Magnified Music

If a conductor wishes to deafen his hearers with a supercolossal roll of the drums or double them up in agony with a high note from the violins, Bell Telephone Laboratories now offers him an opportunity by new "stereophonic" recordings, on motion-picture film, of "enhanced"' music. In stereophonic recording, sound is picked up by three microphones widely separated on the sound stage, to produce an illusion of tonal depth and space comparable to that of an actual performance. It may then be "enhanced" by a conductor, taking the stereophonic recording and fiddling with various mixers to bring out clearer tonal qualities and greater masses of sound on the ultimate sound track. He can thus achieve more striking interpretations than were possible for the real orchestra with its limited range of volume.

Last week at Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, Bell engineers gave an invitation performance of their stereophonic recordings of the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra, conducted and enhanced by silver-maned Leopold Stokowski. After listening to the thunderings and whisperings, Pianist Sergei Rachmaninoff was inclined to doubt the musical worth of the recordings. Said he: "Too much enhancing; too much Stokowski."

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