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.

Definitions and History

What makes a sound iconic? What makes anything iconic? I would argue you can't make a sound iconic, it becomes one organically over time and is recognised as such. Sometimes an iconic sound becomes a source of humour, like the 'Bionic' sound effect from the Six Million Dollar Man or the "wilhelm" scream. Some are so identified with one particular use you can't use it for any other application. The Bionic sound was also used extensively in cartoons, but try using the Tarzan yell for anything other than a man swinging on a vine and see how far you get.

 As a sound designer, I often find that I am disappointed with a lot of modern sound design in that sound designers try too hard to go for spectacle or exaggerated realism. They spent a lot of time processing the sounds with compressors, aural exciters and spacial effects that they end up making very impressive, but ultimately bland and forgettable sounds. Or even worse, just dump any impact sound through a sub-woofer. It's often a treat when someone uses a flanging effect these days. How often do you go to movies these days and remember a cool sound effect? Even big budget videogames, which in many respects had the most scope for creative effects, have started to feature sound design that is utterly polished by more or less forgettable.

There are certain milestones the sound design from movies, TV and games. I would argue that the vast majority of new and iconic sounds has come from science fiction or fantasy sources but I'd like to define in this post some of the movies, TV and games that have made their sound effects and sound design part of our culture.

Cool-sounding sound effects have been with us for a long time. When radio was the dominant medium, full of dramas and comedies, a sound effects man would be providing foley effects off to the side of the stage. It was with the advent of talkie movies, both features and shorts where the sound could be edited and manipulated with relative precision, that things really took off.

 A lot of iconic sounds eventuated from the likes of Three Stooges and Looney Tunes shorts, often created using similar methods to those in radio. As recording equipment improved, particularly with the introduction of tape recorders in the late 1940's, we saw more sounds created through manipulation of real world sounds. So we had a great spurt of new sounds from the 40's and 50's but things did appear to stagnate in the 60's with the same sounds appearing over and over. Was it because a heavily unionized industry of Hollywood technicians had closed the doors to new blood? Star Trek on television aside, there weren't too many creative sounds coming out of the US industry.

 The UK in the late 1950's had seen the establishment of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop which was to provide BBC radio and television productions with music and special sounds that couldn't be obtained from other sources. Mainly concerned with music, the 1960's did provide an outlet for creative sound effects at the Radiophonic Workshop with a new science-fiction series Doctor Who. The Radiophonic Workshop created a great number of sounds for that series (and others) that will be covered in future posts.

 The 1970's continued the overall creative stagnation in movie sound design. How many times did we hear the same thunderclaps, the same explosion and gunshot sounds, the same wobbly telephone. Walter Murch moved sound design along with THX 1138, and gave the field a name at last but it was Ben Burtt's work on the first Star Wars that showed you didn't need to rely on the same dozen sound effects on every programme. Cartoons provided a great deal of scope for creating new sounds even if they didn't always have the time to create whole new libraries. The odd gem escaped such as the famous sound of the Transformers changing or proton packs from Ghostbusters. As more Japanese cartoons were being translated into English, we were exposed to a whole new series of sound effects created by Japanese sound editors.
  And videogames happened. Although sounds were mainly generated by a fairly weak chips in arcade machines, we still have some of the most iconic sounds of the 80's coming from games. In fact despite the proliferation of science-fiction TV in the early 90's I am still hard pressed to recall too many sounds apart from ST: TNG. Videogame systems were getting better sound chips more memories and PC games were starting to use samples rather than FM synthesis to generate sounds.With the 90's move in games to playback sounds rather than generating them, PC and console games became an exciting new frontier where sound design could flourish.

Influences

Hi there,

I've been a sound guy for most of my life. While I've delved into other career areas like music, film-making writing (and 'real' jobs), I've always been a sound guy.

Like many of my generation (born in the early 70's), I learned, or more accurately was forced by my parents into learning, a musical instrument as a child. I ended up taking organ lessons for several years since we had a really, awful late 70's Kawaii organ at home and someone needed to be able to play the thing.

Here is the closest picture I could find. It's not exactly the model but it's close enough. It played really weedy sounds with no expression other than a vibrato toggle through a transistor amp and had a basic built-in rhythm machine. It also came with a stack of sheet music labelled "The Kawaii Way."

 Both of the teachers who gave me organ lessons (or at least took money to babysit me for an hour each week) had truly impressive organs with three manuals, extensive expression and sound options (for the time) out of the wazoo and both were able to play the theme to Star Wars really impressively, including laser sounds.

 I, in no, way learned to play the organ after four years of lessons. Nor did I learn to play the violin after 18 months of lessons at school.

 In 1980, my Dad returned from a trip to Japan bearing some goodies that, little did he know (and I suspect would have been horrified by the fact at the time) had an enormous influence on my eventual career. One was a silent Sankyo Super 8mm movie camera and the other other was a pair of Game and Watch machines (Ball and Vermin, if I recall correctly). I sucked at the games but enjoyed them enough to collect a few handheld games over the next few years, which were probably far better play value than the money I used to churn into arcade machines whenever the opportunity allowed. My brother was the one who got into film-making with the camera more though I tagged along. 

