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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."
Submit a complaint to THX, if they get enough they will check the theater and revoke their certification if things are not up to snuff.
http://www.thx.com/mod/cinema/survey.html
Q.
Occasionally called a resistor and a capacitor.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
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
Five words: A Day In The Life
Sheesh, man, learn your rock history. Styx wasn't even close.
Actually, I thought I was ripping off the end of the Beatles' "Day in the Life". I never heard the Styx&Krakatoa version. I always say when you rip, rip from the best!
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.
THX isn't an audio encoding standard, it's a specification for the sound pipeline and theater construction that assures a certain level of audio fidelity and visual quality. It mandates that a theater use a THX crossover, Dolby Digital, SDDS, or DTS audio tracks, and that the construction of the theater conform to a certain specification.
"Because Science" is one step from "Because old book". Try "Because of my experiment testing my falsifiable assertion".
Gee, you are absolutely right. I went back and looked at it - it is only 325 lines of C code! Gosh, I remembered it as being huge, but it is only about 12 pages printed out. That's what I get depending on a 20-year-old memory. Sorry about the mistake.