Joy of Synths #36 Sound Design

In doing research on sound design as practice, my focus settled on filmmaker George Lucas and his Star Wars films, Editor/Sound Montage/Sound Designer Walter Murch, and Sound Designer Ben Burtt. Perhaps the most direct book to read and listen to is “The Sounds of Star Wars” by J.W. Rinzler with a foreword by Ben Burtt. Additional reading includes “The Making of The Empire Strikes Back” and “The Making of Return of the Jedi,” as well as “In the Blink of an Eye” by Walter Murch.

(I read further books on Sound for Film and Sound Design but found those covered too much technical ground about audio recording, which outdated quickly given the changes in hardware and software.)

Sound design can occur at any time during a film project’s lifecycle, though soundtrack work generally occurs after principal photography and during post-production. At what start time during post-production is up to those in charge. Some prefer to move in a linear fashion of picture editing, sound effects, then music scoring. However, post production is never so linear. Picture editing is equally guided by sound so having sonic elements available at the start of picture assembly, even as placeholders that will be replaced, can be effective for pacing and determining how long to hold a shot on screen.

It is worth watching the animated Wall-E special feature on sound design with Ben Burtt as animated films build a sound world from zero. Everything in the soundtrack is placed intentionally. Burtt began his work early in Wall-E’s production, which in turn helped the director and animators with their work.

A sound designer, harkening back to Star Wars and Ben Burtt, is one who records, edits and mixes a sound effect, ambience/environment, or alien character’s voice. In most situations these are 3 separate roles held by 3 individuals: one to place the mic and operate the audio recorder, one to edit the recordings, another to mix.

Per research, “Sound design, the philosophy espoused by Burtt and Lucas, had one person do all three steps- sound collecting, editing, and mixing-instead of an assembly line of different people. "Since I'm involved from the beginning, the process can reflect one viewpoint, or signature, upon the entire soundtrack," Burtt says.

It can be my vision and the director's to the best of my ability to carry it out."

Walter Murch has the first credit of Sound Design for his work on Apocalypse Now. He said this was due to his designing the placement of sounds in various channels for theatrical exhibition. Each channel went to a speaker in front of, side or behind the audience, creating a more immersive experience than a 3 channel stereo soundtrack (Left-Center-Right). In contrast, Murch’s prior recording, editing and mixing work in George Lucas’s sci fi film THX 1138 was credited as Sound Montages.

Per Walter Murch: "Well, if an interior designer can go into an architectural space and decorate it interestingly, that's sort of what I am doing in the (movie) theater. I'm taking the three-dimensional space of the theater and decorating it with sound. In my case, that was where sound designer, the term, came from.”

Murch went on to describe his use of an ARP2600 synthesizer for processing audio in The Conversation to make it sound “digital” for the early 1970s. “I found a synthesizer and sent the voices through it. I processed the control track with square waves and various other things to get what was an approximate indication, to me anyway, of a digital signal. The motive was everything that I've just been talking about. The means was sending the (recorded human) voice through an ARP(2600) synthesizer, a fairly state-of-the-art analog synthesizer for 1973.”

Burtt also used the ARP2600 for R2D2 sounds and other processing.

In “The Sounds of Star Wars” book, Ben Burtt shares his workflow from the pre-digital era of Nagra brand field recorders that could record 2 channels, or 2 mics going to left and right inputs, dubbing that to 1/4” magnetic tape for manipulation, then dubbing that to 35mm magnetic tape to edit with a double system Movieola editor for cutting audio and film workprints, then mixing 3 sounds and recording to another tape. That’s a number of generations of analog re-recording. Here’s the shorter answer:

"Generally the work was done this way," recounts Burt, "I recorded the original audio on the Nagra, and I played with it on quarter-inch tape. I could change the playback speed, reverse the direction, filter, or process with outboard equipment like the ARP synthesizer. I had George's (Lucas, Director) 35mm film recorder, so I would copy the sounds to 35mm mag and then sync and splice together the sounds in the Movieola to build a sound effects track. Then I could play back three 35mm tracks at a time and make a composite mix."

Sound for storytelling has long existed. Radio plays, podcasts, and audio books use additional sounds to heighten the emotion of an actor’s voice performance. Sound Effects and/or Music were performed live or mixed in later. The listener can imagine the object that would create that sound, even if the sound effect was generally created by a sound-making prop and not the real-world object.

In terms of filmmaking and sound, the audience expectation is to hear what one sees on screen. They don’t expect to hear everything at equal volume all at once in the environment. In terms of production sound, or sound recording during the principal photography on stage or location, the focus is on recording dialog. While one could put several mics on set to record sonic details, this isn’t a common practice as the camera may see the microphones and cables. Even with a focus on dialog, this location or stage dialog recording may or not be used in the final film. That depends largely on the environment in which it was recorded.

The issue with directional condenser microphones used in recording film sound is that even if they have a narrow pickup pattern, the rest of the world still bleeds in. Whereas a zoom lens can frame out the background if it is distracting to the shot, a directional mic on a boom pole does not have a hard boundary like the frame of an image and will still capture the sounds from the background. This is okay if the background makes sense to the picture and the scene plays back from a single angle in a continuous, unedited recording. However, a scene in the final film is generally edited together from multiple takes of the actor’s performance. For example, if an airplane is flying overhead in Take 1, and there are no airplanes in Take 2 or 3, the airplane noise may cut in and out if parts of Take 1 are used. Generally the airplane shots are marked N/G (No Good) during production, so the picture editor would only use Take 2 or 3 because of the background sound interruption of the airplane.

