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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"?
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
it was just the movy skreen starting up. Don't they run on 8 cylenders ?
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.
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 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.
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
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.
except when you are in the digital domain.
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.
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
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 : )
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
Five words: A Day In The Life
Sheesh, man, learn your rock history. Styx wasn't even close.
please, both of you learn your history.. Iannis Xenakis in 1953
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.
"Turn it up!
Turn it uup!"
You're using her as bait, Master!
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!
Wasn't it called an "orchestral freak out". I actually thought of the same thing. Besides, it ends with the chord that sounds conspicuously like the Macintosh boot chime (I guess that's the source of the bitter fight between Apple Computer, Inc. and Apple Corp.) Now I read about this Xenakis guy. Fascinating...
I guess we could even bring up Johann Sebastian Bach, who is widely regarded as among the most brilliant (if not the most brilliant) composer of all time. Bach's works have been analyzed for mathematical excellence as well as aesthetic pleasure.
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.
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!
http://outcampaign.org/
The songstowearpantsto.com guy did.
t he_thx_sound_with_just_my_voice.mp3
It's rad.
mp3: http://www.archivestowearpantsto.com/tracks/0072_
First off, if you RTFA, this guy worked at Stanford in Artificial Intelligence. You don't get to do that, if you're as dumb as you imply he is.
You also have no idea how many lines of the 20,000 are data tables. Note the part where he says "the frequencies of the big chord (which had been typed in by hand - based on a 150-Hz root)..."
I'll tell you what: I'll give you 4 days to write your 5 lines of Perl. When it executes, it should algorithmically create (not download off the internet, or some bullshit) a wav file which 8 out of 10 people can't distinguish from 'Deep Note' based on a side-by-side sound test. If you succeed, I'll send you $300 through PayPal.
Until then, STFU. Some of us are trying to enjoy the show.
Education is the silver bullet.
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.
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.