














        
            
		
            

			
				

	
    
    
  ×
        Article contents

  Dimensional hearing
  Dolby
  Stereo
        Differences
  Footnotes
    


    
     
		
	

    ARTICLE
    
Rapt/Wrapped Listening: The Aesthetics of “Surround Sound”
		

    James Wierzbicki
    


    Sound Stage Screen, Vol. 1, Issue 2 (Fall 2021), pp. 101–124, ISSN 2784-8949. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. © 2021 James Wierzbicki. DOI: https://doi.org/10.54103/sss14474.



    This essay is prompted by my personal experience with Dolby 5.1, the sonic
    results of which have been evident in cinemas since the late 1970s and the
    encoding for which, on the soundtracks of DVDs, since the turn of the
    century has been fairly ubiquitous. More to the point, this essay deals
    with the aesthetic differences (not just perceptual but also affective)
    between listening closely to environmental sounds in real life and
    listening to re-creations of more or less those same sounds, via a Dolby
    system or otherwise, in the privacy and comfort of one’s home.




        Dimensional hearing



    The homophonic adjectives in the essay’s title refer to two “conditions” of
    listening, one of them psychological and the other physical.



    In the first case, the condition of “rapt” listening has nothing at all to
    do with the content or quality of the sonic phenomenon at hand but only
    with the decidedly unilateral relationship between that phenomenon and its
    perceiver. Our English word “rapt” of course derives from the past
    participle of the Latin verb rapere, which means “to seize.” This
    Latin root is the source of the term we use for birds such as eagles and
    hawks that swoop down from the sky and, with sharp talons, suddenly seize
    their prey; it is also the source of the word we use for the heinous
    criminal act in which a person is somehow—usually sexually—violated after
first having been somehow “seized.” On a more positive note, the Latin    rapere, and more particularly its past participle raptus,
    is the source of the English word we use to describe the state of being so
    “taken” with something or other—so “seized” by it—that the “enraptured”
    person is, willing or not, in effect “transported” to a new and perhaps
    elevated state of feeling or even of existence.



    But our English word “rapt” also means something not nearly so
    wondrously ecstatic, or so scarily violent. The word “rapt”—and this is how
    I am using the word here—simply means “attentive,” although not just
    slightly attentive but very much attentive. The person who pays rapt
    attention to something or other is at least for the moment truly and deeply
    focused on that stimulus; in the mind of the rapt attender—whether he or
    she be listening to music or playing chess or doing a crossword puzzle, or
    knitting or repairing a motorcycle—there is no room for distraction. To use
    the term in circulation since the mid 1970s when it was introduced into the
    vocabulary by the Hungarian-American psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi,
    the rapt attender is experiencing “flow,” or—as Csíkszentmihályi puts it in
    the subtitle of one his numerous books on the topic—“the psychology of
    optimal experience”;
    
        [1]
    
    to use a phrase current amongst players of computer games, the rapt
    attender is “in the zone.”



    The vast pigeonhole of rapt listeners certainly includes the erudite Wagner
    idolater who, while indulging in a live or recorded performance of the
    “Liebestod” from Tristan und Isolde, in effect “parses” every
    single nuance and compares the results with every other performance of this
    music that he or she has ever heard. But the pigeonhole of rapt listeners
    also includes the infant who suckles at its mother’s breast as she sings a
    wordless lullaby. As noted, “rapt” listening has nothing at all to do with
    the content or quality of the music, or the sonic phenomenon, at hand; it
    has to do only with the intensity with which the listener relates,
    psychologically, to the sonic stimulation.



    ****



    The condition of “wrapped” listening, on the other hand, has to do only
    with the listening experience’s physical circumstances, circumstances that
    we likely take for granted when we encounter them in our everyday lives but
    which we tend to celebrate when they are artificially re-created by
    stereophonic audio systems.



Human beings have just two ears, yet most of the time we listen    three-dimensionally; the exceptions to that generalization,
    contrary to nature but increasingly common since the invention of the Sony
    Walkman portable cassette player in 1979, involve instances when, for a
    multitude of reasons that surely include psychic self-protection, by means
    of headphones or “earbuds” we make a conscious choice to limit our intake
    of sound.
    
        [2]
    
    Except in such instances, with our two ears we listen three-dimensionally.
    And we do this because we are living creatures.



    Were we robots, with our heads fitted on either side with microphones, we
    could sit motionless and have our electronic brains compare the differences
    in amplitude of a single sound whose vibrations are taken in simultaneously
    by both of our mechanical “ears”; by noting which of the two signals seems
    to be louder, we could determine the extent to which the source of the
    sound in question exists to the right or to the left of our robotic heads.
    But the electronic brain between the microphonic “ears” would be able to
    determine only that the sound source is located within one or the other of
    those two broadly defined areas. The robot’s electronic brain would easily
    know that the sound comes from the left or from the right; it would not be
    able to determine the extent to which the sound comes from in front of or
    behind its head, or from above or below it. This is because our robotic
    heads and ears would not move.



    In contrast, our human heads and ears, like the heads and ears of all
    warm-blooded creatures, do move, and constantly. No matter how
    hard we try, we cannot—as a robot might—sit motionless. Our mere breathing
    causes our hearing apparatus to move; even if we held our breaths, the
    apparatus would still move because of the percussions of our heartbeats.
    And with each ever-so-slight movement comes, automatically, a shift in the
    relationships between various binary (i.e., left and right) fields of aural
    in-take. Whereas a robot’s brain can compare the volume levels registered
    by a pair of immobile mechanical “ears” and calculate that the source of a
    particular sound exists somewhere within the left or right halves
    of a 360-degree sonic plane, the human brain—inside a head that not only
    moves on a rotational axis but also is “cocked” this way and that—can make
    comparable determinations in regard to an almost infinite number of sonic
    planes and thus determine, in an instant, the precise direction
    from which a sound seems to come.
    
        [3]
    
    Simply because we live and breathe, we are always “wrapped” in sound, with
    our sound-perceiving human selves located at the very centers of listening
    spaces that are not circular but spherical.




        
    Dolby



    The latest incarnations of consumer-oriented “surround sound” audio systems
    capitalize on the idea that people apparently enjoy being reminded that
    they naturally inhabit spherical listening spaces. But full-blown
    theatrical installations of the so-called Dolby Atmos system, with speakers
    located not just at the auditorium’s front and rear but also embedded in
    the ceiling and floor, are to date few and far between.
    
        [4]
    
    And the at-home system that is sometimes marketed as Dolby Atmos, but which
    is more accurately described as Dolby 7.2, is an only slightly expanded
    version of the older and more familiar Dolby 5.1 technology.
    
        [5]
    




    My personal relationship with at-home Dolby 5.1 began just three years ago,
    when it became clear to me that I could not possibly write a promised
    monograph on sonic style in the films of Terrence Malick without engaging
    fully with this particular filmmaker’s crafty use of “surround sound.”
    Before this I had been content to hear the soundtracks of Malick’s films,
    and the soundtracks of films by countless other directors, through a simple
    two-channel stereo setup; I confess to not even noticing that most of the
    DVDs I had acquired since the turn of the century feature on their back
    covers tiny icons that indicate the stereophonic extent—accessible, of
    course, only to those with the requisite playback equipment—of their
    soundtracks.
    
