*VHS inserted into player*
[Intro Music]
Whether it's through an elephant roar mixed with tires on wet pavement
or the rumble of an air-conditioning unit,
Star Wars has continued to build on a landscape of sound
that's been ingrained into our cultural consciousness for the last 40 years.
With film, the goal of a traditional audio department is to reinterpret the visual environment
into a complementary aural environment,
giving realistic contextual sound to the images on screen.
But what happens when none of those sounds exist?
When there's no source to draw from,
how do you convey the sound of light?
Or speed in a vacuum?
Well, that's the job of a sound designer.
This sound designer in fact, Ben Burtt.
The creator of the majority of the sound effects in the Star Wars library which houses
over 5000 unique sounds and continues to grow with each new film.
The term sound designer didn't really come into the film-making vernacular until Burtt's work in 1977.
Before then, film sound could be broken up into two different categories:
the production mixer, which is this guy here in the pink booty shorts,
whose job entails capturing onset recordings of dialogue and background elements;
and then there's the sound editors, who fabricate different sonic effects in studio
or make creative enhancements to existing sound.
That's the tradition of the division of labor in feature film
and it has been since the 'Talkies' of the 1920s.
Ben Burtt: "Since I was an exception to that
traditional division of labor I needed to describe myself in some term,
so I began to use the term, 'sound designer,'
which essentially meant that, I although I emphasize my creative work in sound effects,
my job was to coordinate all that you heard in the final sound soundtrack of the film."
And only about 15% of the final mix in the first Star Wars is originally recorded audio.
The rest was added in post with ADR and foley.
Darth Vader: "But yes..."
*transition*
Darth Vader: "...now I am the master."
Ben Kenobi: "Only a master of evil, Darth."
*lightsaber noises*
*transition*
*hitting noises*
The sound gives those visuals credibility
and can take something that seemed relatively awkward during production
*hitting noises*
and transform it into something epic.
The sound and the score allow those moments to have weight,
but some sequences rely on the sound alone to hold that emotion.
A good chunk of the lightsaber duels are played without score,
letting the rhythm of the sound design dictate the edit
and create a cinematic atmosphere.
And when the score resumes, the sound has to play against the music and the dialogue seamlessly.
A fault in any of those three elements could ruin the entire mix.
Vader's wheezing for example could have very easily become a major distraction,
but instead of sounding like an asthma attack, they were able to turn a very unnatural sound
into a natural characteristic of his voice
by matching the low frequencies of James Earl Jones' delivery
with breaths through a Scuba tank regulator.
And that simple effect gives more context to that character than any expository dialogue could.
Some characters like R2D2 were developed completely through sound.
R2 has no dialogue or real physical action,
yet he's able to have an entire spectrum of motion just through 'beeps' and 'boops.'
C-3PO has limb articulation, he's humanoid, and he has a human voice.
Even BB-8 to a degree has different physical cues that you can attribute emotion to,
like the lowering of the head or the thumbs up.
R2 is just a trash can on wheels, but we always know what he's feeling.
And Burtt was able to achieve that by combining his own voice mimicking the sounds of an infant
with a synthesizer, creating a performance that kept our R2's language very abstract and robotic
while maintaining a human element you can empathize with.
That's what grounds these effects.
Every sound has its roots in organic recordings, rather than artificial ones.
And that brings a familiarity to the unknown.
The visual world of Star Wars is rusted and gritty and lived in,
so every belt gear and exhaust used in the foley helps sell that authenticity.
It was essential that each sound be unique,
making a clear association with the visual it originates from,
especially in chaotic sequences like the attack run on the second Death Star.
The Millennium Falcon, Star Destroyers, X-Wings,
Y-Wings, A-Wings, TIE Fighters and explosions
are all distinct and clear enough
that you can locate them in the space of the frame even with your eyes closed.
And that was important given the fact that most cinema audiences
in the late 70's and early 80's would only experience the film through
a single channel monaural sound system.
A six-track seventy millimeter version as well as a Dolby Stereo version
of the mix were also on exhibition in the film's original release,
but out of the seventeen hundred and fifty theaters it screened in,
only about forty of them were equipped to handle anything other than the mono track.
This was the 70's after all and technology was pretty slow to roll-out.
But the incredibly dynamic mono mix of that first film was able to fool many audiences into thinking they were
experiencing a much more advanced sound system than they actually were.
And if we deconstruct some of these effects we can see how that illusion is possible.
The lightsaber for example is essentially just the hum of
two harmonizing simplex projectors' interlocked motors in idle,
along with the buzz of the transmission signal from the cathode ray tube television set,
and the combination of those two sounds creates this,
which is the foundation of every lightsaber blade.
And when played in the steady state condition to a speaker and recorded by a moving microphone,
it creates a Doppler pitch effect, and that makes for a very authentic sense with movement to depth,
even through a monaural sound system.
But we've come a long way since those early days,
and the sound design is something that's only improved as the sagas progressed.
Here's a list of the things many people, myself included, take issue with regarding the prequels.
But the one thing I think we can all agree on is that, this:
*sound effects*
is absolutely incredible.
There's a belief that good sound design is completely invisible,
that foley should only be perceived on a subconscious level,
and that the sound should melt into the image as to not become a distraction.
But I think that method of thinking stifles creativity.
The sounds of Star Wars are just as iconic as the characters, vehicles, and weapons they give life to.
And not every story warrants aural spectacle at the forefront,
but film is in equal parts an audio-visual experience.
And when the sound is relegated to playing second fiddle to the image,
you're limiting an entire spectrum of artistic expression.
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[End Music]