The history
A century from pianists in the dark to helicopters flying over your head in Dolby Atmos.
Films began with no soundtrack at all: musicians played in the hall. In the late 1920s pictures learned to talk, and film-makers had to invent ways to record voices, add footsteps, build impossible sounds and play them back in big rooms. Tape, Dolby, computers and digital cinema each changed the craft, and India, the world's busiest film industry, invented playback singing and won an Oscar for its sound.
1927
Feature film with synchronised singing and speech
The Jazz Singer, USA
1929
Foley performed live to picture
Jack Foley, Universal, USA
1931
Indian sound film
Alam Ara, Ardeshir Irani, India
1935
Hindi film with playback singing
Dhoop Chhaon, Nitin Bose, India
1940
Commercial film released in stereo
Fantasia (Fantasound), USA
1979
Screen credit for a “Sound Designer”
Walter Murch, Apocalypse Now, USA
1992
Film released in Dolby Digital
Batman Returns, USA
2012
Film shown in Dolby Atmos
Brave, USA
1895 – 1925
Films have no soundtrack, so pianists, organists and orchestras play in the hall, and inventors try to chain a phonograph to a projector.
1895
from 1895
From the first public film shows in the 1890s, films were usually accompanied by live music: a pianist, an organ or a small orchestra. Some halls added a person making sound effects, and in India and Japan live narrators explained the story.
Why it mattered. Audiences already expected sound with pictures, long before films could carry it.
1900
At the 1900 Paris Exposition the Phono-Cinéma-Théâtre showed short films of famous actors and singers with sound from phonograph cylinders played alongside. Keeping the two in step was hard, and the sound was too quiet for a big hall.
Why it mattered. It showed the dream of talking pictures and its two big problems: sync and loudness.
1923
15 April 1923
Lee de Forest showed his Phonofilm system, which recorded sound as a strip of light and dark on the film itself, right beside the pictures. Because sound and picture shared one strip, they could not drift apart.
Why it mattered. Sound-on-film became the way nearly every film carried sound for 70 years.
1926 – 1939
Sound on discs and then on the film itself arrives. Studios invent Foley, India makes its first talkies and playback singing is born.
1926
August 1926
Don Juan opened with a recorded orchestral score and sound effects played from large discs, one 16-inch record for each reel of film, turning at 33⅓ rpm. If a projectionist started a disc late, the whole reel was out of sync.
Why it mattered. It proved audiences would pay for recorded film sound.
1927
6 October 1927
The Jazz Singer was mostly a silent film with a Vitaphone score, but in a few scenes Al Jolson sings and speaks in sync. The line "You ain't heard nothin' yet" thrilled audiences, and the film broke box-office records.
Why it mattered. It is traditionally credited with launching the talkie revolution.
1929
Universal turned its part-talkie musical Show Boat into a sound film, and Jack Foley and a small team performed footsteps and other sounds live while watching the film projected. His way of working spread to every studio.
Why it mattered. Artists who add everyday sounds in sync with the picture are still called Foley artists.
1931
14 March 1931
Alam Ara opened at the Majestic Cinema in Bombay. It was recorded with the Tanar single-system recorder, and because trains ran past the studio it was shot mostly between about 1 and 4 in the morning. Its seven songs made music part of Indian cinema from the start.
Why it mattered. It began India's sound era, and no print of it survives.
1935
For the Bengali film Bhagya Chakra and its Hindi version Dhoop Chhaon, the songs were recorded first and actors mimed to them on set. Director Nitin Bose had the idea, with music director Raichand Boral and sound recordist Mukul Bose.
Why it mattered. Playback singing became the heart of Indian film music, a form of the same lip sync ADR uses.
1940 – 1974
Fantasia tries surround sound, magnetic tape and portable recorders change location sound, and widescreen films get stereo tracks.
1940
13 November 1940
Fantasia premiered with Fantasound, the first commercial film released in stereo, with speakers around the hall and music that could move between them. It needed so much equipment that only a handful of theatres could play it.
Why it mattered. It was the first try at surround sound, and it gave mixing the pan pot for moving sounds.
1948
1940s
The German Magnetophon tape recorder, first shown in 1935 and greatly improved by high-frequency bias in the early 1940s, was brought to the USA after 1945. Ampex built its own machines by 1948, and studios soon recorded and edited film sound on magnetic tape and film.
Why it mattered. Tape could be cut, copied and re-recorded without losing quality, which made complex sound editing possible.
1951
Stefan Kudelski's Nagra tape recorders were small, tough and ran on batteries. Later models with crystal sync could keep step with a camera without a cable, and from the 1960s to the 1990s they were the standard for recording sound on location.
Why it mattered. They freed production sound from the studio.
1953
September 1953
CinemaScope films such as The Robe carried four magnetic sound tracks on the print: left, centre and right behind the screen, plus a surround channel for effects.
Why it mattered. Speakers behind the screen and effects around the hall became the cinema layout.
1965
Ray Dolby founded Dolby Laboratories and built his A-type noise reduction for recording studios. It boosted quiet sounds before recording and lowered them again on playback, pushing tape hiss far down.
Why it mattered. Cleaner tracks let film sound get richer and louder without drowning in noise.
1975 – 1989
Noise reduction and matrix stereo reach ordinary cinemas, and a new job appears: the sound designer who builds a whole world of sound.