        [6]
    



    Having at long last installed in my apartment the “surround sound”
    amplifier and six speakers, it was obviously with fresh ears that, early in
2017, I listened again to Malick’s Days of Heaven. By this time    Days of Heaven was hardly new to me. I had indeed encountered the
    film in the cinema when it was first released in 1978, and it was my vivid
    memory of a linked pair of scenes near the film’s start (when more than a
    minute of very loud noise from within a steel mill immediately follows a
    few seconds of very quiet stream-side sounds) that prompted me to respond,
    more than twenty years later, to a “call” for contributions to an edited
    volume devoted to Malick’s work. But my 2003 chapter dealt mostly with the
    formalistic and arguably “musical” qualities of that sequence and
comparable sequences that I had observed elsewhere in    Days of Heaven and in two other Malick films (Badlands,
    from 1973, and The Thin Red Line, from 1998). In this chapter I
    discussed the patterns of Malick’s sounds, not the possible “meanings” of
    those sounds or their acoustical properties, and for the purposes of my
    analyses I could just as well have listened to all three films—albeit
    carefully and repeatedly—by means of a monaural speaker hung from one of
    the front windows of a car at a drive-in.
    
        [7]
    



    ****



    The French sound theorist Michel Chion, paraphrasing ideas first formulated
    by his teacher, Pierre Schaeffer, noted that for most of us there are “at
least” three modes of listening, which he termed causal listening,    semantic listening, and reduced listening.
    
        [8]
    
    Spread over a period of almost forty years, my relationship with the sounds
of the above-mentioned pair of scenes near the beginning of Malick’s    Days of Heaven cycled through all three of these listening modes.



    When I first experienced the film, as a paying customer at the cinema, I
    was interested primarily in the scenes’ narrative content, and thus almost
    all that I really noticed was that the tiny percussion noises in the
    stream-side scene seemed to be caused by bits of scrap metal being tossed
    by gleaners into buckets, and that the tremendous din of the steel mill
    scene seemed to be caused by furnaces and heavy industrial equipment. When
    I re-engaged with Days of Heaven for the sake of the
    aforementioned book chapter, my concern was with these scenes’
    quasi-musical semantic properties, by which I mean the way in which the
    nine-second episode of pianissimo, holding to a model perfected by
    such theatrical-minded symphonic composers as Beethoven and Mahler, in
    effect forces listeners to “dilate” their ears so that they might be
impacted all the more powerfully by the ensuing eighty-two seconds offortissimo. By the time I re-engaged again with    Days of Heaven for the purposes of the monograph,
    
        [9]
    
    I was so familiar with the purely sonic content of these two scenes that I
    could transcribe it into more or less conventional musical notation,
    
        [10]
    
    but what was new to me—and what was strikingly “brought home” to me as I
    listened to the film for the first time with my just-installed Dolby 5.1
    system—was the idea of these scenes’ sounds as tangible “objects”; during
    the stream-side scene I felt, almost literally, as though I were
    being enveloped in a mist of metallic droplets, and during the scene in the
    mill’s interior I comparably felt as though I were being
    physically assaulted, the relentless barrage discomforting to the extreme
    not just because the various thuds and crashes were in themselves so
    forceful but also because each of them hit me from a direction I could not
    anticipate.



    Having been thus “wrapped” (and soundly “rapped”) by the opening sounds of
    a film I thought I knew, I listened with “rapt” attention, again and again,
    to the entirety of Malick’s by this time much-expanded oeuvre.
    
        [11]
    
    More relevant to my current contemplation of the aesthetics of “surround
sound,” I re-listened as well to most of the other films that, along with    Days of Heaven, constituted the first wave of “the Dolby era” that
    in the late 1970s “exploded in all its novelty and excitement.”
    
        [12]
    
    
These early Dolby-encoded films of course included George Lucas’s 1977    Star Wars, which almost overnight made Dolby “surround sound” the
    norm because the director’s unusual arrangement with his distributor,
Twentieth Century-Fox, specified that this much-anticipated film could    only be exhibited in cinemas equipped with potent subwoofers and
    speakers located not just at the front of the house but also at the rear;
these films also included Steven Spielberg’sClose Encounters of the Third Kind (1977), Richard Donner’s Superman (1978), Philip Kaufman’s re-make of Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978), Michael Cimino’s    The Deer Hunter (1978), Jerzy Skolimowski’s The Shout
    (1978), Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), Ridley
    Scott’s Alien (1979), Ken Russell’s Altered States
(1980), Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull (1980), Spielberg’s    Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Scott’s Blade Runner
    (1982), and Steven Lisberger’s Tron (1982).
    
        [13]
    



    ****




    Even before my listening binge was over, I realized that these early Dolby
    films fell into two basic categories. In the smaller group were films that
    I found, and still find, to be genuinely interesting; in the larger group
    were films that for me, back when I first experienced them in the cinema
    and when I experienced them again for the sake of my research project, have
    been entertaining but never much more than that. The interesting films
    explored human situations; their ear-catching instances of “surround sound”
    were few and far between, and usually brief, and more often than not they
    involved the relatively quiet noises of natural environments. In marked
    contrast, the merely entertaining films celebrated adventure; they teemed
    with “surround sound,” most of it involving the relatively loud noises of
    violent action and/or sophisticated—indeed, sometimes
    futuristic—technology.



    Lest I seem self-contradictory here, I grant straightaway that the steel
    mill incident that occurs early in Days of Heaven indeed features
    both the noise of technology and a depiction of violence, and that the
opening scenes of both Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Raiders of the Lost Ark indeed revel in environmental sounds. But    Days of Heaven, once set in motion, settles quickly into a
    conventional mode of storytelling built for the most part on
    front-and-center verbal content, the linear flow of its plot interrupted
    only occasionally by taciturn moments of “enveloping” naturalistic sounds.
    After a brief toot of extra-diegetic music, Close Encounters
    begins with the prolonged and almost deafening roar of a desert sandstorm,
    and Raiders of the Lost Ark begins with an extended scene whose
    sparse underscore is a pale backdrop for the rich cacophony of a South
    American jungle; in both of these Spielberg-directed films, however, the
    slow-paced and sonically immersive opening scenes are preludes to
    fast-unfolding narratives whose sequences of episodes consistently ratchet
    up suspense even as they provide audience members with a veritable
    crescendo of audio-visual spectacle.



That the soundtracks of so many of the first-wave Dolby films were    obviously spectacular has not escaped the notice of critics who,
    like me, prefer cinematic experiences of a more subtle sort. Apparently
    drawn to meteorologic imagery, Charles Schreger early in the Dolby era
    wrote that upon first hearing the eponymous vocal utterance in
    Skolimowski’s The Shout “the audience is suddenly inundated with a
    multitrack, all-enveloping, hurricane-force sound,” and he went on to
    argue, as I argue, that the new Dolby technology was capable of
    much more than just “making the moviegoer think he has a typhoon between
    his ears.”
    
