Slashdot Mirror
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."
>>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..."