Dolby changes its tune, and movie sound, with Atmos

John Shinal | Special for USA TODAY

SAN FRANCISCO — Q: When does an engineering culture that is historically run by consensus learn a new way to speed innovation?

A: When it has to.

Five years ago, cinema owners came to audio pioneer Dolby Laboratories and said they needed better sound systems to draw in more movie viewers.

After considering the idea of merely adding more speaker output channels — a strategy that had been successful for decades — Dolby's product-research division instead undertook an ambitious re-think of the company's technology platform.

The new research initiative focused instead on data input channels, eventually creating a product that lets movie and TV sound editors separate out as many as 128 different sounds and place them spatially anywhere in a theater — from the rustle of a blowing leaf in a corner to the thumping thwack-thwack-thwack of a helicopter rotor overhead.

"We wanted to convey the subtleties of sound, not just its bombastic qualities," says Dolby's Brett Crockett, a senior director of advanced technology research, who describes the new technology as the audio equivalent of high-definition television.

The technology, called Atmos, greatly increases the audio resolution of a dialogue soundtrack or music score — and is smart enough to be customized for individual rooms and speaker types.

On Friday, the movie Man of Steel became the 45th released picture to use the new technology in its first year, eclipsing the company's previous record for technology adoption-rate held by its Dolby Digital 5.1 product.

But turning over Dolby's old platform wasn't easy in an engineering culture that prizes collaboration, Crockett says.

"It was a massive effort, and we're very collaborative," he says of a company that includes many musicians, sound mixers and other audiophiles among its ranks. "Sometimes consensus can take a long time," he said.

It was the largest and longest research project the company had undertaken since the invention of Dolby Digital, and by last year the investment was beginning to take its toll on the company's bottom line.

During the two fiscal years ended in September, the company's operating expenses had shot up 31%, while revenue had remained essentially flat during those 24 months.

By late spring 2012, the Atmos team was under the gun as Pixar, the studio producing the movie Brave, got ready to release its animated feature, which was the first to use the new technology.

Under the Hollywood-imposed deadline, Dolby's Nicolas Tsingos and Jurgen Scharpf worked feverishly in a special screening room within the company's headquarters on the edge of San Francisco's Potrero Hill neighborhood.

Scharpf, a professional movie mixer who'd worked for the post-production company owned by Star Wars creator George Lucas, was trying out Atmos on a sound mixing board and providing feedback to Tsingos, the senior platform manager for Atmos.

"I'd tell Nicolas, 'This would be better than that,' and he sat right here coding it in," Scharpf recounts. "Some days we were doing three full revisions a day."

Tsingos revised the software algorithms, the technology was finished on time, and Brave was a smash hit — providing a big boost to the new platform.

But Tsingos wouldn't have had the authority to make those changes on the fly if Dolby hadn't used a new development strategy for Atmos, Crockett says.

The strategy decentralized decision-making by putting together a small core team drawn from across the company in design, engineering, testing and marketing.

The team had the authority to make important decisions without waiting for approval from higher-ups.

"Once the team took ownership, you could see the velocity (of product development) increase," says Crockett, who called the development of Atmos "one of the most rapid iterative processes" he's ever seen at the company in his 16 years there.

Last week, Tsingos and Scharpf were back in the same screening room where they'd finished the product a year ago, this time to demonstrate the technology for this columnist.

One of the movie scenes the Dolby engineers chose to show off Atmos was the one from Life of Pi in which the main character is in a boat with a tiger amid a school of flying fish.

As the fish crossed the screen from right to left, the whizzing noise they made had the qualities of the Doppler effect, which causes sound waves to bunch up as they approach the human ear and spread out quickly after they pass — much like a speeding bullet or freight train does.

In another video clip, this a promotional one for Atmos, the technology translated the barely perceptible flutter of a seed pod into an audio experience with some oomph, what Crockett describes as "increasing the impact without increasing the volume."

One of the breakthroughs of the technology is the addition of overhead speakers, which help the sound track smoothly across a room and more accurately represent the sound of flying objects.

"We want to move the sound of a helicopter off the (movie) screen and into the room," says Tsingos, who called the result "a 3-D sound field that can be custom-mixed for any theater."

The technology is so powerful that it can lead to states of cognitive dissonance, as when my human brain heard in the room the effects of wind through trees on the screen, yet couldn't feel the breeze I expected.

After that experience, I wasn't surprised to learn that Dolby had employed neurologists and others trained in psycho-acoustics in the development of Atmos.

"Sound has immediacy," Crockett says. "We experience it instinctively and jump away from certain sounds before our brain has even processed what the source is."

As 100 movie screens in the U.S. and 200 worldwide have already installed the technology into their sound systems, I expect a lot of movie viewers will be jumping out of their seats this summer.

John Shinal has covered tech and financial markets for 15 years at Bloomberg BusinessWeek, the San Francisco Chronicle, Dow Jones MarketWatch, Wall Street Journal Digital Network and others.