Beyond Dolby (Stereo): Cinema in the Digital Sound Age

Introduction

1 Audiences around the world listen to, as well as look at, a movie; sound technology impacts on the way films are made and received as much as image technology; the soundtrack is an area of creativity as fertile and exciting as any in filmmaking, yet the majority of scholars and critics have by and large remained impervious to all things sound for nearly a century. Gianluca Sergi in the dolby era The title of this book can be read as either Beyond Dolby or Beyond Dolby Stereo. This first might seem misleading. The film industry has certainly not moved “beyond” Dolby; the company remains a major player in cinema sound, and today any feature film print, DVD, or highdefinition television broadcast includes a Dolby-encoded soundtrack. Indeed, Dolby’s legacy would be difficult to overstate. The company pioneered a host of noise reduction techniques adopted across all areas of sound recording and playback; created Dolby Stereo, the dominant sound system in the 1980s; launched Dolby Digital, the first successful digital surround sound format to hit the market; and since then has remained at the forefront of film sound by developing more advanced formats like Dolby Surround EX and Dolby TrueHD. With all these successes to its credit, and a conscious effort by Dolby Laboratories to market not just its technologies but the “Dolby” brand itself,1 today “Dolby” is often seen as synonymous with “highIntroduction 2 · Beyond Dolby (stereo) quality cinema sound.” But this association grossly oversimplifies the current state of sound technology in the film industry. Dolby Stereo was introduced in the 1970s and was adopted as the exhibition standard after its highly touted use in blockbuster films like Star Wars (1977) and Superman (1978). Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s, Dolby Stereo and Dolby SR (an enhanced version of Dolby’s original system) enjoyed massive success; like the monophonic systems they had replaced, though, these formats too were eventually supplanted. In the early 1990s, the first digital surround sound (DSS) systems appeared , offering a full “5.1 channels” of sound in comparison to the 4 of Dolby Stereo (the “.1” referring to a low-frequencies-only channel). The systems were a hit, and by 1995 most studios had adopted an alldigital release policy.2 Today Dolby Stereo is rarely heard in American theaters, making Beyond Dolby (Stereo) seem an appropriate title for a work on digital sound-era cinema. The simpler title Beyond Dolby has its merits as well, though. In what limited academic work exists on contemporary cinema sound or on film sound technologies, scholars often even describe modern film sound as “Dolby sound” and assume—apparently not recognizing that sound technology has shifted under their feet—that today’s soundtracks rely on the same rules as their Dolby Stereo–based forerunners. In particular, “Dolby sound” is often used interchangeably with “surround sound,” suggesting that Dolby Stereo is a suitable stand-in for all surround sound systems. The truth is that in key ways Dolby Stereo actually has more in common with the monophonic systems it replaced than it does with the digital surround systems that replaced it. Unfortunately, the conflation of “Dolby” with “surround” has kept film scholarship from addressing this latter shift from one multi-channel technology to another. The goal of the present work is to remedy that oversight, demonstrating that digital surround sound has had crucial implications for production practices, cinematic aesthetics, and film theory—read as Beyond Dolby, this work’s title is intended not to minimize the significance of Dolby or its technologies but to acknowledge that digital surround has made the cinema of today something quite different from its Dolby Stereo–era counterpart. In short, Beyond Dolby is a conceptual call to arms: for the field of cinema studies to accurately investigate and comprehend contemporary cinema, it must Introduction · 3 move its understanding of film sound beyond Dolby and into the digital surround age. Surround Sound in Cinema Scholarship For years now, any new works dealing with film sound have been obligated to begin, like the quotation that opens this work, by lamenting film studies’ history of marginalizing the topic. Thankfully this no longer seems necessary, not only because this complaint has been repeated so often but also because current scholarship is increasingly working to address it. Indeed, the editors of the 2008 collection of sound-oriented essays Lowering the Boom write of sound studies that...