STAR TREK: Sounds of the Enterprise

Star Trek is one of those milestone projects in the annals of sound design, so much so one post can't do it justice so today, I'm just going to talk about the sounds of the Starship Enterprise.

 Straight off the bat, the first sounds you think of on the Enterprise is the famous, and much mocked interior door 'swoosh.' Created by playing around with a recording of a power tool.

Then we have the myriad of famous bleeps and bloops. Credited mainly to a trio of sound editors- Jack Finlay, Douglas Grindstaff and Joseph Sorokin- and remember these guys edited all of the sound, not just the snazzy effects- these effects almost defy explanations on how they were made. The answer is simple, manipulated recordings of real world sounds slowed down, sped up and echoed into infinity.
Occasionally sound creating devices such as tone generators may have been used but these guys did not work in a foley shop, nor did they have a studio full of crazy sound-creating gadgets. They did have access to whatever library sound effects everyone in the industry had access to and made use of nascent techniques available at the time. Spock's viewer makes clever use of tones played back at different speeds adn at different intervals. The main looping thumping sound appears to me to be a sound effect played backwards and then looped. It's great stuff.

The soundscape for the Enterprise Bridge was elaborate and rich. We had the general background sound, the sound of the view screen, viewers, alarms, and individual button presses. Ok, so that viewer bleeping so constantly would have driven you mad after five minutes if you were really there, but this is fantasy.

SIX MILLION DOLLAR MAN

So this is an awkward post. I like the Six Million Dollar man. Even now, I enjoy the cheese-filled crust of the show. It has one (actually two) iconic bits of sound design. The beep-beep-beep sound used to convey Steve Austin's bionic vision but the reason you're reading this post is because of the 'bionic man' sound used in the show to show Steve Austin utilizing the strength in his bionic right arm and both legs. If you don't know what sound I'm talking about...


A combination of a mechanical sound augmented with a lot of delay and feedback, the bionic sound is now an icon- only able to be used as a reference to this show (and of course its spin-off, The Bionic Woman). In the 70's, people perceptions of robots as mostly mechanical devices rather than electronic so the sound effects used sounded chunky as people would expect.
 For a short scene of Steve or Jaime Summers flexing their muscles, the sound words and works very well as a way to inform the audience the bionic implants are working but in scenes of extended bionic use, such as running fast (in slow-motion), the sound would often be played over and over again without really synchronising it to the on-screen action. This is the awkward bit. Watch any scene of his power being used for an extended period (such as the third video of Steve lifting a car or any scene of Steve running) and you'll see what I mean when i say it's actually a pretty good piece of sound design ruined by poor implementation.



 That said, it was used in hundreds of cartoons in the 70's and 80's, most notably by Hanna Barberra. It's so closely associated with this show (and of course its spin-off, The Bionic Woman) that most people will be surprised if they settle in to watch any episode from the Six Million Dollar Man's first season that the iconic sound is only heard once and that's made by another character.
 The Six Million Dollar Man and The Bionic Woman were two incredibly popular series from the mid-70's, which no doubt helped popularise the 'bionic' sound effect.
 That's why it's funny when it is heard in a Ben Stiller movie (Mystery Men, Zoolander, etc). It's 2'10" into this clip.

Pac-Man

Our first video game and it's a videogame where almost every single note of audio is iconic.

From the opening musical sting to the wakka-wakka sound of Pacman munching the dots to the deflating sound of Pacman being overwhelmed by a ghost called Clyde, Pacman's audio is burned on the brain of almost everyone. Very few people don't know these sounds, and of those that know the sounds, fewer still are unaware it's from something called Pac Man. Space Invaders and Asteroids may have had some simple and effective sound effects, but Pacman was the first game where everything about the game has become an icon. All arcade games of the time were abstract due to technical limitations but were generally based on some kind of reality. Pacman is based on nothing in real life, it's a complete abstract. Its soundtrack needed to be different.

