Robert B. Ingebretsen

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Robert B. Ingebretsen (c. 1949–2 March 2003) was a pioneer in the development of digital sound.

As a teenager in the 1960s, Ingebretsen built robots and primitive computers that could talk. As a University of Utah graduate student, Ingebretsen worked with Thomas Stockham on his restoration technique for sound and images (Stockham 1975).

A graduate computer science student at Utah in the early 1970s, Ingebretsen studied under Stockham, an expert in sound enhancement asked in 1973 to scrutinize President Nixon’s secret White House tapes. Ingebretsen, Stockham and their fellow scholars — including Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar (maker of the Toy Story films) were part of a 1970s Utah renaissance in computer science. Ingebretsen worked with Catmull in 1974 to produce one of the first digital films, a 20-second portrait of a human hand.

After graduation in 1975, Ingebretsen joined Stockham at Soundstream Inc., a Utah company where Ingebretsen wrote the software for the first practical digital audio editing system. Soundstream briefly operated an editing studio at a Paramount Pictures studio lot in Los Angeles. Ingebretsen commuted from Utah to Los Angeles, where he supervised the new digital recording for the 1982 re-release of Disney’s Fantasia.

Soundstream dissolved in 1985 and Ingebretsen spent the next 15 years in near anonymity in Salt Lake City, founding a series of small high-tech companies. In 1999 he and Stockham received an Academy Award for Scientific and Engineering Achievement for their pioneering work in digital audio editing.

Ingebretsen also helped pioneer satellite communications technology. In recent years, he worked for a Centerville-based startup that develops software for hand-held computers.

On 2 March 2003 Ingebretsen died of heart failure at the age of 54 at his Salt Lake City home.