        [14]
    
    Other writers described the standard Dolby gesture in biological terms,
    noting that the subwoofers especially provoked in listeners “a pure gut, …
    straight-to-the-brainstem physical response”
    
        [15]
    
    and that “big” sound soon became central to the potential blockbuster’s
    “visceral aesthetic.”
    
        [16]
    
    Still others likened the “vulgar extreme[s]”
    
        [17]
    
    of the early Dolby films—the spaceship fly-overs, the wham-bang vehicle
    chases, the shoot-’em-up fight scenes—to the thrills offered by amusement
    parks; with Dolby technology, the interior of the cinema became for patrons
    “a kind of sonic playground,”
    
        [18]
    
    the sound designs in many cases “allow[ing] the filmgoer to ride
    the film rather than simply view it,”
    
        [19]
    
    its sonic attractions comparable to “mere fairground phenomena.”
    
        [20]
    



        
    Stereo



    In fact, it was the recorded noise of a real fairground
    phenomenon—the “Atom Smasher” roller coaster at the Rockaways’ Playland
    amusement park in Queens, New York City—that introduced listeners around
    the Western world to “surround sound.”



    This Is Cinerama
    , to be sure, was not the first film to lure audiences by offering them
    special content that was not just visual but also aural. In 1940 the Walt
    Disney Studios’ Fantasia famously pioneered the use of multiple
    soundtracks whose mostly musical content emanated from loudspeakers located
    at the rear as well as at the front of auditorium. But Fantasia
    with its complex “Fantasound” setup
    
        [21]
    
    played to a limited audience before lingering pressures from the Great
    Depression and new economic pressures from the war in Europe all but forced
Disney to close down the film’s planned “road show”; despite    Fantasia having been booked into almost ninety theaters, it was
    displayed in only thirteen,
    
        [22]
    
    and as early as April 1941—eight months before the United States entered
    World War II—the “Fantasound” amplification systems had been dismantled and
    rights to the film had been sold to RKO Radio Pictures. RKO reduced by a
third Fantasia’s running time and released it with a    monophonic soundtrack; in 1946 RKO re-issued Fantasia
    with its deleted segments for the most part restored,
    
        [23]
    
    but it was not until February 1956, after distribution of the film had been
signed over to Disney’s recently established Buena Vista company, that    Fantasia became available with a soundtrack in two-channel stereo.



By this time, the term “stereo” (from the Greek στερεός, stereós, meaning “full” or “solid”) had become something of a buzzword in
    the entertainment industry. At least since the 1850s the adjective had been
    applied to a visual device called the stereoscope that had its users
    viewing simultaneously a pair of photographs whose cameras had been located
    at least a few inches apart; the peepholes of the stereoscope’s viewing
    apparatus guaranteed that each of the user’s eyes saw only one of the
    photographs, and it was left to the user’s brain to combine the two similar
    but slightly different images into a single image that—comparable to what a
    person commonly perceives when looking with both eyes at anything, focusing
    alternately on what seems to be close and on what seems to be
    distant—offered at least the illusion of depth. Applied to sound,
    the prefix “stereo” had been regularly used since the early 1930s to
    describe experiments in “binaural” sound—which offered an illusion not of
    three-dimensional depth but of two-dimensional spatiality—of the sort that
    Alan Blumlein and other engineers had been conducting under the auspices of
    various British record companies.
    
        [24]
    
    But in a sonic context the prefix circulated for the most part in the
    scientific community, and likely it was not until December 1952 that it
    entered the vernacular, when veteran broadcaster Lowell Thomas, speaking in
the first-person plural, ended his introduction to    This Is Cinerama’s post-intermission demonstration with the
    portentous words: “We call it stereophonic sound.”



    ****



    Audiences at This Is Cinerama heard stereophonic sound aplenty,
    emanating from a quintet of speakers arrayed across the front of the house
    and a pair of speakers at the back. Only in a few of the film’s segments,
    however, did the “surround” nature of the sonic mix call attention to
    itself: when the silence of a cathedral’s interior is quietly broken by the
    voices of choristers processing from the rear;
    
        [25]
    
    when in the episode devoted to the water-skiing show the noise of a
    motorboat comes first from behind and then from the right and then moves
    from right to left; when, at the very start of the film, after Thomas’s
    perhaps deliberately pedantic twelve-minute lecture on the history of
    humankind’s relationship with imagery in general, the giant curved screen
    in effect “opens wide” to offer a full-color rider’s-eye (and -ear)
    encounter with the “Atom Smasher.”



    But even in its more conventional segments—some of them documentations of
    musical performances, some of them panoramic flyovers of natural wonders
    featuring suitably up-lifting accompanimental scores—the stereophonic sound
    of This Is Cinerama was enormously different to what most
    listeners of recorded audio (except laboratory-based engineers, and those
    who might have remembered attending the first run of Fantasia a
    dozen years earlier) had ever before heard.



    Like most of the early reviewers, the New York Times’s Bosley
    Crowther commented at length on the film’s visual features, which were “so
    overwhelming in sheer physical sweep and size” that audience members “sat
    back in spellbound wonder” as though they “were seeing motion pictures for
    the first time.” But he dealt as well with the film’s sound. “To heighten
    the immensity of the impact of the images projected from this screen,” he
    noted a few days after the premiere showing, “Cinerama is
    augmented by a system of multiple sound, which means that the accompanying
    sounds of the picture—the music, natural sounds and dialogue—are fired at
    the audience from outlets all around the theatre. This concentration of
    assault upon the eardrums, added to the saturation of the eye, inevitably
    produces sensations that are rousing, intoxicating—and unique.” Crowther
    wondered, as would many other reviewers, about the extent to which such
    effects could be successfully incorporated into a filmic narrative. But he
    granted that This Is Cinerama  is “frankly and exclusively
    ‘sensational,’ in the literal sense of that word.” Everything about this
    film, he wrote, “is clearly designed to smack the nerves.”
    
        [26]
    



    ****



    The palpable sensations offered by This Is Cinerama did not go
    unnoticed by an American film industry that throughout the prosperous and
    technology-focused 1950s struggled desperately to compete with television.
    Within just a year of Cinerama’s premiere audiences around the
    nation were treated to more than thirty films that, for better or worse,
    featured stereophonic soundtracks. Some of these, to be sure, were
    low-budget “B pictures” whose makers hoped to capitalize quickly not just
    on the novelty of stereophonic sound but also on the novelty of
    stereoscopic visual effects that by this time went by the moniker “3-D”
    
        [27]
    
    ; others of them “simply” featured stereophonic sound in combination with
    one form or another of Cinerama-inspired wide-screen imagery.
    
        [28]
    
    By the end of the decade films of the former sort had proved to be just the
    flash-in-the-pan efforts that they only ever were, but films of the latter
    sort—with large budgets and subject matter that arguably put them on the
    high end of the culture scale—triggered a wave of “blockbusters”
    
        [29]
    
    that held their own at the box office in large part because the public
    regarded their showings as “special events well worth the increased
    admission price that first-run exhibitors charged to see [them] on a big
    screen and to hear them in stereo sound.”
    
