Fantasound

Fantasound was an early stereophonic sound process developed by William E. Garity for the Walt Disney studio in 1940 for the motion picture Fantasia, making Fantasia the first commercial film with multichannel sound. It led to the development of what is today known as surround sound.

The idea for Fantasound came from Walt Disney himself, who was displeased with the quality of conventional optical motion picture sound recording and playback systems. Walt had been present on the sound stage as Leopold Stokowski and the Philadelphia Orchestra had been recording the music score for Walt's ambitious 1940 animated film Fantasia, and he had fallen in love with the rich sound he'd heard on the stage. He asked his sound engineering team, led by William E. Garity, to come up with a better solution than the standard sound-on-film processes then available, all of which Walt felt sounded top tiny and undynamic for the experirence he wanted Fantasia to be.

Garity and his team worked painstakingly for many months before finally completing the process that they dubbed Fantasound. In the Fantasound process, different microphones are used to record different parts of a soundscape (in this case, a performing orchestra) to seperate tracks. These tracks were then mixed into a final four-track stereophonic sound strip that was maried to a three-strip Technicolor release print. The resulting film was run in a theatre that was equipped with (depending upon available resources) anywhere between 30 and 80 individual speakers, set up around the perimeter of the theatre's ceiling. Fantasound also featured a wider dynamic range than conventional sound film, allowing for a fuller, stronger sound. The Walt Disney studio purchased eight Model 200B oscillators (at $71.50 each) from Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard for use in testing Fantasound, thus becoming one of the first customers of the Hewlett-Packard Corporation.

Walt had also wanted other groups of engineers at the studio to rig up a widescreen film process (which would have had an aspect ration of about 2.20:1, the same aspect ratio as Walt's later widescreen film, Sleeping Beauty (1959)), and also a perfuming system that would spray different scents int othe theatre at the appropriate times--during the Nutcracker Suite segment, for example. These plans were never completely carried out.

When Fantasia and Fantasound finally debuted in New York City on 13 November 1940, Fantasound was hailed as an technical marvel. However, the US Army was placing increasing demands on all available metals and electronic equipment during this period, as it prepared for possible entry into World War II. Therefore, the the Walt Disney studio found it very hard to get the neccessary materials to rig a proper Fantasound presentation of the film at each venue. In January 1941, Disney allowed RKO to assume distribution of Fantasia; the first thing RKO did was to have the film remixed into monophonic sound.

See also:

Fantasia (main article)