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How The THX Noise Was Created
devilsbrigade writes "The blog MusicThing is running an interesting interview with Andy Moorer. Mr. Moorer is the man who created the sound called Deep Note, now heard in every THX-enabled movie theatre. The interview is originally from last year, but the tech-heavy discussion is still a timeless analysis of a great sound." From the article: "The score consists of a C program of about 20,000 lines of code. The output of this program is not the sound itself, but is the sequence of parameters that drives the oscillators on the ASP. That 20,000 lines of code produce about 250,000 lines of statements of the form "set frequency of oscillator X to Y Hertz. The oscillators were not simple - they had 1-pole smoothers on both amplitude and frequency. At the beginning, they form a cluster from 200 to 400 Hz. I randomly assigned and poked the frequencies so they drifted up and down in that range."
to turn that sound into an onomatopoeia. Any takers? "Bhhwuhhhhhhhhhhoooooh"
could've done it in 5 lines of perl
THEEEWWWWAANNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGG
You know, a slowed down version of the sound of what happens after George Lucas unzips his fly.
"Made up/misattributed quote that makes me look smart. I am on
This was posted a long time ago...what's next? Bell makes phone call?
recording the sound inside my head when my former wife talks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Dr. Dre is furious that people are using Napster to download his song "Lolo" without permission or license - an obvious "copyright infringement". The irony is that the prominent feature of that song is a sound that Dr. Dre appropriated without permission or license - an obvious "copyright infringement"?
The noise is ok, but I always really liked the solitary "dong" note that was originally after the crescendo. I don't know why, but it was always a very nice soothingly 'pure' sound with good clean resonance!
Newline is the best...
how much of them lines are gotos?
"Me claiming Satan exist is just as valid as you claiming an atom exists" - 1inChrist
to please for the love of god turn the damn thing DOWN A NOTCH?!?!?!
All Troll + "offtopic" mods are meta moderated as "Unfair", because you abused the system.
That depending on the movie that follows it, that sound is the best part of the sitting.
Their stated goal was to demonstrate the clarity or depth or somesuch without being overpowering..
However every theater I've been in with THX has for some odd reason put the audio level up to 11 to "enhance" the effect. So instead of a nice clean silly-sound followed by a clear and rich sound, I am treated to the sharp buzz of overmod followed by the grating pops of briefly exceeding the specifications of the speakers during the exciting parts of the films.
Fortunately, home theaters are cheap and it is quite easy to peg the audio at a level that doesn't stress the speakers. But it's a sad commentary when $60 walmart home theater has better sound than the real thing simply because some undertrained lacky failed to properly adjust the sound levels.
Can you be Even More Awesome?!
No luck finding the Brown note, I presume? Somehow "poked" and the "brown note" bring colorful images to the mind.
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
At first glance, not reading the article, "Deep Note" sticks out first thing I thought of was the infamous pr0n movie of the 70's Deep Throat
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it was just the movy skreen starting up. Don't they run on 8 cylenders ?
Nearly a year old. Simply wow.
Much like some of the methods of lossy compression (Temporal Masking). Maybe the point is to provide a loud sound such that your ears cant really distinguish the crappy audio afterwards -- I do realize that temporal masking is generally on the scale of milliseconds. But maybe they know something we don't.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
This is why there as still so many fans of programs like c-sound, pure-data, jmax etc. :(
Nothing beats creating a sound from scratch.
It takes a lot longer than pressing a preset button on a synth.
An instrument like a guitar is simple in a way, but with practice, people get so many sounds from it. C-sound is a bit like that too, you start off just making beeps and then eventually it sounds a bit like music.
Frontline Assembly either coped it or did a pretty darn close fascimile on the CD Live Wired. I would hope they wouldn't stoop that low. Hope I didn't just blow their cover.
where exactly did you go to kindergarden?
