It takes only a few seconds of sound — a spaceship launching, the familiar clash of lightsabers — to know that you are positively not in Kansas anymore. These are the sounds of Star Wars — from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, three-dimensional in a way that envelops you and that has changed the way movie soundtracks get assembled.
Now the most celebrated of these sounds have been collected for a new book-and-audio collection, The Sounds of Star Wars, written by J.W. Rinzler and including a foreword by the architect of that audioscape himself: renowned sound designer Ben Burtt.
Burtt was the man who engineered that soundtrack revolution. Before the Star Wars movies, most sci-fi films relied on electronic sounds. But George Lucas wanted to depart from that direction,
Rinzler tells NPR's Liane Hansen.
(listen to him creating the R2D2 and Light Saber sounds)
A Book About Sound
It is hard to imagine how one would encapsulate the vast world of sound into the written word. Burtt found that merely writing about sound wasn't enough; the reader needed to hear the audio in context with the stories. Modern technology now makes it possible to include the sound files in the sound module attached to the book. Over 300 photographs illustrate scenes from the films and show Burtt with his team recording audio in the field or sculpting the sounds back in the studio. Each of the sound effects described may be listened to with either the built-in speaker or a stereo headphone jack.
via
It takes only a few seconds of sound — a spaceship launching, the familiar clash of lightsabers — to know that you are positively not in Kansas anymore. These are the sounds of Star Wars — from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, three-dimensional in a way that envelops you and that has changed the way movie soundtracks get assembled.
Now the most celebrated of these sounds have been collected for a new book-and-audio collection, The Sounds of Star Wars, written by J.W. Rinzler and including a foreword by the architect of that audioscape himself: renowned sound designer Ben Burtt.
Burtt was the man who engineered that soundtrack revolution. Before the Star Wars movies, most sci-fi films relied on electronic sounds. But George Lucas wanted to depart from that direction, Rinzler tells NPR's Liane Hansen.
(listen to him creating the R2D2 and Light Saber sounds)
A Book About Sound
It is hard to imagine how one would encapsulate the vast world of sound into the written word. Burtt found that merely writing about sound wasn't enough; the reader needed to hear the audio in context with the stories. Modern technology now makes it possible to include the sound files in the sound module attached to the book. Over 300 photographs illustrate scenes from the films and show Burtt with his team recording audio in the field or sculpting the sounds back in the studio. Each of the sound effects described may be listened to with either the built-in speaker or a stereo headphone jack.
via
