BOOK DATA: Eric Dienstfrey, Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology. Oakland: University of California Press, 2024. $85.00 cloth; $29.95 paper; $29.95 e-book. 312 pages.
The history of multidimensional sound in American cinema is the story of how a media technology became ubiquitous by marginalizing its own use. So goes Eric Dienstfrey’s main argument in Making Stereo Fit: The History of a Disquieting Film Technology. Though ambitions to expand film soundtracks beyond mono (monaural; i.e., only one audio channel) have accompanied cinema for most of its history, it was only through the development of the aesthetic principle Dienstfrey calls monocentrism that multichannel designs finally gained staying power.
Monocentrism is a “set of stylistic practices” that assign the most significant sounds, especially dialogue, to a central audio channel and reserve a wider stereo field for background sounds or momentary flourishes (8). Dienstfrey analogizes it to...
University of California Press