 The game itself and the cultural phenomenon it briefly spawned (which publisher Namco still milks) aside, the sounds were (and still are) unique. The only way to use a sound from Pacman is to reference Pacman.
 Pacman is aurally a very busy-sounding game even though sounds don't overlapping due to the lack of polyphony. The only time there's any silence after you've started is that split second between Pac Man being overcome by a ghost and the deflating sound of Pac Man dieing. A little subtraction from a busy mix can go a long way (rather like the floating space mines from Attack of the Clones whose detonations are preceded by a second of silence.
Now, home consoles of the era were a lot less powerful than the custom boards powering arcade machines of the time and the most popular home system was also one of the weakest in terms of computing power. Pac Man was ported to the market leading Atari 2600 in a very short time and manufactured in such huge quantities that the many unsold piles of the cartridge were buried in a landfill. Its failure bother critically and commercially is considered to a contributing factor behind the Video Games industry crash of 1983. Here's a video of the 2600 port so you can see how this titles disappointed a generation of gamers who had little expectation of pixel-perfect ports


It's churlish to have expected an exact port at the time but it does show how important the audio experience was to Pac Man. Most of the other ports of Pac Man to the admittedly more powerful competitors to the 2600 were much closer to the original.
 The follow up, Ms Pac Man had a different set of sounds and while the game itself may have been better, it did not have the same sonic impact as the original. Other early arcade games had memorable sounds (Space Invaders, Donkey Kong, Berserk, etc) but none have had the lasting impact of Pac Man.

DOCTOR WHO: THE TARDIS

This is such as biggie that it really needs it's own post. The TARDIS take-off sound is one of the few sound effects that's now classified as music for copyright reasons. It's basically the sound of the bass strings of a piano scraped with a door key, slowed down, sped up, repeated echoed and fed back on itself until it became a high pitched whine heading off into infinity.

The TARDIS sound is an icon. It can't be used to convey any other event other than a particular type of time-machine materialising and dematerialising in a particular programme. If it was used for any other event, any viewer familiar with Doctor Who at any time will reject the sound. Like Tarzan, there's no way to repurpose the sound for any other use. The particular combination of bombastic bass notes and top end bleeps and whistling is also the sort of sound no one would have the guts to use for the first time these days. In short, it's a remarkable achievement in sound design.

Here is the first TARDIS dematerialisation from the very first episode in 1963 and was the few, if not only occasions where the full sound effect was heard.


The thud should be familiar to anyone who's ever bumped their legs into a piano whilst playing.
Throughout the 60's and early 70's, the series experimented with how the sound was presented. The sound would audible within the TARDIS on some occasions, not at all on others, variations made and eventually a dedicated landing sound (the take-off in reverse). By the mid 70's it had more or less stabilised to no sound audible inside the TARDIS and a specific take off and landing sound heard outside. The new series has shaken up that standard but as it's a new series for a new audience, it works best if you treat it as a separate entity in the same universe (for example: Classic Trek and TNG).


 It's actually pretty good consistency for a series that has racked up 32+ seasons. I'm one of those pedants who gets annoyed at the changing gun sounds in Star Wars and that's inside of 12 hours of movies.



Note: Doctor Who has always been very popular but has always brought out the inner nerd in many of us. When I started making little movies on videotape in the 80's with Star Wars figures, it was Star Wars figures wrapped in different coloured electrical tape to make Doctor Who characters. So it comes as no surprise to me in the YouTube era with Doctor Who once again popular with people of all ages that the internet is clogged with Doctor Who fan videos and 90% of them are someone's attempt at a TARDIS take-off. It's very hard to find an actual video of the TARDIS from the series.

TARZAN

Oh look, an iconic sound effect that doesn't come from science fiction. Well action films have also given us a fair few sound design gems over the years. Tarzan's yell is so unique that you cannot use it for anything other than referring to Tarzan.




The sound itself is, depending on which version you belief, either Johnny Weismuller himself or an edited version from multiple sources. Rather than just re-write wikipedia's article, go and read this yourself. It's a masterpiece of editing and compositing either way (the sound, not the Wiki article, that is).

