Making Films Sound Better: The Transition to Dolby Sound in Hollywood Cinema By Benjamin A. Wright A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Film Studies Carleton University OTTAWA, Ontario August 18,2005 Copyright © 2005, Benjamin A. Wright Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 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Abstract This thesis explores the transition to Dolby multichannel sound in the Hollywood film industry from 1975 to 1979. Despite the industrial and cultural dominance of Dolby over the past thirty years, this historical moment remains largely overlooked in the history of sound technology and American cinema. Dolby essentially challenges classical notions of cinematic sound space and audience immersion. Whereas monaural film sound was directed at the audience, Dolby surrounds the audience by utilizing not only frontal loudspeakers, but also a U-shaped array of speakers beside and behind them, producing what the thesis defines as a “representational metaspace.” As a representational sound technology, Dolby is shaped not only by theories of sound space, but also by the aesthetic decisions and demands of Hollywood filmmakers. Case studies of Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and Apocalypse Now (1979) concretize the historical, theoretical, and aesthetic properties that define Dolby sound space. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents Acknowledgements ...............................................................................................iii Introduction—The Walls Have Ears: Film Sound in Three Dimensions ..........................................................................1 1- Presented in Stereo: Antecedents, Stereo Sound, and the Dolby “Revolution” ................................9 2- Liberation of the Loudspeaker: Sound Theory in the Age of Dolby................................................................. 43 3- Sounding Out Dolby Stereo: Aesthetics, Specialized Listening, and Close Encounters o f the Third Kind................................................................................................................67 4- The Architecture of Sound: Sound Design, “Room Tone,” and Apocalypse Now......................................89 Conclusion ........................................................................................................... 116 Works Cited......................................................................................................... 121 Films Cited.......................................................................................................... 128 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Acknowledgements Upon the completion of this project, I must acknowledge several people to whom I owe a considerable debt of gratitude. First, I would like to especially thank Paul Theberge for his keen interest in this project from its earliest stages, and for his penetrating commentary and insight on some complex theoretical concepts. His wealth of knowledge on sound technologies and the music industry greatly influenced the structure of this thesis. A number of professors also deserve my profound thanks for informing various aspects of this project. I tip my hat to Mark Langer for his friendship, insight into the inner workings of Film Studies at Carleton University, and for teaching me that professors are human, too. I must also thank Charles O’Brien for his valuable questions and genuine interest in this area of film sound history. Special acknowledgements go to Manuela Gieri, Anne Lancashire, and Cameron Tolton for initially shaping my interest in cinema studies at the University of Toronto. Of course, without the unfaltering love and support of my parents, David and Marlen, I would never have come this far. Most of all, however, I wish to thank Monica for putting up with my neuroses, reading countless drafts of this project, and for basically being the best partner a guy could ask for. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Introduction The Walls Have Ears: Film Sound in Three Dimensions Not only as spectators, but as listeners, too, we are transferred from our seats to the space in which the events depicted on the screen are taking place. As Bela Balazs has suggested in the above quotation, film sound can immerse the audience in the space of fiction. Indeed, the process whereby the audience is “transferred” from the space of the auditorium to the space of the diegesis is a decidedly audiovisual enterprise that requires both sight and sound to sustain the illusion of spatial displacement. For Balazs, however, sound, more than the film image, “reveal[s] for us our acoustic environment, the acoustic landscape in which we live.” In this sense, sound completes the illusion by providing an added dimensionality that one scholar has called a “texture within which one can move around and live.” Significantly, Balazs’ comments on the nature of film sound are no doubt derived from his experience with monaural (single channel) sound. Given the dominance of monaural sound in Hollywood cinema from 1927 until 1977, it is not surprising that his theorizing concerned a form of sonic practice that pervaded the American film industry for nearly fifty years. Implicit in his account, however, is an accepted form of filmic perception that has the sound film speaking “to us more directly from the screen.”4 His use of the word “from” implies that sound emanates from a fixed point in front of the audience. In this way, the audience understands sound to originate from the characters Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 and environments on screen, producing, as Balazs’ has argued, a general sense of spatial immersion. While Balazs does not specify the period of film history in his argument, the concept of audience immersion is a thread that weaves itself through decades of industry practice and, later, through academic discourse. Hollywood’s interest in matters of audience perception and immersion has raised a number of complex issues that continue to be worked out at the levels of theory and practice. From the conversion to sound in the late 1920s, sound engineers began to investigate the ways in which sound could enhance the motion picture experience, leading them to oscillate between the spectacle of “talking pictures” and the narrative invisibility that dictated Hollywood’s image editing style. Whether it was the early tests in synchronized sound, or the short-lived experiments of stereo sound in the 1950s, immersion seemed to offer one way to describe the desired effect of sound cinema. Balazs’ analysis of cinematic immersion is invaluable for its insinuation that sonic experience can modify the audience’s sense of space. Undoubtedly, his notion of the immersed audience is not limited to critiques of classical film sound, but can also be read more specifically as a conduit to theories about contemporary stereo and multichannel film sound. The resurrection of stereo sound by Dolby Laboratories in the 1970s represents an important moment in the last quarter century of Hollywood cinema where the dominant modes of classical sound theory and practice were called