soundboard episode 003

00:00 // introduction

[ soundboard is a production of the austin audio lab ]

Gabe: Learning about your past so that you can make super cool laser sounds in the future. It’s all happening now, on soundboard, with Mark and Gabe.

[ opening track ]

Mark: Hello everyone and welcome to Episode 3 of soundboard. soundboard is an audio production podcast hosted by myself, Mark Stelter, and captain of this Starship Enterprise, Gabe Alvarez.

Gabe: On today’s episode, we’ll take a bit of rewind. Mark is going to dive deep into the history of recorded sound, and talk about the incredible innovations that made it happen.

Mark: And shooting forward from that history, Gabe is going to be discussing how to use all of the modern resources we have available to create incredibly immersive sound effects. So with that, let’s hit 88 miles per hour and start with a blast from the past.

[ tape transition ]

 01:00 // history of recording, part 1

written by Mark Stelter

We as a society have been interested in recording ourselves in one capacity or another for millenia. Through written works, or stories passed down across generations, it's a way for us as individuals to share our experiences and emotions with others. Sound and music is no different. Musical notation, I would argue, is the earliest form of (verbally say quote/unquote) “recorded” sound giving us insight into the creative minds of those long past. We’ve all heard Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, well at least the ode to joy part, even though none of us were able to hear it when he wrote it. Although, to be fair, he couldn’t really hear it either.

Now, you might say that’s kind of a cop out and I’d respond, yeah ok point taken. What we currently perceive as actual recording, as in what we’re doing right now, started in the 1850s. It was around this time that in March of 1857, that a Parisian inventor named Eduard-Leon Scott de Martinville invented something called the phonautograph. This device has been largely overlooked in the public perception of sound recording because it lacked one of the key elements that we now associate with recording. The ability to play sound back. As the name implies, the device created an imprint or autograph of Martinville’s voice as a vibrating stylus traced the soundwaves across a piece of paper or glass coated with soot. After Martinville’s death in 1879 you would think no one would be able to hear his voice again, until, in 2008 a group known as the First Sounds Collective digitally recovered the soundwave recorded by his phonautograph and was able to reproduce his voice singing the French folk song Au Claire de la Lune. 

[ Au Claire de la Lune ]

And it sounds, well let’s be honest, it doesn’t sound great. But let’s take a step back and realize what we’re listening to. This is the actual voice of a man that lived 162 years ago. He made this recording in 1860, which is the same year that Abraham Lincoln was elected president. This is the same time that the concept and practicality of electricity was still in its infancy and commercial electric light wouldn’t really become available until the 1880s. And even then, it was very much a luxury and not widespread in many homes. Compare that to the ease with which we can record today and that is incredibly impressive. Martinville’s phonautograph was the first in a flurry of inventions in the later years of the 1800s that would propel the recording of sound into what we hear today. 

One of those inventions, and probably the one that we are most familiar with as far as the beginning of recorded sound, is the phonograph invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. While Edison was the first to create a prototype and patent the device, he did have a contemporary back in Paris by the name of Charles Cros who almost beat him to the punch. Cros had written a thesis and submitted it to the Academy of Science in Paris based on similar principles as the phonograph several weeks before Edison filed his patent in the United States. However, what Cros gained in primacy, he lacked in technicality. His thesis contained sound ideas and a proof of concept, but didn’t provide any diagrams of blueprints for how to make his device which he would later call the paleophone. As such, the phonograph is still largely credited as the first device capable of both sound recording and reproduction.  

Edison’s first version of the phonograph used a grooved, metal cylinder covered in tin foil and a hand crank to allow the vibrating stylus to record sounds onto the foil paper. To play the sound back, the cylinder was connected to a large horn that amplified the sound to audible levels. If you’ve ever put the needle down on a vinyl record before turning on your speaker, that’s pretty close to what the cylinders sounded like without amplification. These tin foil recordings however weren’t exactly the most durable or effective medium to store or play back sound since the foil would wear out over time and use. But since he was content at the moment with his patent on the phonograph itself, Edison went on to focus on other things, like stealing the best ideas from Nikola Tesla. 

Historical grudge matches aside, the phonograph and cylinder were quickly refined by several contemporaneous inventors, Charles Sumner Tainter and Chichester Bell working under Alexander Graham Bell at his Volta Laboratory. They improved upon the foil cylinders by covering a cardboard cylinder in wax which still allowed the vibrating stylus to imprint soundwaves and proved to be both more durable and cost effective. These wax cylinders would be the primary method of recording through the 1920s, but were fairly bulky and difficult to store. Enter Emile Berliner, a german immigrant to the United States in the 1870s who quite literally turned the recording world on it’s side. In 1888 Berliner developed the precursor to the vinyl record, the gramophone, as well as flat disc records made out of a material called shellac. While the shellac records were even more durable than wax cylinders and easier to maintain, they were more expensive to produce. As such, they wouldn’t become commercially viable until 1929 when the process to create them became refined and they finally overtook the cylinder approach. 

This brings us into the modern era of recording and the advent of electrical over acoustic recording techniques that allowed for even greater quality sound capture and reproduction. Tune in to the next episode of “Soundboard” when I’ll delve into the evolution of the LP and the beginnings of digital recording technology that pretty much allows us to do what we’re doing right now!

[ tape transition ]

08:10 // building blasters

written by Gabe Alvarez

In 1977, Star Wars explodes onto the cinematic scene, arresting audiences worldwide and catalyzing decades of adoration, discussion, and obsession. Star Wars forever changes the ecology of filmmaking, but since conversations about its artistic, technical, and cultural merits are pretty oversaturated at this point, there really isn’t much novel insight for us to offer, despite Mark and I being definitely, if not obviously, big fans of the franchise.  So we’ll move on.

