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"?

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.

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:THX, DTS, etc.

[blackraven14250]

Probably the THX logo.

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:This Is Very Old

[nurd666]

Ug Make Fire! Story next on RockDot.org

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!

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 ;)