The Sounds of Star Wars

Sound effects and Foley sounds (incidental or background audio) are vital to creating a fully immersive cinematic experience. Ben Burtt is one of Hollywood’s legendary waveform artists, and is responsible for many of the key sounds in the Star Wars series…

Sounds Like A Hit

Just in case you’d forgotten what Star Wars sounded like, here’s a list of the ‘top ten’ sound effects from Star Wars Episodes I-VI. Not sure I would entirely agree with this particular order – I’d definitely rate Chewbacca ahead of Wat Tambor – but it is a quick refresher…

As a sound designer, Ben Burtt definitely has his roots in Foley – many of his sounds begin with field recordings of places, animals or mechanical devices and are built from there. As he says himself in the below clip, people can recognise the underlying authenticity of such audio, even if it is post-processed into something quite different. For example, the classic laser gun sound was derived from tapping on the support cables of a radio tower with a spanner.

The book ‘The Sounds of Star Wars’ is an interesting creation – a hybrid of traditional hardback reference tome and a hardware audio playback device. Although a book of this kind would be obviously suited to app format on a modern tablet device, this unique format does have a sort of retro-futuristic appeal that suits the subject matter.