THE HISTORY OF SURROUND SOUND – week six
Music recording and reproduction started off as monophonic, which then evolved into multiple-channel systems to replicate a real live musical experience. Surround sound experiments started in the 1930s and by 1940, Walt Disney introduced the idea of an audio system that would ‘totally immerse the film-going audience in the same way his film Fantasia was designed to immerse the audience’. His sound engineers came up with Fantasound, however this was too expensive and complex to carry out – the original idea involved 96 speakers.
Another channel sound system was developed by Hollywood, being more affordable, though this didn’t have a successful outcome either and film surround sound eventually died out. This however took a turn in 1975 with the Dolby Stereo which included audio through four channels, being left, right, a front-facing centre speaker channel and a surround channel for the speakers at the sides and back of the theatre. This system was used in films such as Star Wars and Close Encounters of the Third Kind which ‘made the sound effects and ambient noises come alive’, creating an immersive movie experience for the audience.
In addition to the theatre setting, in 1967, Pink Floyd played the first-ever concert in quadraphonic sound in London with the use of four discrete channels placed in the four corners of the concert venue. Surround sound was able to be experienced in the home setting in 1982, introduced by Dolby Surround technology.
There are numbers of different types of surround sound speaker setups. These include speaker channels 2.0, 2.1, 5.1, 7.1, 7.1.2, and many more. The first number represents the number of main speakers, the second is the number of subwoofers, and if there is a third number, it is number of “height” speakers.
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Fluance (n.d.). The History of Surround Sound. [online] FLUANCE. Available at: [https://blog.fluance.com/history-surround-sound/.]
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Matthes, J. (2019). Surround Sound Channels Explained: 2.1, 5.1, 7.1, 9.1, and More! [online] The Home Theater DIY. Available at: [https://thehometheaterdiy.com/surround-sound-channels-explained/.]
Miller, M. (2004). The History of Surround Sound. [online] informIT. Available at: [https://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=337317.]