- "All sounds bring with them an association with something emotional. […] You search for the sounds that not only bring a sense of naturalness and reality to a film scene but also — and more importantly, one discovers — provide the appropriate emotional association. For example, you can pick out any number of wind backgrounds that will bring a scene very important emotional coloration. You can play a "friendly wind," or a "lonely wind," or a "spooky wind," depending upon the sound texture you have chosen."
- ―Ben Burtt
Ben Burtt (born July 12, 1948)[1] is the sound designer for the Star Wars films, and others made by Lucasfilm Limited with subsidiary Skywalker Sound. His most famous creations are the sound of the lightsaber, Darth Vader's breathing, and the binary speech of R2-D2. He has created many of the languages heard in Star Wars—most of which are marked by shared etymological roots with English—and has written the Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide.
Burtt has a reputation for including a sound effect dubbed the "Wilhelm scream" in many of the movies he's worked on. Taken from a character named Wilhelm in the film The Charge at Feather River, the scream can be heard in Star Wars when a stormtrooper falls into a chasm in the Death Star, and in Raiders of the Lost Ark when a Nazi soldier falls from a moving car. The scream appears in many other movies.
Biography[]
In his childhood, Ben Burtt visited his grandparents in Ohio for summer vacations, and spent time with his grandfather's makeshift ham radio receiver in the attic, experimenting with the dials and listening in awe the various modulated voices and electronic sounds through the headphones. He had recorded some of those sounds, that would use years later as sound effects in Star Wars, such as the sound of the Viper probe droids. In his early teens, he was making an audio drama on an audio tape, recording some "Martian" dialogue; for this he recorded speech on a twisted tape, which played back would be heard backwards. As it was a very trite method, he tried to speak backwards himself, then to be played backwards to convey a weird effect, although he was not satisfied with the result.[2]
He studied in the University of Southern California where he met Rick Victor, and Richard Anderson, who would later become his friend and assistant.[2]
Work for the original trilogy[]
- "...but that was the feeling about the whole project. There were many unknown experiments under way with the whole idea of Star Wars."
- ―Ben Burtt
Ben Burtt started working for Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope in 1975, and was in charge of special dialogue and sound effects for that film; equipped with a Nagra III NP recorder suitable for film work, he was tasked by George Lucas with creating or finding the sounds and speeches of various characters, droids and creatures. The process took about six months, parallel to the film editing. At some point he used Lucas's basement as his editing room, complete with a Moviola, right under his kitchen.[2]
Lucas suggested to him a technique, calling it "worldizing": recording lines in locations with specific acoustics that match the setting of the film, in order to catch an authentic ambience and reverberation. Burtt found himself often alone at nights, with lights off — so as not to be disturbed by speeches, phonecalls or even buzz of fluorescent lights — in dark corridors, offices and bathrooms, playing back Darth Vader's voice, to find where it reverberated better, according to the movie setting.[2]
For alien sounds, he collected human-made, animal-made, even synthesized sounds especially for the cantina scene: a spring peeper frog; the "laughter" of a hippopotamus; a friend's voice reciting Latin, edited in a synthesizer; then a group of volunteers after inhaling helium. His experimentation went as far as closing some dogs in a closet full of helium to see this effect on dogs, which did not produce any results.[2]
Even the growls of Chewbacca had to convey nuances and intonations. He followed Lucas's idea to use bear sounds for Chewie; after failing to find high-quality samples from sound libraries, or making successful recordings at zoos, he turned to menageries of trained animals for Hollywood. Thus he met Pooh the Bear. Burtt and Anderson recorded the session with the help of stuntwoman Susan Backlinie. Pooh's sounds formed the bulk for Chewie's voice, with Burtt archiving his samples according to the intonation (whether angry, or interrogative) and through editing and pasting, engineered whole "sentences".[2]
For Chewbacca, he also found an oportunity to record walruses after a pond at Marineland, Long Beach was drained for cleaning. Friends who were aware of his quest, gave their dogs for audition, although he could get only a few interesting barks or moans; in that process, an aggressive dachshund offered the sounds that would be used later for the Rancor Pateesa in Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi. The sounds were later adapted to fit the movements of Peter Mayhew's mask.[2]