The sound used for the call in the Weismuller versions of Tarzan was so perfect and beloved that it was a very brave Tarzan producer who didn't include its use. It must be a licensing nightmare but one that is justified by audience expectation. Other Tarzan movies have attempted their own version of a Tarzan call as described by Rice Burroughs in his books but this quickly became futile after the scream went viral in the days before YouTube and Reddit. Even now, years since any major Tarzan adaptation, everyone knows the Tarzan yell, even if they don't know what Tarzan is. The yell is now bigger than the property that spawned it. It would be as if people recognised the sound of a lightsaber but didn't know it was from Star Wars.


Edgar Rice Burrough's Tarzan the Ape Man was a popular property for much of the 20th Century back when South American jungle locations were considered exotic. Tourism and Karl Pilkington has cured the world of that so I can't see Tarzan coming back for anything other than a movie every now and then and an occasional cheaply-made syndicated series for kids. At each stage of pre-production, there would be serious discussions on how they handle the yell. Do they go for a new version, a cover (as in Disney's animated film) or the original and possible derision?

 But that yell...

HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY

The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy started off as a BBC Radio series in 1977 and one of Douglas Adams' stated goals was to have the series not sound like every other radio comedy of the previous 50 years. To that end, the BBC Radiophonic Workshop were drafted in, crafting a great number of classic sound effects for the radio series and later iterations on record and television.

 This is the sound of the Hitch-Hike's Guide itself being used. If my smartphone made this sound every time I looked up IMDB to see how old an actor was, I'd shoot myself but as a sound to denote when the guide itself was in use on a radio series it is an excellent piece of sound design. You can't mistake the sound of the guide for anything else. It has a clunky machinery feel that was in tune with how people saw computers in the 1970's (ie corporate mainframes with large reel-to-reel tapes whizzing around), but stands out even in an era where computers make little sound that user experience designers haven't deliberately specified. The sound is funny without saying "hey, I'm funny and amusing." But then, it was from an era were something that sounded somewhat like but not actually flatulence was funny. There's a lot of almost scatological but not really sounds in Hitch-Hiker's.


Marvin the Paranoid Android had that fantastic movement sound made of tape loops but the real genius was in the vocal treatment the character was given. You of course need Stephen Moore's fantastic vocal delivery accompanied by a harmonizer (an early hardware pitch-shifter) but we have an effect that conveys a manically depressed android yet allows the dialogue to be (mostly) intelligible. Alan Rickman's delivery in the film was great but I'll always have Stephen Moore's voice in my head.



Many moons ago, a script book of the first two radio series was released with each episode accompanied by production notes that occasionally went into how the sounds were made. A great deal of tape loops and flanging went on in the creation of some of these sounds. And splicing. Oh, did they splice. And an ARP Odyssey synth. After Adams' untimely death, the BBC adapted the 3rd, 4th and 5th books into radio plays but without the Radiophonic Workshop (which has been long gone). The sound design is fine but somehow missing that zing. You always appreciate things when people work harder to achieve them.

Though the technology used to create these sounds has moved on there are still some great bits of advice in the notes. For instance, if you are recording voice artistes who are meant to speaking over the top of a noisy event, e.g. in a club or a battle, give them music in their headphones.

WAR OF THE WORLDS (1953)

War of the Worlds (1953)
How many cool sounds originated from or were made popular by this movie? You have the various weapon charging and firing sounds plus the sounds made my the war machines. These sounds have been used in dozens of other places such as Star Trek's photon torpedo using one of the laser sounds (green beams fired from the wings of the war machines. Of course, if you want to use them in an actual production, they're all on the Hanna Barberra discs from Sound Ideas and the like.



The greatness of these sounds is that they defy reverse engineering, with the exception of the aforementioned laser sounds later repurposed in Star Trek's photon torpedo sound. I would hazard a guess it uses a similar source as the lasers in Star Wars, striking a high tension cable and swathing it in echo.



As mentioned many of the sounds were also used widely in cartoons and other shows and movies but also, somewhat self-defeatingly, in Nick Meyer's The Day After during the nuclear attack. As that movie scared the living shit out of me as a kid, I'm not linking to it but I'm sure you know where you can find it.