I donno about a
surround soundtrack, but I was just reading an interview (on Jake Malooley's
Expanding Dan Substack) with Rob Fraboni, chief engineer at Village Recorders in the early 70s and producer of
The Last Waltz soundtrack. Listen to this:
"Marty [Scorcese] said to me, “Look, I want to try something. Everything that you see on screen, I want the sound to match it. If there’s an extreme close-up on a vocalist, I want that voice to be unnaturally loud. If there’s a shot from behind the stage, looking out towards the audience, I want the hall to get really loud. And when it comes off of that edit, I want the hall to go away.” In other words, he wanted the sound to match the picture as the camera panned across the stage. I had to dream up all these ways of doing things that had never been done before. I was doing all this inventive stuff to the point where, if you take the original mix of The Last Waltz and turn the picture off, it sounds like I was on acid. The mix is all over the place—but it’s integrated into the movie in the most incredible way, and it creates a certain experience."