Constant Sound

Given the amount of time we spend here on home theater sound, we thought it might be interesting to take a look back at the roots of the kind of high quality film and television surround sound we now take for granted. Today, it's far from unusual to be blown away by the realistic sound of a train horn or a starship exploding in a multiplex or via a DVD or Blu-Ray disc at home. It wasn't always so.

The fact of the matter is that, until George Lucas launched the "Star Wars" behemoth in 1977, stereo sound was something most people heard only on home and car audio systems and only very, very rarely in conjunction with visual material. While the film now known as "Episode IV - A New Hope" wasn't the first production released in Dolby Stereo, it was the first really successful film to feature the process which for the first time made stereo practical for most movie houses to employ. Even enormous hits with best selling soundtracks, such as "Jaws," "The Sting," and "The Exorcist," were available only in mono.

There were exceptions. If you saw it in a large, big city theater, you could hear the realistic sound of a railroad train horn in Sam Peckinpah's hugely controversial 1969 masterpiece, "The Wild Bunch." For the most part, however, multi-channel stereo sound in movies was reserved for special first run "Road Show" engagements. It was most often featured in lavish widescreen musicals like "West Side Story" or enormous costume spectacles such as "Ben-Hur" and "Spartacus."

Nevertheless, the roots of today's surrounds systems go back many years earlier. A habitual visionary, Walt Disney was the first to attempt to revolutionize movie theater sound, even while what we now call stereo was in its infancy. His 1940 attempt at combining classical music and groundbreaking animation for a mass audience, "Fantasia," was presented in an early version of multitrack stereo called "Fantasound" during its initial engagement at 13 big city movie palaces. The movie was a commercial disappointment and was mixed down for regular monophonic audio for most theaters.

By the 1950s, however, stereo was being taken seriously by record companies and competition from television was motivating filmmakers to experiment with lavish filmmaking formats such as 70mm, which was actually 65mm with 5mm left over for magnetic multi-channel stereo sound tracks. So it was that big city audiences, paying extra to see a brand new extravaganza in a high-end first run theater, enjoyed some pretty amazing sound, starting with such 1953 sensations as the 3-D "House of Wax," and the Cinemascope religious epic, "The Robe."
Experimentation with various multi-channel sound systems became common over the following decades, despite the fact that relatively few moviegoers would be able to experience it. When the film version of the Who's rock opera, "Tommy," directed by the late Ken Russell, came out in 1975, it was released initially in a five channel system promoted as "Quintaphonic," an attempt to one-up the quadrophonic (4 speaker) home sound systems which were briefly in vogue. The film was a hit, but the sound systems was too expensive and difficult for most theaters. Most filmgoers heard it in other formats, including mono and the newfangled Dolby sound system, which found a way to translate optical material into sound so that magnetic sound strips (actually a type of audio tape) were no longer necessary for film stereo.

Throughout the late 1970s and all through the 1980s, multichannel sound became more and more common and mixes became more and more ambitious. Movies started to have new credits like "sound designer" as the great Walter Murch created previously unheard of surround collages for pictures like "Apocalypse Now." With the advent of digital sound in the 1990s, audiences grew to expect high quality surround sound as part of the reason for their increasingly expensive movie ticket. Meanwhile, of course, home theater sound was also being developed, but you already know all about that, right?

When the America fears to regulate themselves, a better percentage of private dance institution teachers in London and Canada have adopted professional standards and also set up curriculums inside their practices. Through my personal experience working in Europe, I discovered the dance education in the area to be more consistent from studio to studio compared to America. They don't have the plethora of bad quality dance studios which I discovered throughout the America. This acceptance of professional standards as well as proven curriculum has increased the bar of the typical small-town dance studio above that presently practiced in America.

On the other hand, there is another side. Europe doesn't have as much exceptional, innovative dance education organizations as the America. It appears standardization operates the risk of stifling creativity. Dance in america remains the leading innovator for that world. The concept of national standards around dance threatens creativity, all of our cowboy/cowgirl spirit, as well as the qualified, yet non-degreed, instructors. All these factors cause a resistance to accept standardization in america.

We require national standard and we are also stubborn to accept all of them...what now?

While the American spirit is not likely to move to national standards designed by a governing board, you will find a group of people who already undoubtedly sets the standards for dance schools: the parents. Parents drive the level of good quality inside our market-driven community. Even so, it is not easy for a parent, uneducated in the field of dancing, to produce an informed choice.

However, many parents observe the dance teacher's position on par with the baseball trainer or even the cheerleading trainer. The majority of trainers for youth baseball, football, as well as cheerleading are not professionals or even professionally educated. And also fewer have been educated in the way to educate. This can be acceptable for youth sports. What they're failing to take into serious consideration would be the fact the demands of dance training on the body, during even the youngest level, can cause wonderful growth or even great harm. The seemingly harmless choice of looking for a dance for your child can be harmful for their young bodies. It will take time and energy to research which dance schools meet higher standards.