Dolby is best known for inventing the acoustic technologies such as surround sound and the noise reduction system known as Dolby NR. He also had a hand in the development of the first video tape recorder.
He also founded Dolby Laboratories in the mid-1960s, which operates in 20 countries and licenses its sound technologies to consumer electronics manufacturers.
The papers were donated to Stanford on what would have been Dolby’s 90th birthday – the inventor died in 2013 – by his widow Dagmar Dolby.
"Ray was a tinkerer in every sense of the word," said Dolby, his widow and president of the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Family Fund.
"The addition of Ray's papers in the Silicon Valley Archives offers scholars a rich corpus of primary source material spanning the early years of sound recording inventions and history," said Michael A. Keller, the Ida M. Green University Librarian at Stanford. "Moreover, this wonderful treasure trove of material offers a glimpse into the person behind the technology that changed the way we experience movies and recordings."
Although Dolby received a degree in electrical engineering at Stanford, his passion was music and he taught himself the clarinet and equipped his home office and lab with a basket of hand instruments which he often used to test for transient sounds when perfecting various technological inventions.
His deep love of music led Dolby to use his scientific training to transform the sound of entertainment.
When Dolby Laboratories was founded, movies and television only had one channel of sound and music producers were limited in the types of audio tracks they could use. Surround sound and other Dolby-related technologies changed that providing an immersive experience for cinema.