 My brother is a very influential figure in my life so even though our interests diverged in later years, our shared upbringing shaped our lives and careers. He's older by 4 1/2 years so he took the lead in the film-making. When we were given our first computer (an Atari 400), I played games on it and he taught himself some BASIC and become interested in using the computer for art and animation. I didn't really latch on to anything other than games on the computer until we had an Amiga 500 a few years later (which was funny because I didn't everything but play games on that machine).

 

Back to the early 80's and in 1983, we acquired a portable Panasonic VHS video recorder and a Video Camera. This was a few years before camcorders took over. It was big and bulky and you had to make sure you didn't trip over the cable linking the camera to the recorder. You couldn't  superimpose images from another video source or do stop motion animation (as you could on the Super 8 film camera). But being videotape, it had a very important feature that our 8mm set-up didn't have. An Audio Dub button.

When I moved into high school, my weekends were spent making movies with this system. Occasionally with my friends, but mainly with re-purposed Star Wars figures (and whatever figures at the correct scale that you could get before Masters of the Universe up-sized action figures). At some point, I wanted to start adding sound effects and that's when I purchased this vinyl album in 1984

Well that and the fact I had become a Doctor Who fan (i.e. nerd) and I looked at anything Doctor Who-related. But this particular purchase ended up being useful and I soon looked to ways to integrate sounds from this disc into my movies. I learned that this album was number 19 in the BBC Sound Effects library. I smell a collection.

 In the 80's, you could go and buy sound effects albums to use in plays and home movies. You still can now but in the record stores where I lived, the easiest and most comprehensive series of FX discs available to ordinary consumers were the BBC Sound Effects library.

 I started with the Science-Fiction based sounds originally but as I branched out into more live action stuff, I needed a wider variety of effects. I did occasionally get one or two non-BBC discs but with few exceptions was disappointed by them. I did have a "Doctored for Super-Sound" disc that had some great military sounds on it.

 Between 1984 and 1988, I had collected the majority of the library, even occasionally double dipping and getting some on cassette. I learned you got better quality by connecting a record player directly to the cassette recorder's audio input (back when audio input and output sockets and recording volume controls were common. DIN pin FTW) and indeed, connected the cassette players output into the VCR and using the microphone input on the cassette player to mix in dialogue. I eventually added a small radio shack mixer so that I could mix multiple tape decks at the same time. I used to also put a lot of effort int the video side but the sound work was the thing that eventually lead me into a career. A need trick was getting double speed sound effects in a high-speed dubbing two-deck unit by keeping the recording side deck open and holding down a toggle so that you fooled the deck into thinking it was recording.

That's not to say these sounds are the best sounds you could use at the the time. They were decent, they were familiar is you watched a lot of BBC-made programmes like The Goodies, Doctor Who, Blake's 7 and even some non-BBC series such as Danger Mouse. The Doctor Who sound effects album was used quite extensively on the original Transformers cartoon.

Stereo was still not ubiquitous for music even by the late seventies and so some of these albums were almost demo-discs for people's up-scale Hi-fi systems. BBC Records started to present some of these albums as almost sequences so the likes of "More Death and Horror" were little horror sketches than individual sounds. This made them less useful in the long run but occasionally you'd find something worth using.

Yes, it has the Liberator on it since it featured sounds from Blake's 7, Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy (radio series) and some early 80's Doctor Who episodes.

Most of the SF- oriented sounds in this series of discs were produced by the BBC Radiophonic Workshop but most of the others created by sound editors working on programmes. You couldn't buy sound effects from Star Wars or Hanna Barberra cartoons and it would be a few years before there was a disc of sounds from Classic Star Trek.

I used to watch movies and TV like other kids, but I started noticing the sounds more and more. I started noticing that on some American TV shows, every time someone opened a car door, it was the same sound or even funnier, the same explosion sound repeated over and over (See posts on Battlestar Galactica). We still have sound editors who use the same sounds over and over. Oh boy, If had a dollar for everytime someone uses the 'squeaky door' sound effect.

 

My interest in sounds morphed into an interest in music and for a few years I was away from film-making and sounds and just working on music. I did take on a sound engineering course in the early 90's, which gave me a good grounding as I moved into music work.

 When multi-track recorders at home meant either Tracker software on the Amiga (Where I wrote my first professional commission for a video game) or a 4-track cassette recorder from Fostex or Tascam.

I had a Tascam 424 which I used to sync up to a Kawai Q-80 hardware sequencer for music. The way it used to sync up was by generating a tone called FSK (Frequency Shift Key). You had to sacrifice one of the four tracks to record the sync track (which was an awful sound similar to the tone a fax machine makes over the phone line) but what this meant was that you could play the 424 and when the recorded tone kicked in, the Q80 would start the song so your MIDI instruments would start playing in time (hopefully) with your three recorded audio tracks on the tape.You'd always have to start the song from the beginning, though you could 'drop in' if you were dextrous or had a foot-pedal.

In terms of sound effects, it also had a variable playback speed which with I used a great deal in my early sound work to take sounds recorded on tape and manipulate them before mastering onto either a cassette, or later on, minidisc. Later on I started working FX using a computer, initially in Animator Sound Lab and then Sound Forge, which I still use to this day.  

Now, onto the Classic Sound FX...