Robert B. Ingebretsen, Date of Birth, Date of Death
TweetRobert B. Ingebretsen
American software engineer
Date of Birth: 
About Robert B. Ingebretsen
- Robert B.
- Ingebretsen (30 March 1948 – 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 in the early 1970s, Ingebretsen assisted Dr.
- Thomas G.
- Stockham in the development of Stockham's restoration technique for sound and images.
- This work led to RCA's Caruso-A Legendary Performer that applied Stockham's restoration techniques to acoustic recordings of opera great Enrico Caruso. Ingebretsen worked with Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull in 1972 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 Stockham and Ingebretsen received a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences 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.
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