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.