Occasionally called a resistor and a capacitor.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
I was trying to remember the first time I heard the "Deep Note", but couldn't. The only thing I could think of was "The Digital Experience" intro at the beginning of Jurassic Park (I think the first or at least one of the first movies released using DTS), but I don't think that was quite the same thing. Really cool though, and it was a great opening for the bone-rattling bass in that movie. Anyone know what the first thing the "Deep Note" was attached to?
I bet you could've done it in LISP in only 200 lines of code. tssk, amateurs.
I randomly assigned and poked the frequencies so they drifted up and down in that range.
He fiddled with it until it sounded nice.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Ob-Simpsons
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How'd you make this crunching noise, in this part of the song, here?
Well, it's, it's really a combination of... I used celery. I broke celery sticks, and then pitched it down, and I added lots of reverb. I guess I'm giving away some trade secrets here.
But nobody will ever really know exactly how much celery you used.
I also added corn starch, and then we went and crashed our van. And recorded that. And I mixed it in.
It sounds incredible.
My favorite use of this sound was in a Simpsons episode. Video here:
d y--DIVX
http://media.putfile.com/The--Simpsons--THX--Paro
"0101100101? It's just jibberish. *looks in mirror, gasps* 1010011010@!? AHHHHHH!!"
Here's a good place to get them. Apparently there have been some variations over the years:
http://www.digital-audio.net/sounds_o.shtml
I've got a Home Theater Calibration DVD that contains all the recent variations of that THX sound. They made dozens of them. The coolest one? The one made for the movie Aliens, by far. I think they did a few for the Star Wars movies too, and other movies where sound quality was paramount. (no pun intended) It cost a ton of money to get my theater to the point where it sounded just like a cinema, but now it is sometimes the highlight of the movie watching experience. Which says a lot about the quality of movies these days. Only the overhead rumble of the first Star Wars movie matches that THX sound clip in its viceral sound impact, along with the opening segment of Top Gun with the subwoofer cranked up.
I can imagine Mr Moorer is a real chick-puller at parties:
"Hey, I invented this really really famous sound - it goes like...well..actually I have it here on my iPod, or you can come back to my place to hear it on my home theatre if you want? Here take this copy on CD, it's free..."
Think Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters!
AT&ROFLMAO
The music in the first stage of the Sega arcade game Quartet started with something a lot like the Deep Note, played on a plain old Yamaha OPM synthesizer.
I was in a somewhat similar spot a few years back, where a script I'd written to generate random data for load testing a server, used date and time as a rand() seed. One set of data I generated uncovered a weird threading issue, and it was pretty reproducible with that dataset. Then a disk crash wiped the dataset. I still had the script, but couldn't seem to get another dataset that would repro the issue.
In addition to being better about backups, I now log whatever random seed is used to generate a dataset like that.
That depending on the movie that follows it, that sound is the best part of the sitting...
It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
Hmm, that sounds like something you'd see at the spearmint rhino.
except when you are in the digital domain.
The THX "Find a cinema" search function told me my ZIP Code didn't appear to be valid! I appear to live over 100 miles from the nearest theater that plays this supposedly "famous" sound.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
Leonard Nimoy saying ,"Who put the boop in the boopseboop?" Note: This is a song. I just don't know the corect line.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
They put a lavalier (wireless microphone) on Lucas and followed him around for a day-in-the-life thing, and at one point he pulled out his wallet and opened it.
So they sampled that, air-balled it once, and patented it.
I doubt Lucasfilm or THX authorized that usage.
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
deepnote.mp3: No such file or directory (ENOENT)
I would plug in Super Mario World (either on cartridge or on an emulator), head to Donut Plains, grab the cape, fly up near the end of the stage, and stick the key in the hole. This causes the game to play a humorous sped up version of "Deep Note".
MythBusters confirms it: Brown note is dying
Well, if it's a variable resistor and a variable capacitor (do they even make those?) it becomes quicker to say "one-pole smoother"
you know, like how an IDE is a compiler, linker, editor, and debugger, or something.
