The Soundscape of the Cinema Theatre

Abstract

This article explores the history of the cinema auditorium’s acoustics and its role in the construction of dominant models of cinematic listening from the 1930s through the present. Focusing on how contemplation was achieved and noise was reduced via the development of acoustical engineering and its later application to the cinema context, it argues that these acoustical treatments and designs worked to cultivate a dominant form of listening that favoured aesthetic absorption. Analysing the more creative and prominent methods of acoustical design that were active in cinema theatres from the rise of amplified sound in film through the emergence of THX, it also traces models of aural absorption that were encouraged by these technologies. Drawing upon evidence from art history and the history of previous public entertainments that then appear powerfully in cinema, it argues that the acoustical engineering of the cinema auditorium has always worked to encourage absorption through the reduction of noise and the de-emphasis of the surrounding social context of cinema. It ends with an analysis of how certain sounds–specifically, those of the spectator’s body and breath–emerge in accounts of the moviegoing experience and dispel the carefully cultivated myth of perfect absorption.