Surround Sound - History

History

The first documented use of surround sound was in 1940, for the Disney studio's animated film Fantasia. Walt Disney was inspired by Rimsky Korsakov's operatic piece, Flight of the Bumblebee to have a bumblebee featured in his musical Fantasia and also sound as if it was flying in all parts of the theatre – the unsuccessful experimentation led to the music being excluded from the film and the eventual invention of "surround sound".

The initial multichannel audio application was called 'Fantasound', comprising three audio channels and speakers. The sound was diffused throughout the cinema, initially by an engineer using some 54 loudspeakers. The surround sound was achieved using the sum and the difference of the phase of the sound. In the 1950s, the German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen experimented with and produced ground-breaking electronic compositions such as Gesang der Jünglinge and Kontakte, the latter using fully discrete and rotating quadraphonic sounds generated with industrial electronic equipment in Herbert Eimert's studio at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR). Edgar Varese's Poeme Electronique, created for the Iannis Xenakis designed Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World's Fair, also utilised spatial audio with 425 loudspeakers used to move sound throughout the pavilion. There are also many other composers that created ground-breaking surround sound works in the same time period.

In 1978, a concept devised by Max Bell for Dolby Laboratories called "split surround" was tested with the movie "Superman (film)". This led to the 70mm stereo surround release of "Apocalypse Now," which became the first formal release in cinemas with 3 channels in the front and 2 in the rear. The "Apocalypse Now" encoder/decoder was designed by Michael Karagosian, also for Dolby Laboratories. The stereo surround mix was produced by an Oscar-winning crew led by Walter Murch for American Zoetrope. The format was also deployed in 1982 with the stereo surround release of Blade Runner.

5.1 surround sound originated in 1987 at the famous French Cabaret Moulin Rouge. A French engineer, Dominique Bertrand used a mixing board specially designed in cooperation with Solid State Logic, based on 5000 series and including 6 channels. Respectively: A left, B right, C centre, D left rear, E right rear, F bass. The same engineer had already achieved a 3.1 system in 1974, for the International Summit of Francophone States in Dakar Senegal.