25 January 2006

The Sound Of Movies

To continue on the movie-themed posts, I have always been enthralled by the powerful impact of sound and music in film.  While a student at Stanford I took a great class entitled "The Physics of Music" which would have more appropriately been entitled "Really Cool Field Trips in Music."  We visited Dolby Labs, Meyer Sound, the local Imax Theater, but the raison d'etre for taking the class was the trip to Skywalker Ranch to hear Ben Burtt speak.  Ben Burtt is a 4 time Academy Award winner for sound design (Star Wars, E.T., Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade).  He is the guy who created the light saber sound by smashing on the guy wire of an antenna tower.  He created the bleeps of R2D2, the ambient noises of the Cantina, the breathing of Dearth Vader, and any other sound you heard in every one of the Star Wars movies.

As I sat in the temple of movie sound -- the main theater in Skywalker Ranch -- the thing that truly brought home for me the power of well-utilized sound and music in film was a simple demonstration Burtt did for us.  He played a short scene from Star Wars, first with all the sound and music in place, then stripped away the score, and then the sound effects, finally leaving just the footage with the raw sound captured at filming.  The difference was startling.  Each sound element added a powerful set of cues that helped drive the emotion and overall impact of the scene. 

Since that lecture I have often times found myself listening to a movie as much as I watch it.  I was reminded of that incredible college experience last year at TED when James Horner spoke.  As Horner deconstructed the famous scene from Titanic for which he won an Academy Award, I could hear Ben Burtt stressing the same things about emotion and emphasis.  With any luck I will get a chance this year at TED to talk with Peter Gabriel about his incredible score to the film Birdy and see what further insights he has to share. 

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