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Stereo sound was first
transmitted
by
telephone as early as 1881, at the Paris Electrical Exhibition in
that year - see
United States Early Radio History
- but there seems to be no
evidence for stereo
recordings
from the acoustic era.
Duke Ellington and
his Orchestra made some accidental stereo recordings (
"
Mood
Indigo, Hot and Bothered, Creole Love Call
"
and
"
East St
Louis Toodle-o, Lot o' Fingers, Black and Tan Fantasy
"
-
it is not clear which was recorded first), on 3
February 1932 for RCA-Victor. It was standard practice at that time to record using more than one microphone and disc cutter,
allowing for backups in case
something happened to the original. Although the records are fairly
rare, a collector had both versions and noticed that, while they
appeared to be the same performance, the sound mix was different on
each (although the microphones were close together). When the two recordings were synchronized, it became
acceptable stereo.
The resulting recordings are commercially available on disc 6 of the 24 CD set
The Duke Ellington Centennial Edition
.
Several stereophonic test recordings by Bell Laboratories, using two microphones
connected to two styluses cutting two separate grooves on the same
wax disc, were made with Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia
Orchestra at Philadelphia’s Academy of Music in March 1932. The
first, made on 12 March 1932, of Scriabin’s
Poeme du feu Op. 60
, is the earliest surviving stereo recording that was
heard as such at the time. [
Copeland
, p24;
Stokowski
] The two tracks recorded on this date are as follows:
A
,
B
.
Quadraphonic sound (4.0 stereo):
Although multi-channel sound
had been experimented with both for
audio and in movies since at least the 1930s, it wasn't until 1969
that technology and the audio industry were ready to commercialize it.
At the Audio Engineering Society meeting in 1969 Vanguard records demonstrated discrete
four-channel sound on a four-channel reel to reel deck. The first home quad recordings on open reel
tape were released in 1970. [
"Quad"
Bob
] According to
CD-4guy
, a seller on eBay, Vanguard's Quad demo tape numbered
VSS-1 was the "First tape issued by Vanguard, perhaps the first tape
that started Quad rolling, way back in 1969!" This discrete
4-channel quadraphonic factory pre-recorded 7.5 ips open reel tape
was a compilation of the following selections: Handel:
Jephtha
(Sinfonia); Berlioz:
Requiem
, Op. 5, Tuba Mirum; Mahler:
Symphony No. 3
, Fifth Movement; Mahler:
Symphony No. 3
,
Sixth Movement; Joan Baez, "Love is Just a Four Letter Word";
Buffy Sainte-Marie, "Poppies"; and Jean-Jacques Perrey, "Gypsy in
Rio".
Discrete reproduction is the only real quadraphonic
system. As its name suggests, with discrete formats the original
four audio channels are passed through a four-channel transmission
medium, presented to a four-channel reproduction system, and fed
to four speakers. This is defined as a 4-4-4 system.
Surround sound:
The first documented use of surround sound was in 1940, for the
Disney studio's animated film
Fantasia
.
Its
multichannel audio application was called Fantasound, and comprised
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 Karlheinz Stockhausen experimented
with and produced ground-breaking electronic compositions such as
Gesang der Junglinge
(1955-6, originally in five-channel sound) and
Kontakte
(1958-60), the latter using fully
discrete and rotating quadraphonic sounds generated with industrial
electronic equipment in Herbert Eimert's studio at the
Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR).
Aurophonic sound:
Aurophonic sound attempts to recreate the true three-dimensionality
of the recording space along all three spatial axes (most surround
sound systems don't include height channels).
On 20 September 2002, Dolby
premiered a master of the movie
We Were Soldiers
which featured
a Sonic Whole Overhead Sound soundtrack, developed by Randall
Wallace. This mix included a new
ceiling-mounted height channel.
Aurophonie
currently lists six aurophonic systems, though one
(Imax) is not fully aurophonic, as it has a single mono height
channel. Three are proprietary Aurophonic systems of different
degrees of complexity, one is Dolby Digital Plus, the fifth being
Hamasaki 22.2.
Binaural sound:
The recording of
binaural sound
replicates the human listening experience directly, with microphones
placed at left and right ears of a dummy head. Though giving the
most accurate directionality, its drawback is that optimum playback requires
the use of headphones. Possibly the first true binaural recording
(as opposed to earlier recordings which were described by this term,
but actually used what is now described as stereophony) was
The
Binaural Demonstration Record
put out by
Stereo Review
in
1970. In the studio music recordings on Side Two (ZD-BN-1B) it used
a home-made sculpted head known as the Blue Max; while on Side One
(ZD-BN-1A), a selection of live field recordings, small capacitor
microphones were taped directly onto the recording technician's
head. The Side One recordings include the voices of men, women and
children in a variety of urban contexts, along with a selection of
sounds selected to display the binaural effect to advantage. [album
sleeve and insert, 1970]
Wave-field synthesis:
Wave field
synthesis (WFS) is a spatial audio rendering technique,
characterised by the creation of virtual acoustic environments. It
produces artificial wave fronts synthesised by a large number of
individually driven speakers. Such wave fronts seem to originate
from a virtual or notional source. Unlike traditional stereo, the
localization of virtual sources in WFS does not depend on or change
with the listener's position.
Early development of WFS began in 1988 at the
University of Delft. Further work was carried out in the context of
the CARROUSO project, promoted by the European Union (January 2001
to June 2003). In Europe, ten institutes were included in this
research. The IOSONO WFS system was developed by the Fraunhofer
Institute for Digital Media Technology (IDMT), at the technical
University of Ilmenau. IOSONO technology includes an UPMIX! engine
allowing up to 64 audio sources to be converted into object-based
components, which can then be redistributed into 3D space and
rendered into any speaker configuration (from 5 to 500 speakers),
using a
Spatial Audio Processor
®
.
IOSONO has its headquarters at the KinderMedienZentrum in Erfurt,
Germany, where it has its main 3D sound showroom. [
IOSONO
]
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