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...