The History of Immersive Sound in Cinema - Text 6
Twentieth Century Fox invested in immersive sound systems for the film The Towering Inferno in 1974. Fox’s process consisted in blowing the film up to 70 mm in order to have six sound tracks, spread across the film stock in a non-standard manner. Three of these tracks were used for the stereophonic sound on the stage and the three others were used for the lateral walls and the back of the hall. In this way viewers felt themselves prisoners in the flames of the fire. The effects were also gripping, and the film was nominated for an Academy Award for the quality of its soundtrack.
With the marketing of more affordable sound processes, such as Ultra-Stereo, Dolby Stereo, Quintaphonic Sound, etc., for films such as Ken Russell’s Tommy (1975), George Lucas’ Star Wars (1977), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Roman Polanski’s Tess (1979), etc., immersive sound became accessible to the entire film industry and would become widespread. In particular, it was used in a much more subtle way with more thought-out balance between form and content.
It is important to note here the crucial contribution of the Dolby laboratories from the late 1970s in the race to improve sound quality in cinema. The situation had become urgent, mostly because of the appearance of movie-theatre complexes in which the theatre and the screen had become gigantic. Dolby won the battle of the sound processes thanks to an economical yet complex and very elaborate system: the Dolby Cinema Processor, with the following circuits: a system for reducing background noise and increasing the dynamic range (increasing the range of high and low frequencies) and the possibility for stereo sound with rear sound, along with a considerable reduction in distortion. The Dolby Stereo system (used for the first time with Star Wars) made it possible in addition to recreate a “surround” sound effect by using only two audio tracks.[1] The Dolby company then marketed a number of other processes, improved each time. This insert describes one of these, Dolby Stereo Spectral Recording, marketed in 1986.
