Don Martin proved you can also do sound fx with invented words.
You may have heard the expression “seeing is believing”? If you’re talking about accepting the reality of what’s presented in a TV show or film, then hearing is believing. The sound is what convinces us that plastic armor is polished metal, that Jedi light-sabres hold electric power and that bones are broken in a fight between actors, even when we KNOW the punches are pulled. We even believe that explosions in the vacuum of outer space are audible – because we demand that they be heard, and we won’t suspend disbelief without that sound. Here are the stories behind five famous sound effects. All of them helped audiences to believe. None of them were the real sounds of what took place.
1.) Bob’s “Bee-woop” (alternate spellings available)
Bob Clampett (1913-1984) was one of the top directors of Warner Brothers cartoons in the 1930s and 40s. His cartoons feature lots of physical distortion, uninhibited behavior and surreal backgrounds. Although WB had brilliant sound resources available in musical form by Carl Stalling and “real” noises adapted and edited by Treg Brown, Bob occasionally did something audacious and loony instead. He would step up to the microphone and produce a sound effect vocally. His “bee-woop” noise ends this 1946 cartoon, just after the wolf says “Stop that dancing up there, ya thillies!” Bob also mouthed the “poink” effect, used for finger pokes.
2.) Godzilla’s Roars (1954)
Unlike the heavily re-edited version seen by most English-speaking audiences, the original Japanese film, Gojira, is about much more than an enraged dinosaur released by radiation. Godzilla is an example of daikaiju, (giant strange creatures) and he represents both negative human emotions and the uncontrollable destructive forces in nature. Japanese audiences found it moving and cathartic to symbolically revisit the recent nuclear devastation they alone had experienced directly. Godzilla’s rampages are atomic explosions occurring in slow motion. Critics there complained that the subject matter was inappropriate, but the film was a box-office success and was even nominated for the Japanese version of an Academy Award as Best Picture, competing against Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai !
The film’s composer, Akira Ifukube created unique roars befitting an impossible being. He loosened the strings of a bass viol, put rosin (what you use on a bow) all over tight leather gloves, and stroked them up and down the strings at different speeds. The recordings were slowed down, reverb and eq were added, and the roars were edited into the footage as required. The sounds have an organic resonance that connects with our emotions because they come from a manipulated acoustic instrument. Considering the inexpensive models and the man in a rubber monster suit we see, the roars help a lot.
3.) The Wilhelm Scream (1951 – Now?)
This one represents the kind of in-jokes that develop over time in the technical areas of motion picture production. It’s long been the custom for filmmakers to bring in a “screamer” to provide intense vocal reactions to be dubbed in later, because to make the onscreen actors shout so forcefully will cause hoarseness, and they’ll be unable to continue filming until they get their voices back. In 1951, a bit player on the film Distant Drums was brought in to record the vocal reaction of a “man being eaten by alligator”. Though we don’t know for sure, the screamer was probably character actor and singer Sheb Wooley, who would later become famous as the composer-performer of the song “The Purple People Eater“. The recorded scream became part of Warner Brothers’ in-house sound fx library, available for use in later movies.
It was next employed in the 3D western The Charge at Feather River (1953). In this case a minor character is shot in the leg by an arrow and reacts with the scream. When sound designer Ben Burtt was collecting fx for use in the post-production of Star Wars (1977), he found the original reel and named it “Wilhelm”, after this little-known character. To date this scream has appeared in more than 150 feature films, but now that the sound itself has become well known some sound editors say they can’t use it. It will draw too much attention to itself.
4.) Doctor Who’s TARDIS (1965)
There’s no logical reason that a time-and-relative-dimension-in-space-travel machine has to make any noise when it “moves”, except that we are conditioned to expect that all machines make noise, and cool, futuristic technology therefore must be accompanied by sounds. An inventive fellow named Brian Hodgson at the BBC Radiophonic Workshop came up with this one in a similar fashion to the Godzilla roar. He took the back door key to his mom’s apartment, scraped it up and down the low strings of a gutted piano and added reverb to the recording. The ambiguity of the sound has been described in ways from “wheezing and groaning” to one character’s assertion that Doctor Who causes it by “leaving the brakes on”.
5.) The Well to Hell
I’ll end with this story of a marriage between clever sound design and the inestimable gullibility of humans. Once upon a time there was an Italian horror movie called Baron Blood (1972), about an evil sadist who gets resurrected. The Baron lived in a spooky castle containing a museum of torture instruments, complete with sound effects representing the reactions of the unfortunate victims (Aieee! eeYAAA! OY! oooOW! etc.). Probably a good date movie.
Anyway, in unrelated news, scientists dug an experimental well in Russia’s Kola Peninsula in 1984. The hole went down 12 Km, and at the bottom they encountered unusual gases and rock formations, and it was warm, about 180F degrees. You wouldn’t want to live in a place that hot, but it’s still 40 degrees below what’s needed to boil water and 270 below the point where paper ignites.
Somehow this story about a deep well got exaggerated in retelling. The newer, scarier version was that scientists in remote Siberia dug down 14.4 Km (9 miles) and the drill broke through, as if the Earth was hollow. They measured temperatures of over 2000 degrees. Then, when they lowered super-sensitive microphones down the hole, what do you suppose they heard? THE SCREAMS OF A MILLION SOULS BEING TORTURED! And that proves that hell exists, God too, so there all you smart-alecky atheists.
Unfortunately, the recording provided by a “Mr. Azzakov” was a loop of the screams from “Baron Blood”, thus proving (I suppose) that horror movies are popular everywhere, even at the center of the Earth.