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.