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.