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."

Comments

Now the art is

[Too many errors, bai]

to turn that sound into an onomatopoeia. Any takers? "Bhhwuhhhhhhhhhhoooooh"

pfft ... 20k lines of C

[Anonymous Coward]

could've done it in 5 lines of perl

I always thought it was

[Orrin Bloquy]

THEEEWWWWAANNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGG

You know, a slowed down version of the sound of what happens after George Lucas unzips his fly.

They created it by

[geekoid]

recording the sound inside my head when my former wife talks.

Some tangential "Deep Note" trivia

[doesitmakeitsick]

This always amused me: http://www.benedict.com/Audio/dre/dre.aspx When the Napster maelstrom hit the recording industry, Dr. Dre, along with Metallica, was one of the first to hurl accusations of copyright infringement at the popular file sharing site.

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"?

Could you add one more line of code

[Unknown Poltroon]

to please for the love of god turn the damn thing DOWN A NOTCH?!?!?!

Re:Could you add one more line of code

[animaal]

My date was mortified; still got laid, though.

Do you know for sure that she got laid? She might only have told you she did out of spite ;)

I like the THX signature sound so much...

[E-Lad]

That depending on the movie that follows it, that sound is the best part of the sitting.

Blasting Speaker Noise

[zippthorne]

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.

Re:Blasting Speaker Noise

[Quikah]

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

Re:Blasting Speaker Noise

[Locke2005]

Their stated goal was to demonstrate the clarity or depth or somesuch without being overpowering...

But there actual goal was to get everybody in the theater to SHUT THE FUCK UP and listen to the movie, which requires a burst of sound so loud that nobody can talk over it.

Re:Blasting Speaker Noise

[Silver Gryphon]

If only mod points went to 11...

Volume has to be the most irritating problem in a movie theater. Granted, the 14 year old lackeys don't give a rat's ass what they set it at, but if enough people complain through the THX survey, those 14 year old lackeys will be the most educated in town on the definition of 'audiophile.' THX will work hard to preserve its reputation vs. DTS and competitors. They'll come down hard on theater management, who will have no choice but to train and weed out failing staff. With keeping a uniform or theater clean, or keeping food safety in mind, a theater's reputation spreads. So too does "that theater's too loud, let's go to the one across town."

I had no idea until now that THX had a public survey. I'll have to use it.

Brown note...

[GillBates0]

I randomly assigned and poked the frequencies so they drifted up and down in that range."

No luck finding the Brown note, I presume? Somehow "poked" and the "brown note" bring colorful images to the mind.

On Purpose? (Temporal Masking)

[slashbob22]

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.

er, um...

[hackwrench]

where exactly did you go to kindergarden?

So, in other words ...

[ScrewMaster]

I randomly assigned and poked the frequencies so they drifted up and down in that range.

He fiddled with it until it sounded nice.

Re:THX, DTS, etc.

[blackraven14250]

Probably the THX logo.

it can't be that complicated...

[ALpaca2500]

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.

Simpsons

[PoitNarf]

My favorite use of this sound was in a Simpsons episode. Video here:

http://media.putfile.com/The--Simpsons--THX--Parod y--DIVX

Links to the original THX sound

[theurge14]

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

Many Variations on a theme.

[LibertineR]

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 bet he's a real party anmal

[Linker3000]

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!

TODO: log random number generator seed

[natophonic]

Some months after the piece was released (along with "Return of the Jedi") they lost the original recording. I recreated the piece for them, but they kept complaining that it didn't sound the same. Since my random-number generators were keyed on the time and date, I couldn't reproduce the score of the performance that they liked. I finally found the original version and everybody was happy.

Whew!

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.

Re:Wow! A one pole smoother...

[dmiller]

except when you are in the digital domain.

Re:This Is Very Old

[nurd666]

Ug Make Fire! Story next on RockDot.org

Super Mario World's keyhole sound

[tepples]

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".

Here's how it *really* went down

[popo]

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.

Re:Two words: Styx & Krakatoa

[AMoorer]

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!

Have a listen...

[lax-goalie]

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.