-mkb
George Lucas: How'd you make that sound Andy?
Andy Moorer: We electrocuted a sperm whale.
George Lucas: God damn that sounds great.
Andy Moorer: [Giggles} I *know*
George Lucas: Thing is... we need a story that's not going to bring those Greenpeace punks down on top of us.
Andy Moorer: I coded the sound with 20,000 lines of C?
George Lucas: Nice. Let's go with that.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
Seriously, did the guy think he'd get away with this? What total and utter plagiarism! Styx did the whole "notes appearing at random points and sliding at random rates toward a crescendo chord" thing ages ago. And better, if you ask me. It's not so much that he copied them almost directly that bugs the crap out of me every time I go to the movie theatres. The fact that he claims that it's original and "had never been done before." Total crap.
I'm pretty sure you're supposed to be obsessed with Ruby on Rails this week. You're like 4 coding fads too late (perl, php, python...).
Now I'm just going to sit back and wait for somebody to tell me I'm wrong and it could be done in 3 lines with AJAX
variable capacitor
They exist, but i dunno how common they are these days. Old timey radios had air-gap caps that had interleaved plates adjusted by turning the knobs
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
A one-pole smoother in the digital domain is called a "leaky integrator".
If you can find an MP3 (or Ogg Vorbis, or FLAC, or WAV, or...) copy of "Deep Note," try playing it backwards and/or at various different speeds. If it's played at around 14x the original speed it actually sounds sorta neat. And backwards it sounds like a nuclear reactor going down.
(Uh... not that I'd know what a nuclear reactor would sound like... yeah, uh, you can get back to dealing with Iran now...)
Creative misinterpretation is your friend.
A few years ago my company was organizing a speech/audio engineers' conference (ICASSP) in Orlando. Mr. Moorer was one of the keynote speakers. His topic wasn't the THX sound, but he did talk about it. His story matches TFA, so I guess it's legit ;-)
I ended up playing his sound samples for his talk through the auditorium sound system. I didn't know he was involved with the THX sound, and when he mentioned it, I realized I now had an interesting (somewhat) story. "I ran sound effects for the guy who invented the THX sound." It impressed me, anyway.
"Turn it up!
Turn it uup!"
You're using her as bait, Master!
* And remember, it's spelled N-e-t-s-c-a-p-e, but it's pronounced "Mozilla."
"Next up: "Tables cure cancer" :-)"
Only if you smack the cancer with the table.
For those who want to give it a listen, the trademarked THX sound is available on the USPTO's web site here.
They have a whole bunch of others here. It's kind of a fun page to click around on.
I like the DTS sound a lot more... too bad there arn't as many of those around...
You still came across them, I had one in a radio teddy bear in the 80s.
Of course, at the time I thought it was potentiometer and couldn't figure
out why it worked in the radio but not for me.
Were that I say, pancakes?
I'm getting pretty sick of the loud pretentious dolby ads at the front of movies. That's all they are, and they are mostly repeated, so it gets dull after a couple of times.
Imagine if every technology involved in movies got a 30 second ad at the start of the movie.
For every expert, there is an equal and opposite expert. - Arthur C. Clarke
The "freaking orchestra" sound of THX is very, very much the same as the opening of Asia's "Countdown to Zero" song, part of the "Astra" album. I always wondered if the THX guys had bought the rights from them. I guess they wrote 20 klocs of C to reproduce a sound made with a couple of Moogs.
--
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"Posted: 25.5.05 by Tom"
None of them. Not a single one. I'd guess that there probably isn't any branching or looping logic in the entire program...
Talk about -funroll-loops!
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I just came back from a dance club and I can say this is true. Right now I can't hear a thing.
Proof by very large bribes. QED.