Location shooting has other issues to contend with. A location may only be available for a short time, or actors becomes unavailable, or light may be changing over time such that there would be no visual continuity with earlier takes. In those cases you may be stuck with Take 1 and its audio and have to make it work.

If the background sounds are too loud or don’t make sense to the film’s reality then this location recording may serve as a guide track for eventual replacement in ADR Looping Sessions where the actor repeats their performance in an audio studio in sync with the video recording.

AI audio filters are pretty amazing and worth exploring to remove sound intrusions before resorting to ADR, but it’s smart to budget time and money for ADR sessions with the actors.

With DaVinci Resolve 20 beta free version, AI can train on an actor’s voice from a clean audio recording in order to NOT have to record ADR. However that is a murky area, legally and ethically and may not be allowed per the actor’s union. Creatively, an AI text to voice performance will likely miss the intonations that come with human delivery. The accent on one word can change the meaning of a sentence.

The issue of background interruption and time constraints comes to play in the practice of field recording for sound design. Field recording means recording in the field (real-world locations) and not an audio studio. The purpose is not to record dialog but sounds to fill in the world of the project. Field recording implies one uses a microphone to record on location.

This is distinct from generating sounds with an analog synthesizer and recording directly from the synth outputs into a portable field audio recorder or an audio interface and laptop. The analog synthesizer bypasses microphones. However, the practice of sound design is rooted in field recordings either recorded by the sound designer and their team or pulled from a sound library of pre-existing recordings.

Randy Thom worked on The Empire Strikes Back and had this to say:

"What Ben did on Star Wars and developed even more on Empire was to take real-world sounds," Thom says, "which had the kind of grittiness and physicality that we can relate to, and then process the sounds in ways that gave them a kind of exotic patina, if you will, by playing some of them backward, by altering the speed of the recordings, or by putting them through electronic circuits."

Examples of real-world sound replacement in The Empire Strikes Back are cited by Ben Burtt: "We got the door of an old Cadillac Eldorado," Burtt says. "The motors in its door that operate the window became the motor that we used for Threepio walking. The tauntaun voice was concocted from the recording of an Asian sea otter named Mota, which we pitched down a little. And I recorded the foghorns out on San Francisco Bay, which are in the background of Cloud City's audio track."

The book “The Sounds of Star Wars” goes into detail of the various sounds that form the basis of Star Wars. It’s a must-own if you are interested in sound design.

A constraint with field recording is the equipment needed to do this effectively. The basics of field recording are simple: place and point the mic as close to the sound source as possible; set the recorder’s audio input levels to -12dB if sound doesn’t rise in volume; use the most professional gear you can afford/rent; monitor the recordings with headphones (if you’re not recording loud sounds); slate the date and intention of the recording by talking into a mic, start recording in advance of the sound and keep rolling after the sound.

The complexity is based on the explosion of audio gear that isn’t necessarily the best for field recording. What is the best mic? That depends on what is being recorded and where it’s being recorded. What is the best recorder? While it depends on pre-amps, it also depends on how many microphone inputs it accepts and resulting file. Do you need a blimp and furry covering? Yes, if you’re outdoors as a gust of wind will screech across the recording.

For example, the Sound Devices Mix Pre 6 II portable recorder records multiple mic or line inputs to a single file. This multi-channel file has to be separated in audio software in order to listen to the individual mics. If you playback the recordings outside of audio software then you just hear a mix of all the inputs. So you can record on location but would need a laptop to verify that one of the individual tracks is suitable for further work.

This is a lot of gear to acquire, manage, transport, and return, in addition to the organization needed after recording to make sense of individual audio events.

Based on practice, an analog synthesizer is a better first step towards sound design than field recording if one is new to working with audio. Rather than dive into field recording gear and techniques, analog synthesizers can create sounds that can be applied to sound design for films, videos, podcasts and sampling for music. Synths can generate sounds to be used alone or in combination with other sounds for sound effects, ambient backgrounds, ambient music, or as effects boxes to filter/process other sounds.

Analog synthesizer recordings still need to be organized and labelled for use as a sound library, however, different synths produce different sounds and this process of discovery can be a lot of fun.

Ultimately, sound effects, background ambience, and music serve soundtracks that are about imagining a world in which a story plays out. Analog synths are great instruments for unlocking and building those worlds.

This is the first newsletter published in two months as I proposed, developed, and presented a hands-on event on Sci Fi Movie Sound Effects for younger folk. Hence the deep dive into Sound Design, Star Wars, Ben Burtt and Walter Murch. For the event we recorded a Slinky (laser sound), Hand Held Mixer, and Manual Typewriter with 2 shotgun mics, a contact mic, and Wireless Lavalier. Then we moved to playing electronic instruments and synths I set up for specific sounds. It was a fun event, and the participants liked the synth generated sounds more than the mic recordings.

This event was computer free and a lot of mic recording sound design magic comes from editing, adding audio effects and mixing combinations of sounds in audio software. So the seed of a mic-recorded sound is perhaps less wondrous than a laser sound generated by a synthesizer.

The initial idea was to build a sound with littleBits from zero, however, it worked better to cover Sound Design with mic recording and synths than just focus on synthesis. With synths, it was best to have the sound set so kids could compare and contrast analog synths with real-world recordings. Cheers!

All Contents Copyright Anthony Torres 2025. All rights reserved.