        [30]
    



    I remember very well how exciting it was to go, as an impressionable kid in
    the company of just my older brother and a cousin, to the “prestige”
    cinemas in downtown Milwaukee and see some of these films. And I remember
    at least something of hearing them. The angelic voices resonating from the
    rear speakers during the nativity scene near the start of Ben-Hur,
    and the several seconds of eerie wraparound wind noise that later marks the
    return home of the title character’s leprous mother and sister, are sonic
    niceties of which I was reminded only upon revisiting the film via my Dolby
5.1 system, but this same recent revisitation triggered genuine feelings of    déjà entendu, especially during the sea battle scene during which
    the percussion accents of Miklós Rózsa’s score mix three-dimensionally with
    the crashes and bangs of weaponry, and during the Judean chariot race that
    for almost nine minutes features nothing but rumbles and roars.
    
        [31]
    
When I popped a newly bought copy of    Journey to the Center of the Earth into the DVD player, the
    triggered sense was of an almost haptic sort;
    
        [32]
    
    how could anyone who once upon a time attended a showing of this film ever
    forget, I asked myself, how it felt—not emotionally but
    physically—when the professor chips off a rock sample and unwittingly lets
    loose a near-fatal flood, or when the members of the expedition make their
    way along a ledge in an underground canyon and are almost lifted off their
    feet by a powerful updraft?
    
        [33]
    



    In truth, the actual memories of these films that I have carried over the
    past sixty years have been vague, and they have had much less to do with
    the films’ sonic content than with their visual spectacles and their story
    lines. On the other hand, a sonic memory from back then that is not at all
    vague—one that remains so clear in my mind that I sometimes wonder if it
    has turned into a personal “myth” that grows in grandeur with each
    recollection—has to do with my experience of listening for the first time
    to stereo at home.



    ****



    This must have happened sometime in the second half of 1960. I suggest this
approximate date because I know that it was only in July of that year that    This Is Cinerama at long last arrived in my hometown,
    
        [34]
    
    and I am pretty sure that it was my father’s exposure to that film (in the
    company, I think, of me and several siblings) that inspired him to surprise
    the family by one day bringing home a relatively huge Magnavox console and
    remote speaker.
    
        [35]
    
    I also suggest this approximate date because I know for a fact (having
    checked the catalogues) that at least a few of the LPs included in the
    stereo system’s purchase package had only recently been issued. To my
    twelve-year-old ears the music contained on these LPs seemed all fine and
good; indeed, I thought that the recording of Tchaikovsky’s    1812 Overture, with all the cannons and bells, was pretty “cool.”
    
        [36]
    
But what really blew me away, much more than the windy scenes in    Ben-Hur and Journey to the Center of the Earth could ever
    do, was what I heard on the demonstration disc.



    There were no nerve-smacks here, just an array of sounds largely of a sort
    with which I was already quite familiar. Yet these sounds proved to be
    fascinating—and memorably so—to a degree I still find hard to fathom. By
    this time in my young life I had been often to the zoo, and to parades; the
    field where I and my friends regularly played was bordered by a railroad
    track; in our basement we had, and almost nightly used, a ping-pong table.
    I knew well the sounds of barking sea lions and marching bands and passing
    trains and table tennis. But never—until I heard them stereophonically
    rendered and coming from just a pair of loudspeakers set up in our living
    room—had I given these sounds more than a passing thought.
    
        [37]
    



    I did not wonder then but I certainly wonder now: Why is it that mechanical
    reproductions of certain sounds—at least for me, but I suspect for others
    as well—tend to be so much more compelling than their real-life
    equivalents? Why might a person be inclined to pay more attention to
    stereophonic recordings of certain sounds than to the actual sounds that
    such recordings represent? Why might someone be more “rapt” in his or her
    at-home listening to two-dimensional replications of sounds than when he or
she, outside the home, encounters the very same sounds and is    three-dimensionally “wrapped” in them?




        
    Differences



    At the risk of seeming tautological to the extreme, I will state here some
    of the obvious differences between “surround” sounds in real-life
    situations and their at-home equivalents. Of these, the most obvious,
    surely, has to do with the simple fact that sounds of the latter type are
    heard at home.



    For me or anyone else to experience in real life some of the recorded
    sounds I have just described might well be thrilling. But for us to be
    face-to-face with the real-life sounds of, say, an underground deluge or a
    sandstorm or a steel mill we would have to actually be in a
    flooding cavern, or a wind-swept desert, or a steel mill. In such
    circumstances we might well have on our minds numerous things other than
    how “interesting” our environment sounds (we might be concerned, for
    example, with the dangers of being drowned, or with how it feels,
    physically, to have the skin on our faces scratched by particles of blowing
    sand or to be fairly cooked by the heat of blast furnaces). Even if the
    real-life situations were relatively safe, we would still be thinking, I
    imagine, about such things as how we happened to be there and how much time
    we might be spending there. These thoughts would of course be part and
    parcel of our experience, and they would distract considerably from the act
    of “pure” listening. In marked contrast, hearing not long stretches of
    real-life sounds but just recorded bits of them in the comfort of our homes
    allows us to attend to the sounds with our ears alone. Upon first
    encountering such recorded bits we are of course likely to be put in mind
    of the real-life contexts in which such sounds might actually occur. But if
    the sounds themselves catch our fancy we have the option of forgetting
    altogether about their real-life contexts. If we so choose, we can fiddle
    with our devices’ “rewind” and “replay” buttons and just listen, again and
    again.



    Another obvious difference between real-life “surround sound” and its
    mechanical reproduction has to do with the fact that the latter, regardless
    of its sophistication, and regardless of its sonic content, is in essence a
    fiction.



    In Disney’s 1940 Fantasound setup, the relatively low-volume sounds that
    came from the rear speakers were indeed the actual sounds of the orchestra
    whose recorded performances issued primarily from the auditorium’s left-
    and right-hand speakers; in the 1952 This Is Cinerama, the
    “surround” sounds of the roller coaster, the motorboat, and the processing
    choir were indeed documentary recordings of the real thing, and even in the
    many stereo demonstration discs from later in the 1950s most of the sounds
    that purportedly represented sonic “realism so true to life you have to
    hear it to believe it” were, in fact, true to life.
    
        [38]
    
    Stereophonic sounds in narrative cinema, on the other hand, have almost
    always been artificial. The quiet chirps of crickets that lend such a
feeling of intimacy to the lovers’ late-night snuggle in Malick’s    Days of Heaven, like the barely audible snaps of dry twigs in the
    autumnal mountain scene near the start of Cimino’s The Deer Hunter
    and the faint buzzes of swamp insects heard so clearly near the end of
    Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, are no more “real” than are the roars of
the dinosaurs in Merian C. Cooper’s decidedly monophonic 1933 King Kong or Steven Spielberg’s spectacularly stereophonic 1993    Jurassic Park. Yet in all these films the sounds, stereophonic or
    not, have by means of careful editing been made to seem real, and
the audience accepts them as such. In a section of his    Audio-Vision book headed “Sound Truth and Sound Verisimilitude,”
    Michel Chion notes that audiences have long assessed “the truth” of
    cinematic sound not by how the sound relates to what they know from their
    “hypothetical lived experience” but by how it conforms to the “codes
    established by cinema itself, as well as by television and
    narrative-representational arts in general”;
    
        [39]
    
    exploring this same theme, film historian John Belton argues that one of
    the problems encountered by makers of the late-1950s “blockbusters”
    entailed an over-reliance on stereophonic sound as an element of the
    spectacles they sought to sell, the result being that “stereo sound became
    associated for audiences not so much with greater realism as with greater
    artifice.”
    