For the nonverbal speech of R2-D2, he experimented with producing electronic sounds of different tones with Moog and ARP synthesizers. In order to add personality, intelligence and emotions, Burtt added some mechanical sounds which he performed himself; whistling through a plumbing tube, or interacting metal with frozen carbon dioxide, producing gas with various pitches as it melted (such sounds were used also for lightsaber hits). While showing R2's prototype sounds to Lucas, the latter exemplified a dialogue between Artoo and Threepio with nonsense babbling of various intonations, and Burtt realised that babytalk communicates the babies's emotions and needs by intonation even without words. Initially Burtt started recording samples of babies but this attempt failed for practical reasons, as babies would not cooperate. Burtt ended up recording himself delivering scenes in babytalk in Lucas's basement, end eventually melded the electronic tones to the voice. He programmed the synthesizer to make an interactive blend of tones and babytalk, so that when he played while vocalizing, the electronic tone shaped its envelope to conform. His first samples were used for the brief scene with WED-15-77, which however was cut from the final film, and went on to record "dialogues" for R2-D2; in order to make his sounds as "logical" as possible, he wrote in English what he imagined Artoo saying to C-3PO, and created tones consistent to the context.[2]
While researching for humanoid speech, he sought to find interesting and "exotic" human languages so as to not sound similar to English. He monitored shortwave transmissions, the distortions and aberrations of which gave him further inspiration; listened to recordings from language lessons and samples from university linguistic departments. He favored African languages, specifically Zulu, for their exotic sounds and rhythms. Samples of Quechua of Peru attracted his attention, as it sounded musical, and the rhyming of some phrases seemed comical to him; furthermore it possessed some exotic click-like sounds that don't exist in the languages familiar to English.[2][3] Burtt did not intend for the aliens to speak copies of those languages, but to derive other sounds from those patterns and sets of phonemes and emulate how he felt listening those languages.[2]
Burtt collected samples of Zulu and Quechua, and was able to interview speakers of zulu, while narrating stories in a dramatic way, so as to record specific (checklisted) emotional states in that language; in one case a Zulu warrior refused to narrate a dialogue with fear in his voice, claiming he didn't know any fear. Zulu became the basis for Jawaese, and most of the dialogues heard in New Hope came from a passionate argument between a couple in a narration.[2]
In preparation for recording Jawaese, and following Lucas's suggestion for "worldizing", he travelled with his friend Rick Victor to Vasquez Rocks and spend the evening shouting Jawaese phrases, since in the movie those scenes took place in the rocky deserts of Tatooine.[2]
Burtt however was not able to find a speaker of the endangered[4] Quechua language; in his search he met linguistics graduate Larry Ward with whom they worked together. Ward was familiar with eleven languages and was able to transcribe the Quechuan samples, and even mimic comfortably the sounds of the language as if he was fluent. Together they invented their own words emulating the elements of Quechua they liked; this "fake Quechua" would become Huttese. Burtt then studied Greedo's snout movements, writing phrases timed to fit with the scene, and recorded them with Ward, replacing his earlier "oink-oink" language.[2]
Burtt was the first person who ever saw completed scenes of the film, and the full story in sequence, as he was the one receiving them from three separate editors who worked independently, in order to add sound.[2]
He had the same capacity in the 1978 TV special The Star Wars Holiday Special[5] and spent two days in the Olympic Game Farm, recording different bears for other Wookiee characters: grizzlies for Itchy, black bears for Malla; he also recorded a lion that would be used later in Alien (1979); in the San Jose Baby Zoo he met baby bear Tarik that made the voice for Lumpy.[2]
For Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back he recorded baby raccoons in a bathtube for the Ugnaught language. For the Omnisignal unicode heard by the probe droids, he mixed unused sounds from Alien with broadcast recordings of his grandfather's radio.[2]
The languages would need more work for Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi, showing extensive dialogues, and songs, of Huttese and a new language, Ewokese. After watching a documentary, he thought Tibetan would be an exotic basis for the latter, however he had difficulties finding Tibetan speakers. He found a San Francisco-based owner of a gift shop near Embarcadero,[6] and Burtt interviewed him and his father, but they could not "perform" satisfactorily.[2] They introduced him to a relative of theirs, Kosi Unkov,[6] an elderly Mongolian woman who spoke only Kalmuck in a raspy high-pitched voice, and, in her 80 years, left her tribe to live in a city. Despite this, the "Grandma Vodka", as they affectionally called her, was friendly and charismatic, and passionately narrated some folk tales, especially while enjoying vodka.[6][2] After this, Burtt sought some low-pitched female voices. He directed a subset of the Oakland Inspirational Choir to record Ewokese babbling and chanting.[2]
He also provided the original idea for the character of Salacious B. Crumb.[7]
New trilogies[]
The Geonosian language that was known as "Geonosian hive-mind" was created from three sounds recorded by Matthew Wood under the direction of Ben Burtt while in Australia. In the city of Melbourne, Wood recorded the mating cries of penguins at a reserve. In the city of Cairns, Wood recorded a group of fruit bats fighting over a banana. Wood also recorded the sounds of flying foxes. Burtt mixed all of these sounds and created the Geonosian language.[8][9]
Burtt returned as sound designer for 2015's Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens. He is credited as sound designer and re-recording mixer, with David Acord, on Star Wars Forces of Destiny. He voiced the droid BD-1 in the 2019 video game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.
