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.
Sound design
The terms "sound design" and "sound designer" began to be used in the motion picture industry in 1969. At that time, The title of "Sound Designer" was first granted to Walter Murch by Francis Ford Coppola in recognition for Murch's contributions to the film The Rain People. The original meaning of the title "Sound Designer", as established by Coppola and Murch, was "an individual ultimately responsible for all aspects of a film's audio track, from the dialogue and sound effects recording to the re-recording (mix) of the final track". The term "sound designer" has replaced monikers like "supervising sound editor" or "re-recording mixer" for what was essentially the same position: the head designer of the final sound track. Editors and mixers like Murray Spivack ("King Kong"), George Groves ("The Jazz Singer"), James G. Stewart ("Citizen Kane"), and Carl Faulkner ("Journey to the Center of the Earth") served in this capacity during Hollywood's studio era, and are generally considered to be sound designers by a different name.