        [40]
    



    Still another obvious but often overlooked difference between real-life
    “surround sounds” and their recorded counterparts has to do with how these
    sounds are organized; whereas the former simply “come” together,
    paratactically or accidentally, the latter are almost always “put”
    together, deliberately, and thus it remains—whether their artifice is
    audible or not—that they are artifacts.



    When I step out onto my third-floor balcony and pay attention to the sounds
    of my urban environment, I have expectations of what I might hear but no
    control over what I actually do hear, and it is the unpredictable
    combination of the expected norm with the occasional surprise that makes
    this real-life three-dimensional sonic experience at least potentially
    interesting. Were I to make a narrative film that included a nocturnal
    scene in which someone for a moment or two stood on a balcony and did
    nothing but listen, my Dolby 5.1 soundtrack might well feature noises of
    the sort that I, in similar circumstances, regularly encounter: the squawks
    of nightbirds, for example, or the distant thrum of a passing helicopter,
    or the constant but usually quiet din of vehicles moving this way and that.
    But this soundtrack most probably would be something constructed, something
    designed—with care and craft—so that, for example, the squawks are heard
    only in those brief instants when the noise of the traffic has ebbed, or
    that the sound of the helicopter is heard only when the film’s tacit
    narrative suggests that the scene’s protagonist is thinking about
    something, say, police- or hospital-related. In real-life situations, the
    sounds of birds and helicopters and traffic would by definition be
    juxtaposed or superimposed; in re-creations of comparable situations, mixes
    of these very same sounds—perhaps merely for the sake of making them seem
    credible, but also perhaps for the sake of serving some narrative
    purpose—would surely be composed.
    
        [41]
    



    ****



    This essay has not dealt with “surround sound” compositions per se
    , that is, works of music intended by their creators to be heard in
    situations where the sounds come not from a conventional stage located in
    front of the listeners but, rather, from places more or less all around the
    listeners.



    The long history and rich repertoire of three-dimensional music in Western
    culture ranges from the aptly named antiphons of medieval chant to the
    sixteenth-century cori spezzati pieces designed for the echoey
    interior of St. Mark’s Cathedral in Venice, from the grandiose
    nineteenth-century operas and symphonic works that featured offstage brass
    ensembles to the insouciant musique d’ameublement with which Erik
Satie during World War I decorated Parisian theater lobbies, from the    Poème électronique of Edgard Varèse that coursed through more than
    350 loudspeakers inside the Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s
    Fair to the handful of recordings by Pink Floyd and other art-rock groups
    that tried to exploit the short-lived fad for “quadraphonic sound” in the
    early 1970s, from the 1959 String Quartet No. 2 of Elliott Carter that
    required its players to sit on the same platform but as far apart as
    possible to the 1995 Helikopter-Streichquartett of Karlheinz
    Stockhausen that had the four players perform from positions within
    airships that flew a choreographed pattern high above the listening space.



    Much of this music is available on commercial recordings, but mostly in
    two-channel stereo formats.
    
        [42]
    
    It would be puritanical priggery to declare that one misses the point
    entirely when employing “mere” two-channel stereo to listen to music along
    the lines of Thomas Tallis’s ca. 1570 Spem in alium (written for
    eight five-voice choirs and supposedly first performed not just from the
    cardinal points on the floor but also from the high-up balconies in the
    dining hall of the Earl of Arundel’s Nonsuch Palace in Surrey) or John
    Cage’s 1951–53 Williams Mix (created by aleatoric methods and
    consisting of snippets of recorded sounds contained on eight separate reels
    of monophonic tape). It is fair to say, however, that to hear such music
emerge from just a pair of loudspeakers is to miss at least    something of what the composers had in mind; such listening is not
    without value, but it is arguably akin to viewing the paintings of
    Rembrandt and Vermeer in black-and-white textbook reproductions, or taking
    in architectural wonders by means of photographs alone.



    The debate about the relative merits of hearing music performed “live” and
    hearing it via one form or another of stereophonic recording, in any case,
    is one that can be saved for another day. In this essay I have simply
    explored the aesthetic/experiential differences between listening to
    real-life “surround” sounds and listening to at-home replications of more
    or less those same sounds, and I have regularly raised the question as to
    why over the years at least some listeners—certainly including myself—seem
    to have been more intrigued by the latter than by the former.



    Again at the risk of seeming tautological, let me conclude by reminding
    readers that most examples of real-life “surround sound”—ranging from the
    perhaps awe-inspiring noise of a thunderstorm to the quotidian noise of
    traffic—are, by definition, ordinary. In contrast, “surround sound”
recordings, including recordings of traffic and thunderstorms, are quite    extraordinary, at least in comparison with what we normally hear
within the confines of our homes. Whereas real-life “surround sound”    exists in space, crafted equivalents are examples of what the
    announcer for one of the early stereo demonstration discs aptly called
    “sound sculptured in space.”
    
        [43]
    
    No matter how expert has been the sculpting, we cannot help but be aware,
    by virtue of the physical circumstances of the listening experience, that
    at-home “surround sound” results from human agency. Even the most
    natural-sounding examples, we know, are man-made, and perhaps that
    is why—almost rapaciously—they grab our attention.






    

    

   
        
            
                [1]
            
            Born in 1934 to a Hungarian family living in Rijeka (Croatia)—a
            city that at the time was known as Fiume, part of the Kingdom of
            Italy—and since 1969 a professor of psychology at the University of
            Chicago, Csíkszentmihályi first used the term “flow” in his
            
                Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: The Experience of Play in Work and
                Games
            
            (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1975). The widespread popularity of
            the term doubtless owes to its appearance as the one-word main
title of Csíkszentmihályi’s first mass-market book,            Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience (New York:
            Harper and Row, 1990). Capitalizing on the popularity not just of
            the term but of its underlying concept, in 2000 the publishers of
            the earlier book retitled it
            
                Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play
            
            .
        

