The cartoonist Max Yantock (or Yantok), the nickname of Nicolau Cesarino, was a regular contributor to the illustrated magazine O Malho, published in Rio de Janeiro. His contributions included the section ‘A Trip to Pandegolandia’, in which he satirised the federal capital through drawings and texts. In O Malho from 15 February 1930, his last square section featured the illustration of a man with earplugs and an ice pack on his forehead, holding a protest sign that read: ‘Protest league against all devices that end with “phone”’ (Figure 11.1). The caption said ironically: ‘I had occasion to note that people are very fond of jazz and cinema, especially when their ears are properly corked’ (Yantock 1930: 4).

Some months before, the same Yantock had published, also in O Malho, a comic strip occupying a full page of the magazine, addressing the same subject of the city's excessive noise resulting from new sound technologies. Named ‘Gramophonoradiomania’, the story featured a man who wandered through the streets of the city, disturbed by various sounds, especially those emanating from record players and radios that permeated the urban public space (Figure 11.2). Not even in death, inside a coffin, was he free from that unwanted soundscape (Yantock 1929: 69).

This chapter will draw on these two similar comments on the modern, urban and intermedial soundscape of Rio de Janeiro in order to launch a discussion of the intermedial character of sound cinema at the time when this technology was being introduced into the Brazilian film market. I adopt Emily Thompson's definition of soundscape as an ‘auditory or aural landscape’, which differs slightly from Murray Schaefer’s, who coined the term: ‘Like a landscape, a soundscape is simultaneously a physical environment and a way of perceiving that environment; it is both a world and a culture constructed to make sense of that world’ (Thompson 2008: 1). My discussion will first consider how late 1920s Rio de Janeiro, then Brazil's main metropolis, was consistently represented as a ‘noisy city’ – an old appellation that gained a new lease of life at the time. The noises then invading the capital came, above all, from the exponential growth of new electrical technologies of sound reproduction: phonograph, radio and sound cinema. Or, as Yantock's cartoon shows, from the various devices that ended with ‘phone’, such as the gramophone, the ‘radiophone’ and the vitaphone.