Now, when I think of Star Wars, three things come immediately to mind: the amazing visual effects, the spectacular and enduring music, and, of course, the iconic sounds. Ben Burtt, the now legendary sound designer, unproven at the time, is recruited by George Lucas to define the sounds of this gritty, industrial, grounded, organic universe he hopes to capture. Burtt recalls, “...it was very unusual for someone to be employed to make specific sounds for film … Then along came George Lucas.” And Lucas says, “ …take a year and go out and collect all the interesting sounds you can think of.” So he does.

Burtt takes his field recorder and an open mind and ends up hand crafting an expansive catalog of sounds. Things that he thinks to record. Things that he hears that surprise him. And he takes it all back to the studio and starts building libraries and libraries of sounds: places, people, technologies. And an unorthodox methodology yielded unorthodox and genre defining results. Especially for the sound I’m thinking of today.

[ Star Wars sample ]

Blasters. Blasters in Star Wars are ubiquitous. Pretty much every character uses one at some point and every ship has some heavy derivation of it. It’s an iconic sound, to me it’s an iconic sound and this is wild coming from a series with no shortage of iconic sounds. 

[ SFX: a lightsaber, R2-D2, a TIE fighter ]

And the story is that their discovery was an accident -- Burtt was hiking in the Pocono Mountains, his backpack caught on a radio tower guy wire and ‘pinged’ it. And he hears the ‘pew’ as the vibration goes up and down the metal cable and that’s where he gets the idea to come back and record the ‘pew pew’ sounds for Star Wars. So I decided: I’ve seen some of those in my neighborhood, let me see what I can do.

[ SFX: recording around the neighborhood ]

I don’t have any cool radio towers in walking distance, but I’ve seen power lines with support wires I figured would work just the same. I had a pretty good idea where to look. Not exact, but pretty good. And this was my first challenge. Location. Things are hard to find when you… I feel like I tend to notice these things when I’m not looking for them, so I spent a lot of time just kind of walking. But the good news is, you can just follow the power lines and eventually you’ll find what you’re looking for. Probably. The problem is when you spend a couple hours hitting power lines with a wrench, people kind of start noticing and looking at you weird.

My second challenge was condition. All of the cables that I found were really small in diameter. A lot of them were too slack to work, or they were resting on a tree branch or something. I could tell that the sound was going to be muffled, I wouldn’t get that pew sound I was looking for. And I was really worried about the sounds I was getting. But I did what I could. I used my beat up contact mic, and went at the cables with my wrench, the hammer, and the screwdriver. Just trying things. They didn’t all sound good. I didn’t know if any of it sounded good. Or if I had anything I could actually use.

But it was a nice day. And I like walking around.

[ SFX: reviewing and processing recordings ]

I was pretty excited to listen back. I was pretty nervous, but I was pretty excited. I’d recorded each combination of cable and tool for at least a minute, so there was a lot to sort through. Unfortunately, as I sorted through it, I found that a lot of it failed to bring me joy. I knew that I was working under less than optimal conditions, so I tried to anticipate some iffy results, but I thought even these takes were pretty disappointing. They’re dull, muffled, just lacking immediate character for me.

And then I found the good ones.

Some of them were good. And some of them were good. It’s a balance of finding the right tension, the right diameter, the right impact, the right instrument. I was happy to be moving in the right direction. And then the fun part.

Making blaster rifles and pulse cannons. Maybe somebody has made an official guide somewhere on how you should do it, but I took the opportunity to sit down in the lab and go mad scientist on it. First, I raised the gain and completely blew out my levels so it just had this intrusive, ugly quality. Then, I tweaked combinations of pitch shifting, overdrive, some flange, and experimented with EQ until I had something that had a grounded quality to it, this familiar weapon punch, but with a gritty, analog messiness that gave me a hint of technology. I gave myself the freedom to see what I would get. And what I got was pretty cool.

So, as it turns out, it’s not so hard, given the right tools, to create your own custom blaster sounds from sounds you source yourself. Which is a great skill to realize when you do a lot of work in the sci-fi genre, as we do, or are an indie producer with limited budget for foley. Now, as I put these sounds together, I do so with producing audio fiction specifically in mind, and as I started exporting these sounds, hearing them play back over each other, I got a little inspired.

So I grabbed some old recordings I had handy. The ceiling fan of a hotel bathroom, the condenser of my friend’s refrigerator, vibrations from a helicopter ride Mark and I took, and, of course, my vacuum. With a little EQ on those blasters, it almost sounds like we’re flying over some kind of ‘star war.’ Add some music, some switches, and all of a sudden you’re propelling your audience into a scene. An exciting, kinetic scene. A scene full of blasters nobody has ever heard before.

And the characters jump out of the ship, and there are lasers going everywhere and everybody’s running and they’re like, move, move, get to cover and then the ship flies up and -- or whatever you want to do, they’re your blaster sounds. And if you want to check out our blaster sounds, find a link in today’s show notes or visit our blog at AustinAudioLab.com.

16:25 // closing

Mark: Thanks for listening to this episode of soundboard! Join us next time for more history on the recording process and further insights into all the different ways we can use and combine sounds to make something entirely new.

Gabe: You can find links to the gear we used and the sources we referenced for today’s episode in the show notes, or, on our blog post at austinaudiolab.com. This is the Austin Audio Laboratory, signing off for now.

[ music fades out ]