    

    
        
            
                [2]
            
            Defenders of the cassette-based Walkman and its digital successors
            typically argue that the devices’ prime value lies in its allowing
            the “average person”—like the nursery rhyme’s “fine lady” from
            Banbury Cross who sported “rings on her fingers and bells on her
            toes”—to “have music wherever she (or he) goes.” But numerous
            critics, vociferous especially in the 1990s, have labeled the
            Walkman (and other players) as devices whose main purpose is to
            insulate their users from the world around them. For pioneering
            commentary on the Walkman, see Shuhei Hosokawa, “Considérations sur
            la musique mass-médiatisée,”
            
                International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music
            
12, no. 1 (1981): 21–50, and “The Walkman Effect,”            Popular Music 4 (1984): 165–80, partially derived from
Hosokawa’s Walkman no Shûjigaku (            The Rhetoric of Walkman) (Tokyo: Asahi Shuppan, 1981),
            which remains untranslated into English but is available in German
            as Der Walkman-Effect, trans. Birger Ollrogge (Berlin:
            Merve Verlag, 1987). For later commentary, see, for example, Iain
Chambers, “A Miniature History of the Walkman,”            New Formations 11 (1990): 1–4; Theodore Gracyk, “Listening
to Music: Performances and Recordings,”            Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55, no. 2 (1997):
            139–50; and Michael Bull, “The World According to Sound:
Investigating the World of Walkman Users,”            New Media & Society 3, no. 2 (2001): 179–97. For
extended overviews, see, for example, Paul du Gay et al., eds.,            Doing Cultural Studies: The Story of the Sony Walkman
(London: Sage Publications, 1997), and Andrew Williams,            Portable Music & Its Functions (New York: Peter Lang,
            2007).
        

    

    
        
            
                [3]
            
            Anyone who doubts the natural human capacity for determining the
            directionality of sound need only attend briefly to the environment
            with only one ear. This experiment will not succeed if a person
            merely holds a hand over an ear or uses an earplug, for such
            efforts will decrease but not entirely eliminate an ear’s in-take;
            for the experiment to work one needs to place a finger on the
            tragus (the bit of cartilage located at the front of the outer ear)
            and firmly press so that the cartilage in effect seals the
            ear canal. Just a few seconds of one-eared listening should be
            enough to convince participants that the perception of sonic
            directionality depends crucially on the ability to hear with not
            just one ear but two.
        

    

    
        
            
                [4]
            
            The Dolby Atmos system was demonstrated for the first time in 2012;
            its “breakthrough” film was Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 Gravity,
            which won Academy Awards for both “sound editing” and “sound
            mixing,” but the system is currently installed in fewer than 5,000
            cinemas worldwide. For details, see, for example, Benjamin Wright,
            “Atmos Now: Dolby Laboratories, Mixing Ideology and Hollywood Sound
            Production,” in
            
                Living Stereo: Histories and Cultures of Multichannel Sound
            
            , ed. Paul Théberge, Kyle Devine, and Tom Everrett (New York:
Bloomsbury, 2015), 227–46; Dong Liang, “Sound, Space, Gravity: A Kaleidoscopic Hearing (Part I),”            The New Soundtrack 6, no. 1 (2016): 1–15; and “Dolby
            Surpasses 4,000 Dolby Atmos Screens Worldwide,” Boxoffice,
            October 4, 2018. For a critical discussion of how Gravity’s dimensional
            sound, especially in its opening scenes, relates to the narrative,
            see Alison Walker, “Sonic Space and Echoes of the Flesh: Textual
and Phenomenal Readings of Gravity,”            Music, Sound, and the Moving Image 14, no. 2 (2020):
            119–39.
        

    

    
        
            
                [5]
            
            5.1 and 7.2 are not decimal fractions but indicators of an at-home
            audio system’s array of speakers. 5.1 indicates five “surround”
            speakers—three in the front and two at the rear—and a subwoofer to
            which low-frequency sounds are assigned; 7.2 indicates seven
            “surround” speakers—the five just mentioned plus an additional pair
            located on either side of the listening space—and two subwoofers.
        

    

    
        
            
                [6]
            
            The icons take the form of squares embellished with dots. A
            monophonic soundtrack is indicated by a single dot located at the
            midpoint of the square’s topmost side; a two-channel stereo
            soundtrack is indicated by a pair of dots on either end of the
            topmost side; Dolby 5.1 is indicated by three dots on the square’s
            topmost side and two in the lower corners, plus an additional dot
            (representing the subwoofer) in the square’s middle.
        

    

    
        
            
                [7]
            
            The results of my formalistic analyses appear in James Wierzbicki,
“Sound as Music in the Films of Terrence Malick,” in            The Cinema of Terrence Malick: Poetic Visions of America,
            ed. Hannah Patterson (London: Wallflower Press, 2003), 110–22.
        

    

    
        
            
                [8]
            
            Michel Chion, Audio-Vision: Sound on Screen, trans.
            Claudia Gorbman, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 25.
            Orig. L’Audio-Vision (Paris: Éditions Nathan, 1990). In a
            revised edition (Paris: Armand Colin, 2017), Chion changed the
            second of the three terms from “écoute sémantique” to “écoute
            codale,” and it appears as “codal listening” in Gorbman’s new
            translation (2019) for Columbia University Press. In both editions,
            Chion acknowledges that the concepts of different modes of
            listening, and especially the ideas of “semantic listening” and
            “reduced listening,” had earlier been explored by Pierre Schaeffer
            in his 1966 Traité des objets musicaux. Schaeffer’s book,
            translated by Christine North and John Dack, was published in 2017
as            Treatise on Musical Objects: An Essay across Disciplines
            (Oakland, CA: University of California Press).
        

    

    
        
            
                [9]
            
            James Wierzbicki, Terrence Malick: Sonic Style (New York:
            Routledge, 2019).
        

    

    
        
            
                [10]
            
            A transcription of the noises in the steel mill scene is included
            in my “Zvukovoy ryad kak muzyka: o novykh putyakh v izuchenii
            kinoiskusstva” [Hearing Sound as Music: On New Directions in Film
Studies], Nauchnyy vestnik Moskovskoy konservatorii [Journal of
            Moscow Conservatory] 3 (2013): 120–35.
        

    

    
        
            
                [11]
            
            Malick’s work by this time included not just the three already
mentioned films but also The New World (2005), The Tree of Life (2011), To the Wonder (2012),            Knight of Cups (2015), and Song to Song (2017).
            Malick released a ninth film, A Hidden Life, in 2019.
        

    

    
        
            
                [12]
            
Gianluca Sergi,            The Dolby Era: Film Sound in Contemporary Hollywood (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004), 3. Throughout his
            book Sergi suggests, although not always convincingly, that “the
            Dolby era … has its roots in the cultural and political movements
            of the 1960s” (3). He makes his strongest case, arguing for a
            linkage between “changes in cinema architecture” and “the rise of a
            ‘new’ audience” for film, in his final chapter (“The Politics of
            Sound”).
        

    

    
        
            
                [13]
            
            Paraphrasing work by Jay Beck, Mark Kerins reports that “less than
            three years after Star Wars premiered, the Dolby Stereo
            format had already been used on 85 feature films, and decoding
equipment had been installed in over 1,200 theaters.” Mark Kerins,            Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 32. The figures come
            from Jay Beck, “A Quiet Revolution: Changes in American Film Sound
            Practices, 1967–1979” (PhD diss., University of Iowa, 2003), 171.
        

    

    
        
            
                [14]
            
Charles Schreger, “The Second Coming of Sound,”            Film Comment, September/October 1978, 36.
        

