The sound of a light saber from "Star Wars" is, at this point, it’s a near-universal cultural reference point — the sound alone evokes an entire genre of movies. But back in the late 1970s, when "Star Wars" was still in development, nobody knew what a light saber sounded like. Someone had to invent that sound.
That someone was Ben Burtt — who’s since gone on to an Oscar-winning career as a sound designer on films like "E.T.," "Wall-E" and "Indiana Jones." Burtt is giving a talk about his career Monday night at Arizona State University Media and Immersive eXperience Center. As he told The Show recently, back in the early days, all he had to go on were his instincts.
Full conversation
BEN BURTT: When I saw the artwork of the lightsaber on the wall of George Lucas's office, I immediately could hear something in my head.
SAM DINGMAN: Could I ask you kind of a weird question? Do you, do you think you could imitate, like, what that sound was like, just verbally?
BURTT: OK. I could hear this humming sound — mmmmm — buzzing. You know, this sort of dangerous burning sort of sound. And I had an immediate recollection of the sound that a very specific motor made in the projection booth at the USC cinema department where I was often a projectionist. I was obviously carrying around in my subconscious, a connection with many sounds that I had heard over my lifetime and associations with those sounds.
DINGMAN: Do you remember any early experiences of that, like maybe even before film school? Like, was sound always something that kind of stuck in your subconscious?
BURTT: I was in love with music as a toddler, and when music would be played on a record, I would immediately start to react in pantomime stories based on what I was hearing.
DINGMAN: What did that, what did that look like? Like you would, you would assume physical characters and — ?
BURTT: Yeah, I would become a cowboy riding a horse. I would become someone falling off a cliff, which would be the edge of the couch, that sort of thing. I'd ride the ottoman in the living room as if it were a horse, you know. And later when I started recording television shows off television with my tape recorder, I would play them back and it would bring the whole film to life in my imagination.
DINGMAN: Just from the sound of it?
BURTT: Just from the sound.
DINGMAN: That's interesting, that's interesting.
BURTT: I got a little older. I got bolder and I would take my tape recorder to the movie theater, sneak it in a little gym bag or something, and I would try to record the movie.
DINGMAN: Would you then sit and listen to the playback of these tapes?
BURTT: I would spend hours playing back the television shows and movies I recorded. I'd sit there with headphones on in my bedroom or something, listening to some western I recorded, and I would just enjoy the movie again. Eventually I'd start going out, not recording movies or TV shows, but I would go record things in my world around me. And I was one of the few kids that had a tape recorder, that was a high tech instrument in 1958.
DINGMAN: Yeah, this is not trivial. It's not like now where you can just open the voice memos app on your phone. I mean, you, you had to really carry around what I imagine must have been a fairly bulky physical unit.
BURTT: It's like moving a, you know, a microwave around or something more than that. It was an appliance, but when, when Sony introduced the first portable recorders in the United States, I think around 1963, 1964, I was, my father got me one for Christmas and that was the fact that I could go portable on batteries with a small reel to reel recorder really just, opened up a whole world and I enjoyed recording outside, taking it to document various experiences in the neighborhood.
DINGMAN: Now would you sit and listen to that playback as well? I mean, I can imagine, you know, the appeal of sitting and listening to a recording of a TV show or a movie and kind of replaying it in your mind. But would you sit and do the same thing with these more environmental recordings?
BURTT: Yes, yes, and, and I got my first clues as to how motion picture sounds were done. The craft of it and, and to some degree the artistic nature of it. And I was fascinated by that as well, because the language of sounds in movies was teaching the public what things are supposed to sound like.
DINGMAN: But that makes me think about something I've heard you say, you know, if we think about R2-D2, I've heard you say that one of the challenges of R2-D2 is that it was one of the first major characters in a movie who didn't have a mouth and didn't speak in English words.
BURTT: In thinking it over years later, I realized that probably the closest thing that came to an R2 in the movies I saw growing up were in the Tarzan movies, there was Cheeta, the chimpanzee.
Cheeta would communicate, you know, through chirps and groans and verbal, you know, nonverbal sounds, and you pretty much understood what she was thinking. And it's very much R2, in the sense that you're using sounds that people worldwide connect with certain emotions. That was the breakthrough for robots.
DINGMAN: One of my favorite things about the “Star Wars” movies is that we meet a lot of characters throughout them who communicate in these made up languages, whether it's aliens or robots. It's always just been cool to me that there's never any subtitles. It strikes me that, because of the very human way and culturally associative way that you were approaching this, there almost wasn't a need for them because we just kind of got it based on the tonality that you had this fluency with.
BURTT: There was a discussion of using subtitles as we were plotting out how to have all these aliens interact. We didn't want to have subtitles because, as George Lucas would put it, it's kind of non-cinematic to do it that way. So, we tried to develop sounds that did not require any translation except for, I think, Greedo in the original “Star Wars” because he has a conversation with Han Solo, that was very specific.
DINGMAN: Yeah, but it's the exception and not the rule.
BURTT: It is the exception.
DINGMAN: How would you say your process now is different? Do you, do you feel like you use modern tools now to achieve the same effects, or are you still — ?
BURTT: Analog minded. Yeah. I believe my creative process has not changed very much. My process has almost always been to start with acoustic sounds gathered in the real world somewhere. Motors, vehicles, storms, animals, and birds, because the organic real world sounds are much more successful in creating the illusion that these characters are real because people hear the reality to the sound.
DINGMAN: Isn't that interesting.
BURTT: Yeah.
DINGMAN: To make people invest in the fantasy, you had to start with reality.
BURTT: Yes, they recognize them as being, having complexity and depth that real sounds have.