Sounds like a lot of work for one sound effect... couldn't they have just downloaded it off of some pirate site somewhere?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Close but no Tiparillo. One-pole smoother to me sounds like a first order filter, which has a feedforward component on top of the leaky integrator feedback part.
what a great purpose!
this was always the sound played to wake people up after the commercials so they can actually see a difference between crappy ads and a crappy movie and the critics don't accidently write their resume on the ads. Would be kinda embarrassing.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
From chapter six of the book Analog Days, talking about the album In a Wild Sanctuary:
>>could've done it in 5 lines of perl
You know, I don't doubt that. I'm thinking Mr. Moore may have slept through some important concepts in CompSci 101. Like, say, LOOPS and ALGORITHMS.
From Original Post:
>>20,000 lines of code produce about 250,000 lines of statements of the form "set frequency of oscillator X to Y Hertz
And I'll bet that code looks like something off of www.dailywtf.com
I've got one word for Mr. Moorer : A_L_G_O_R_I_T_H_M It's this facinating little trick where you put a formula in a loop and permute a variable. In short, you let the computer do the work for you in about 1/100th of a second instead of hacking out TWENTY_FUNKING_THOUSAND_LINES_OF_C over only God knows how long a time period.
Unbelievable!
Thank goodness he wasn't trying to compute a moonshot. "okay, and then at 1.004 seconds after liftoff the following five thousand things happen. [snip] Then at 1.005 seconds..."
They're called varactors and they are hiding in a lot of places like satellite tuners and stuff. Not the block in the antenna, but in the decoder thingy.
kindergarten, btw
"Our interests are to see if we can't scale it up to something more exciting," he said.
If you can find it, the 1982 sampler CD "Digital Sound Spectacular" contained Deep Note. I heard it there before I heard it in a theatre.
Chip H.
In my Windows systems with good speakers, I like to put these THX, Dolby Digital, etc. sound clips in my startup wave file. :) I used to do that for other OS like Linux and MacOS X, but they are not connected to good speakers so I don't bother.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I've produced much more chilling sounds on string instruments.
An even better THX sound would be the song" Webber" by the Butthole Surfers.
It starts with chaotic pitchiness and culminates in resounding depth of consonance echoing to silence.
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
The songstowearpantsto.com guy did.
t he_thx_sound_with_just_my_voice.mp3
It's rad.
mp3: http://www.archivestowearpantsto.com/tracks/0072_
They exist, but i dunno how common they are these days
That's it. You've done it. I officially feel old now.
The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence was false.
Isn't this big by a couple orders of magnitude? I've written an entire Java interpreter in 23,000 lines of C.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
I was on an overhead wing propjet (some Korean or Chinese made thing, looked kinda like a Dornier 328) taking off from Ventiane (Laos) last week, and when the the engines kicked on, it sounded so much like the THX berzschwaaaangahn! that I had to smile. After that, it was just a regular sorta scary, sorta funny (but mostly predictable) ride, and the food was crappy, so the whole experience was very movie theater like.
by loading it into Audacity. Set Spectrogram size to 4096 on Preferences, maximum freq to ~2500Hz. Load up Deep Note from the USPTO website, stretch the audio tracks, and enjoy. It actually seems the description is pretty accurate - at first frequencies drift randomly, and then they converge to a set of fixed ones.
...getting an interview with Brian Eno about how the Windows 95 sound was made?
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
This has got to be the funniest thing ever posted to Slashdot.
http://musicthing.blogspot.com/2005/05/tiny-music- makers-pt-2-microsoft-sound.html
sheep.horse - does not contain information on sheep or horses.
The art is how to teach movie theaters that 180 decibells is NOT necessary.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
How can a post that wasn't rated to begin with be overrated?
How about
y(n) = a*x(n) + (1-a)*y(n-1)
It's even easier than a resistor and a cap.
No, but I did have the Deep Note and also the 20th Century Fox fanfare on my old phone for assorted things.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
Bah, but no bass out of the phones unless they have subwoofer. [grin]
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Thanks for taking the time to do this.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
So maybe I shouldn't tell you that I didn't actually even know they existed until my Fields prof mentioned it earlier that day? ;P
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)