    

    
        
            
                [15]
            
            Hudson Miller, quoted in Kerins, Beyond Dolby (Stereo),
            134. The comment from sound editor Hudson comes from an interview
            that Kerins conducted on 20 July 2004.
        

    

    
        
            
                [16]
            
            Paul Grainge, “Selling Spectacular Sound: Dolby and the Unheard
History of Technical Trademarks,” in            Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound, ed. Jay
            Beck and Tony Grajeda (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008),
            252–53.
        

    

    
        
            
                [17]
            
            Ioan Allen, quoted in Sergi, The Dolby Era, 102. As a
            sound engineer, Allen worked closely with Ray Dolby on the
            development of the “surround system”; throughout the 1970s he
            liaised significantly between the Dolby company and various film
            studios.
        

    

    
        
            
                [18]
            
            Gianluca Sergi, “The Dolby Era: Sound in Hollywood Cinema
            1970–1995” (PhD diss., Sheffield Hallam University, 2002), 125.
        

    

    
        
            
                [19]
            
            William Whittington, Sound Design & Science Fiction (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2007), 108. Emphasis added.
        

    

    
        
            
                [20]
            
            Michel Chion, “Quiet Revolution … and Rigid Stagnation,” trans. Ben
            Brewster, October 58 (1991), 79.
        

    

    
        
            
                [21]
            
            The workings of Fantasound are explained, in highly technical and
            richly illustrated detail, by its two principal designers—William
E. Garity and John N.A. Hawkins—in “Fantasound,”            Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 37, no.
            8 (1941): 127–46. Reader-friendly explanations of the system are
offered by Jesse Klapholz in “Fantasia: Innovations in Sound,”            Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 39, no. 1/2
            (1991): 66–70, and by Kristina M. Griffin in “Fantasound: A
            Retrospective of the Groundbreaking Sound System of Disney”
            (master’s thesis, University of Colorado at Denver, 2015).
        

    

    
        
            
                [22]
            
             Fantasia opened on November 13, 1940, at New York’s Broadway Theatre—not a
            cinema but a playhouse—and played there for forty-nine weeks. Its
            other venues, likewise playhouses whose relatively flexible
            schedules accommodated shutting down for at least a week so that
            Disney technicians could properly install the sound equipment, were
            in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Boston,
            Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Baltimore,
            and Washington, DC.
        

    

    
        
            
                [23]
            
            The cut and then restored segments had mostly to do with
            explanatory commentaries by music critic Deems Taylor, but they included as well Fantasia’s
            original opening segment, which featured a visually “abstract”
            interpretation of Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, BWV 565.
        

    

    
        
            
                [24]
            
An article from 1941, contemporaneous with the Walt Disney Studios’ Fantasia, indeed uses in its title the adjective “stereo            phonic” to describe what Blumlein had been working on; see
            Harvey Fletcher, “The Stereophonic Sound-Film System—General
Theory,”            Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers 37, no.
            10 (1941): 331–52. Most of the many patents filed during the period
            of Blumlein’s experiments with “binaural” sound, however, used the
            never popular adjective “stereosonic”; see, for example,
            the applications for the patents granted to Lloyd Espenschied
            (Sound Recording and Reproducing, US patent US1661793A, filed July
            8, 1920, and granted March 6, 1928), Julius Weinberger (Sound
            Reproduction, US1850701A, filed November 10, 1928, and granted
            March 22, 1932), John F. Dreyer Jr. (Sound Reproducing System,
            US1915926A, filed October 17, 1930, and granted June 27, 1933),
            George L. Beers (System for Producing Stereosonic Effects,
            US2098561A, filed February 9, 1934, and granted November 9, 1937),
            and Robert H. Dreisbach (System for Sound Reproducing Apparatus,
            US2110358A, filed June 6, 1936, and granted March 8, 1938). For a
            detailed narrative account of Blumlein’s work, see Robert Charles
            Alexander, The Inventor of Stereo: The Life and Works of Alan Dower
                Blumlein (Oxford: Focal Press, 1999).
        

    

    
        
            
                [25]
            
            Tom Gunning notes that, once the film is underway, only in this
            episode does This Is Cinerama refrain from use of
            Technicolor cinematography. “I imagine [that here] they wanted to
            direct the audience’s attention to the sound,” he writes; in this
            episode in particular, he suggests, “they wanted to drain the
            colour so you’d be more tuned to the sound.” Tom Gunning, “A
Slippery Topic: Colour as Metaphor, Intention or Attraction?,” in            Disorderly Order: Colours in Silent Film, ed. Daan Hertogs
            and Nico de Klerk, (Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands Filmmuseum,
            1996), 47.
        

    

    
        
            
                [26]
            
            Bosley Crowther, “Looking at Cinerama: An Awed and Quizzical
Inspection of a New Film Projection System,”            New York Times, 5 October 1952, X1.
        

    

    
        
            
                [27]
            
            The first film to use so-called “3-D,” or “three-dimensional,”
            imagery was House of Wax (1953), a horror film from Warner
            Bros. that also featured a soundtrack in four-track stereo; other
            films from 1953 that featured both 3-D imagery and one form or
another of stereophonic sound were Warner Bros.’ The Charge at Feather River, Universal’s            It Came from Outer Space and Wings of the Hawk;
Twentieth Century-Fox’s Inferno; RKO’s Second Chance and Devil’s Canyon; Allied Artists’The Maze; Scott-Brown Productions’ The Stranger Wore a Gun; Pine-Thomas Productions’ Those Redheads from Seattle; Sam Katzman Productions’            Fort Ti; and Parkland Pictures’ I, the Jury.
        

    

    
        
            
                [28]
            
            The early (i.e., 1953–54) round of wide-screen stereophonic films
included Universal’s Thunder Bay (1953); Columbia’s The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T. (1953); Paramount’s            Shane (1953) and The War of the Worlds (1953);
Twentieth Century-Fox’s The Robe (1953) and Demetrius and the Gladiators (1954); MGM’s Julius Caesar (1953), Mogambo (1953), and            Brigadoon (1954); Horizon Pictures’ Melba (1953);
            and Transcona Enterprises’ A Star Is Born (1954).
        

    

    
        
            
                [29]
            
            Employing not just stereophonic soundtracks but such new
            wide-screen formats as CinemaScope, Super Panavision, Todd-AO, and
            VistaVision, the “blockbusters” of the period included Cecil B.
            DeMille production company’s The Ten Commandments (1956);
Twentieth Century-Fox’s Carousel (1956) and            Journey to the Center of the Earth (1959); Michael Todd
            company’s Around the World in 80 Days (1956); Rodgers
& Hammerstein Productions’ Oklahoma! (1955) and            South Pacific (1958); MGM’s Ben-Hur (1959);
            Centurion Films’ The Big Fisherman (1959); Bryna
            Productions’ Spartacus (1960); Samuel Bronston
Productions’ El Cid (1961); and the Mirisch Corporation’s            West Side Story (1961).
        

