In 1956 The Philips Electronic Company commissioned Le Corbusier to design and build a pavilion for the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Rather than build a conventional exhibition stall, the architect promised to construct:
“an Electronic Poem and a vessel containing the poem; [where] light, color image, rhythm and sound join together in an organic synthesis.”
Composer and architect Iannis Xenakis assisted Le Corbusier in the design of the structure. He also created a unique musique concrète tape piece titled Concret PH (1958) to be played inside the pavilion. This two and half minute minature consisted of burning charcoal sounds subjected to various sonic transformations and overdubs to create dense granular textures. These layers of sounds were projected via the pavilion’s 400 loudspeakers, acting as a transitional music to help guide visitors into the performance space. For the main presentation, Edgard Varèse’s eight minute electronic composition Poème électronique (1958) was diffused and spatially synchronised with an array of projected video and light displays. The completed pavilion was one of the first electronic-spatial environments to combine architecture, film, light and music into a total experience made to function in time and space. Its unique sound diffusion system prefigured later designs such as Francois Bayle’s 80 loudspeaker system The Acousmonium.
Around the time of the World’s Fair in Brussels, abstract filmmaker Jordan Belson and musican Henry Jacobs were busy in San Francisco organising a series of innovative audiovisual concerts called Vortex Concerts. These events took place at the Morrison Planetarium and utilised a large number of projectors and loudspeakers to playback and manipulate various sounds and images in space. In 1963, experimental filmmaker Stan Vanderbeek began building his own hemispherical theatre, the Movie Drome in New York, where he would organise live collage performances of images, video and multi-channel sound. Experimenting beyond mere video playback, these multi-sensorial performance events influenced the development of the psychedelic light shows of the 1960s. Today they are recognised as precursors to what is now considered Expanded Cinema - moving image and sound beyond the conventions of cinema spectatorship.
Hollywood was increasingly interested in the potential for spatialised sound in the cinema. In 1978 Dolby introduced a split surround system (stereo) for the screening of Superman, while a newly conceived Dolby Stereo 70mm six track system was designed a year later for the cinematic screening of Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now.
Philips Pavilion, World’s Fair 1958 • Movie Drome performance, circa 1963, Stan Vanderbeek
The use of multiple loudspeaker technology to project sound in space has been integral to the development and public presentation of electronic and tape-based music throughout the 20th century. The playback and manipulation of pre-recorded sounds in both concert and installation settings emerged out of the innovations in magnetic tape as well as multi-channel loudspeaker technology. These contributed to the development of an electroacoustic art form concerned with exploring “the traits of the sound itself, independent of its cause and of its meaning.”
In both public presentation and performance - inside both the cinema, the concert hall and beyond - film sound and contemporary music deploy a similar array of electroacoustic technologies to project and diffuse sound across multiple loudspeakers.