Groves (sound engineer)
George Robert Groves (13 December 1901 – 4 September 1976) was a film sound pioneer who played a significant role in developing the technology that brought sound to the silent screen. He is also credited as being Hollywood's first ‘sound man’; he was the recording engineer on the seminal Al Jolson picture, "The Jazz Singer" (1927), as well as many other early talkies. In a career with Warner Brothers that spanned 46 years, he rose to become their Director of Sound and won two Academy Awards.