After the stock market crash of 1929 and the onslaught of the Great Depression, little technical development occurred in the early thirties.

In 1933, the King Kong was released by RKO and made film sound history.  Murray Spivak, who did the sound design for the movie, was the first person to manipulate sound in a creative way.  Spivak used the sound of a lion's roar slowed down one octave mixed with the sound at unity pitch.

In 1933, Leopold Stokowski's became involvement in research with Bell Telephone Lab's early "Auditory Perspective" experiments on stereophonic sound. Bell's most famous demonstration came when the Philadelphia Orchestra, conducted by Stokowski, was transmitted over three telephone lines to an astonished audience in Washington's Constitutional Hall.

In 1935, Alan Blumlein invented the first stereo variable area soundtrack. Earlier in the decade, Blumlein was an inventor at the then EMI Central Research Laboratories, where he experimented with stereo sound recording and invented an apparatus for binaural recording, as well as designing several pieces of equipment of equipment, including a stereo microphone. Blumlein understood the complex way that the ears detect the direction from which a sound comes. He derived a technique to record and recreate the necessary features in the sound field through two independent channels cut onto a gramophone record. Blumlein believed that for realism, the sound image associated with a "talking picture" should follow the moving image.

In 1938, Hollywood studios decided on an equalization curve to have theaters and studios monitor in a way that sounded similar.  This curve was based on research by the Research Council of the Academy for Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which became known as the "Academy Curve".

 Created by Jonathan Kay, Kimber Ghent, Brian Chumney, and Erik Lutkins

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