Loudspeakers and Digital Immersion - Text 1
When talking films were becoming widely made, a single loudspeaker was placed near the screen. Several attempts were made to position it: on one side of the screen, in the orchestra pit (because the speaker replaced musicians) and finally behind the screen. In this latter case, however, new screens with tiny holes had to be created for the sound to pass through.
Every time a multi-track system was tried there was a shift from one central loudspeaker to several speakers. In 1937, for example, the film One Hundred Men and a Girl, a musical by Henry Koster, was recorded using multiple tracks, based on an idea by the orchestra conductor Leopolod Stokowski. In movie theatres, however, the sound remained monophonic. It was still complicated to install several loudspeakers to recreate the various sound tracks. In the 1940s, with Fantasound, Disney was one of the few companies which tried to innovate. This “stereo” playback system was set up in various movie theatres solely for screenings of Fantasia (1940) as part of a “road show” travelling from town to town. The music for this animated film was recorded on eight optical tracks. Recreating the sound in movie theatres was done on three tracks with thirty to eighty speakers placed around the periphery of the theatre. The film toured thirteen American cities.