1975
15 August 1975
Sholay was released in 70 mm with stereophonic sound, shot on 35 mm and blown up for the big prints. It is widely called India's first 70 mm stereo film, though the 1967 film Around the World was released that way earlier.
Why it mattered. It showed Indian audiences what big, spread-out cinema sound could do.
1977
25 May 1977
Dolby Stereo squeezed four channels (left, centre, right and surround) into the space of one old optical track. First used in 1976, it spread fast after Star Wars showed off its sound in 1977, and many cinemas installed stereo for the first time.
Why it mattered. Stereo and surround became normal in ordinary cinemas, not just a few showcase halls.
1977
For Star Wars, Ben Burtt recorded real things and layered them. The lightsaber hum came from an idling film projector and the buzz of a broken TV set. He won a special Academy Award for the film's alien, creature and robot voices.
Why it mattered. It showed that recorded, layered and pitched sounds could make impossible things feel real.
1979
Apocalypse Now was the first film to credit anyone as Sound Designer: Walter Murch, who is widely credited with coining the title. Its 70 mm release used three screen channels, a low-frequency channel and split surrounds, the layout now called 5.1.
Why it mattered. Sound became a creative craft with its own leader, and 5.1 became the standard layout.
1983
May 1983
THX was launched with Return of the Jedi. It is not a sound format but a quality standard: a cinema that passes its tests plays a soundtrack the way the mixers heard it.
Why it mattered. It made the room itself part of the sound chain.
1989
1989–1991
Digidesign's Sound Tools (1989), and then Pro Tools (1991), let editors record, cut and mix sound on a computer screen, with any cut undoable. Within a decade most film sound was edited this way.
Why it mattered. Layering hundreds of tracks became quick and cheap.
1990 – today
Sound is edited on computers, delivered as digital files and placed in 3D with Dolby Atmos, and an Indian sound mixer wins an Oscar.
1992
Batman Returns was the first film released with Dolby Digital: 5.1 channels of compressed digital sound printed as blocks between the sprocket holes of the film. DTS (Jurassic Park, 1993) played its sound from a CD kept in step by timecode on the print.
Why it mattered. Clean, discrete 5.1 sound became the cinema standard of the 1990s.
1998
Recommendation ITU-R BT.1359 set out how far sound and picture may drift. Viewers begin to notice when sound is about 45 ms early or 125 ms late, and find it unacceptable beyond about 90 ms early or 185 ms late.
Why it mattered. It gave engineers a clear target for keeping lips and words together.
2005
20 July 2005
The DCI specification defined the Digital Cinema Package. Its audio is uncompressed: 24-bit, 48 or 96 kHz, up to 16 channels in one package with the pictures and subtitles.
Why it mattered. Film prints gave way to hard drives, and the soundtrack lost the noise and wear of film.
2009
22 February 2009
Resul Pookutty, a sound engineer from Kerala who trained at the Film and Television Institute of India in Pune, won the Academy Award for Best Sound Mixing for Slumdog Millionaire, shared with Ian Tapp and Richard Pryke.
Why it mattered. It put Indian film sound engineers on the world stage.
2010
August 2010
EBU R 128 told broadcasters to set programmes by measured loudness, −23 LUFS, instead of by their loudest peaks. Streaming services adopted similar targets, such as Netflix's −27 LKFS measured on dialogue.
Why it mattered. It ended the loud-advert problem and gave mixers room for real dynamics.
2012
June 2012
Dolby Atmos was first installed for the premiere of Brave. It adds ceiling speakers and treats sounds as objects with a 3D position, up to 128 tracks and 64 speaker feeds. The cinema's processor decides which speakers play each one.
Why it mattered. Mixers could place a sound anywhere in the room, including overhead.
By the numbers
From a single track to 128 in 85 years. Counts are the separate audio tracks each landmark format carried to the cinema.
Did you know?
Jack Foley reportedly walked more than 5,000 miles on the Foley stage making footsteps.
Alam Ara (1931) was shot mostly between 1 and 4 in the morning, because trains ran past the studio.
Star Wars' lightsaber hum began as an idling film projector plus the buzz of a broken TV set.
In a big cinema, a seat 30 m from the screen hears the actors about 87 ms after it sees their lips move.
A cinema screen is full of holes about 1.2 mm wide, so the speakers behind it can be heard.
The people
1891 – 1967 · Sound effects artist · USA
Performed footsteps and props live to picture at Universal; the craft carries his name.
1886 – 1969 · Director and producer · India
Made Alam Ara, India's first sound film, shooting at night to escape train noise.
1897 – 1986 · Director and cinematographer · India
Came up with playback singing for Bhagya Chakra and Dhoop Chhaon in 1935.
1929 – 2013 · Engineer · Poland and Switzerland
Built the Nagra portable recorders used on film sets for decades.
1933 – 2013 · Engineer and founder · USA
Invented Dolby noise reduction and founded the company behind Dolby Stereo and Atmos.
1943 – · Sound designer and film editor · USA
First person credited as a film's Sound Designer, on Apocalypse Now.
1948 – · Sound designer · USA
Made the sounds of Star Wars from layered recordings of real things.
1971 – · Sound designer and mixer · India
Won the Oscar for Best Sound Mixing for Slumdog Millionaire.
Where it happened
Sources
Dates marked “c.” are approximate, and historians sometimes disagree about who was first. If you spot a mistake, tell us.
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