    

    
        
            
                [30]
            
            John Belton, “Glorious Technicolor, Breathtaking CinemaScope, and
            Stereophonic Sound,” in Hollywood in the Age of Television, ed. Tino Balio (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 189.
        

    

    
        
            
                [31]
            
            Released in November 1959, William Wyler’s Ben-Hur featured six-channel stereophonic sound.
        

    

    
        
            
                [32]
            
            The term “haptic” (from the Greek ἁπτικός, haptikós,
            meaning “tactile”) is relatively new to the vocabulary of film
            studies. It appears nowhere in all the five editions (2000–2018) of
            Susan Hayward’s Cinema Studies: The Key Concepts (London:
            Routledge), but it is indeed listed, under “Haptic Visuality
(Embodied Spectatorship)”, in the 2012            A Dictionary of Film Studies, ed. Annette Kuhn and Guy
Westwell (Oxford: Oxford University Press). As defined in the            Dictionary, the word is meant not literally but only
            metaphorically; “haptic visuality,” write the entry’s authors,
            involves visual imagery whose “close engagement with surface detail
            and texture” gives viewers “a sense of physical touching
            or [of] being touched” (s.v.; emphasis added). For extended
            discussions of haptic film imagery in general, see, for example,
            Laura U. Marks, The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the
                Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) and Jennifer M. Barker,            The Tactile Eye: Touch and the Cinematic Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). For a discussion
of arguably haptic qualities in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2013 film            Gravity, see Walker, “Sonic Space and Echoes of the
            Flesh.”
        

    

    
        
            
                [33]
            
            Henry Levin’s Journey to the Center of the Earth, released
            in December 1959, featured a 4-track stereo soundtrack.
        

    

    
        
            
                [34]
            
            By the end of the decade, many film historians suggest, the novelty
            of Cinerama had worn thin, yet “road-show” installations
            involving Cinerama’s special audiovisual setup continued
            for years to come throughout the United States and in Europe.
            Various of the wide-screen stereo films mentioned in notes 28 and
            29 had already by this time been exhibited at such “prestige”
            Milwaukee venues as the Riverside and the Strand, but it was only
            on 28 July 1960 that This Is Cinerama itself debuted at
            the city’s Palace Cinema. For details on the showings at the Palace
            not just of This Is Cinerama but of all its sequels, see
            Michael Coate, “Remembering Cinerama (Part 33: Milwaukee),” Cinema
            Treasures, blog, June 18, 2009. For extended commentary on the short-lived novelty of not just            Cinerama-esque sound but also of “3-D” imagery, see
            Catherine Clepper, “The Rigged House: Gimmickry, Exhibition, and
            Embodied Spectatorship in Mid-Century American Movie-Going” (PhD
            diss., Northwestern University, 2016).
        

    

    
        
            
                [35]
            
            For commentary on how throughout the 1950s the idea of at-home
            stereo was marketed to a decidedly male demographic that possibly
            included my father, see Keir Keightley, “‘Turn It Down!’ She
Shrieked: Gender, Domestic Space, and High-Fidelity, 1948–59,”            Popular Music 15, no. 2 (1996): 149–77.
        

    

    
        
            
                [36]
            
            Featuring the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra under the direction of
            Antal Dorati, along with cannons from the United States Military
            Academy at West Point and the carillon at New York City’s Riverside
            Church, the Tchaikovsky album (Mercury Living Presence SR90054,
            1958) proved to be the decade’s best-selling classical LP. For an
            account of the album’s legacy, see John Schauer, “How Hi-Fi
Popularized Tchaikovsky’s ‘1812’ Overture (with Cannons),”            Ravinia Backstage Blog, 11 July 2017.

    

    
        
            
                [37]
            
            The demonstration disc that in 1960 my father brought home was
            Audio Fidelity’s 1959 Demonstration & Sound Effects (AFSD 5890). Numerous other record labels, and equipment
            manufacturers, at around the same time released demonstration discs
            of their own, many of which are readily available on YouTube; see,
for example, RCA’s            Sounds in Space: A Stereophonic Sound Demonstration Record (SP-33-13, 1958), London’s A Journey into Stereo Sound (PS
            100, 1958), Bel Canto’s Stereophonic Demonstration Record (SR 1000, 1958), Packard Bell’s Space Age Stereo (PB 1,
            1962), and Admiral’s Stereophonic Demonstration Record (PRS-218, 1964). Along with musical examples, these demonstration
            discs included a wide array of “sound effects”; to the best of my
            knowledge, however, only the Audio Fidelity disc featured the
            back-and-forth ping-pong clicks that in my memory remain so
            permanently fixed.
        

    

    
        
            
                [38]
            
            The quoted words are spoken by announcer Howard Viken on the
            Admiral disc mentioned in the previous footnote.
        

    

    
        
            
                [39]
            
            Chion, Audio-Vision, 107.
        

    

    
        
            
                [40]
            
John Belton, “1950s Magnetic Sound: The Frozen Revolution,” in            Sound Theory, Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York:
Routledge, 1992), 158. In Chapter 9 (“Spectator and Screen”) of his            Widescreen Cinema (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
            Press, 1992), Belton deals at length with the issue of the
            “perception of stereo as artifice” (207) and its effect on
            filmmaking in the 1960s.
        

    

    
        
            
                [41]
            
            A variation on this generalization applies even to the recorded
            sounds of documentary films and of television newscasts, the
            episodes of which typically are presented for public consumption
            only after several “takes” have been made, and often the decisions
            as to which “take” to use has very much to do with the recorded
            sounds’ communicability. For commentary on sounds in news footage
            and documentaries, see, for example, Richard J. Schaefer, “Editing
Strategies in Television News Documentaries,”            Journal of Communication 47, no. 4 (1997): 69–88; B.
            William Silcock, “Every Edit Tells a Story—Sound and the Visual
            Frame: A Comparative Analysis of Videotape Editor Routines in
            Global Newsrooms,” Visual Communication Quarterly 14, no.
            1 (2007): 3–15; and Karen Collins, “Calls of the Wild? ‘Fake’ Sound
            Effects and Cinematic Realism in BBC David Attenborough Nature
            Documentaries,” The Soundtrack 10, no. 1 (2017): 59–77.
        

    

    
        
            
                [42]
            
            There do exist commercial recordings of music that use the
            so-called SACD (Super Audio CD) format, and in 2005 the National
            Academy of Recording Arts and Science started to include in its
            annual Grammy Awards a prize for “Best Surround Sound Album.” But
            these recordings (available on such labels as Audite, Chandos,
            Coro, Mode, and Telarc) are still few in number, likely because, as
            Justin Colletti notes, “consumers are slow to adopt systems that
            require a [special] setup and are hampered by competing delivery
            standards.” “Music in 5.1 Dimensions: How the Best Surround Mixers
            Approach the Soundstage,” SonicScoop, January 21, 2014.
        

    

    
        
            
                [43]
            
            The words are spoken by the British actor Geoffrey Sumner near the
            end of the London label’s A Journey into Stereo Sound disc
            that is mentioned in note 37.
        

    




    



                

            

                

            

          
          
        
        
        
