The History of Immersive Sound in Cinema - Text 2
The history of immersive sound in cinema begins by all accounts with the sound version of Abel Gance’s famous film Napoléon, made in 1927 with a sound version released in 1934. In 1932, Gance and André Debrie filed a patent application for a multi-directional stereophonic sound reproduction system with the possibility of lateral and depth effects which they called “Perspective sonore.” They tried the system out in 1935 for the sound version of Napoléon shown at the Paramount cinema in Paris, and again the following year for the film Un grand amour de Beethoven. To match the action on screen, this film’s sound was directed to a multitude of loudspeakers placed throughout the cinema. Gance’s experiment, however, had no future.
At the same time, in the United States, the Magnascope process, which consisted in suddenly enlarging the image in important sequences of the film, was used for example in 1936 for the MGM production San Francisco by W.S. Van Dyke. The effect of enlarging the image must have been spectacular in its day, especially as the sound track was reproduced at the same time throughout the cinema using a series of loudspeakers placed on the lateral walls and at the back of the hall, thereby completely surrounding the viewers. This film obtained an Academy Award for best sound.
Not long before the United States entered the war, several large studios were using very sophisticated sound processes, such as Warner’s stereophonic process Vitasound and RKO’s modified monophonic Hi-range process. The Vitasound process, employed on only two Michael Curtiz films, Four Wives (1939) and Santa Fe Trail (1940), used a complex system for dividing the sound up among three loudspeakers at the front of the hall. The film’s monophonic sound was directed to match the action on screen via signals recorded on a special track on the exhibition copy. The Hi-range process was used mainly for RKO’s famous Citizen Kane (1941) to meet Orson Welles’ wishes. This system used a recording method for optical sound which doubled the standard dynamic range and made it necessary to add powerful amplifiers and loudspeakers in RKO movie theatres.
The Fantasound process, conceived by the Disney studios and RCA, can be seen as an important stage in the history of immersive sound. For the final scene in the animated film Fantasia, released by Disney in 1940, the music (Franz Schubert’s Ave Maria), was reproduced in stereo at the beginning of the sequence on the three stage loudspeakers, and then the sound gradually shifted to the back of the hall by means of several groups of loudspeakers placed along the lateral walls, thereby gradually enveloping every viewer. This kind of immersive experience was relatively rare.