Cameos[]
Burtt appeared in two of the Star Wars films as an extra. He appeared in Return of the Jedi (as the Imperial officer Colonel Dyer, who yells "Freeze!" before Han Solo throws a toolbox filled with explosive charges, causing him to fall off a catwalk; he utters a Wilhelm scream at that moment) and The Phantom Menace (as Ebenn Q3 Baobab, who appears in the background near the end when Amidala congratulates Palpatine). He also provided the voice for Wat Tambor in Attack of the Clones[10] and Lushros Dofine in Revenge of the Sith.
Other involvement[]
Burtt was heavily involved in writing the animated series Star Wars: Droids.
In early '80s he worked in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, where he collaborated with Pat Welsh as the voice of the extraterrestrial title character. According to Burtt, voice of elderly women is ideal for alien voices, as, with some editing, can seem ageless and genderless, an idea that he used for his later works, such as Ewokese.[2] He worked with Welsh again in Return of the Jedi.
Ben Burtt appeared at Celebration IV in 2007 for a question-and-answer session.[11]
Sources[]
Notes and references[]
- ↑ 1.0 1.1
This Week! in Star Wars The Bad Batch Returns, Your Photos of The Child, and More! on the official Star Wars YouTube channel (backup link)
- ↑ 2.00 2.01 2.02 2.03 2.04 2.05 2.06 2.07 2.08 2.09 2.10 2.11 2.12 2.13 2.14 2.15 2.16 2.17 2.18 2.19 2.20 2.21 Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide
- ↑ In the Travel Guide Burtt describes Quechua as having "smacking sounds and clicks"; whereas Quechua doesn't possess click consonants, which are peculiar only to some languages of Africa, some Quechua dialects have ejective consonants that have a similar effect to the ear.
- ↑ https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2011/apr/15/language-extinct-endangered
- ↑ The Star Wars Holiday Special
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 6.2
Jedi at 40: Ben Burtt and Randy Thom on Crafting Ewokese, Jabba's Voice, and the Rancor's Roar (Brandon Wainerdi) on StarWars.com (backup link)
- ↑ Much to Learn You Still Have: 5 Things You Might Not Know About Kowakian Monkey-Lizards on StarWars.com (backup link)
- ↑
Drawing from the Present: Familiar Creatures in a Galaxy Far, Far Away on StarWars.com (backup link)
- ↑ Much to Learn You Still Have: 8 Things You Might Not Know About Geonosians on StarWars.com (backup link)
- ↑ Star Wars: The Clone Wars The Complete Season One ("Liberty on Ryloth" - Featurette)
- ↑ Ben Burtt at Celebration IV on StarWars.com (content now obsolete; backup link)
External links[]
- Sound Design of Star Wars on FilmSound.org (archived from the original on May 11, 2020)
- Ben Burtt Interviews on Blogspot
- Ben Burtt on Wikipedia
- Ben Burtt at the Internet Movie Database
- Ben Burtt on the Pixar Wiki
