This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling.

When you think about Star Wars, what’s the first thing that comes to mind? Lightsabers? Spaceships? Alien creatures? What about all of the sounds that go with those things? How were those sounds made, and what makes them so good? In this episode, we explore how legendary Sound Designer Ben Burtt created the sonic universe of Star Wars from scratch, one sound at a time. Featuring Marshall McGhee.

MUSIC FEATURED IN THIS EPISODE

First Flight by David Molina
This is Our Time by Cassette Deck
Gizmo by Sound of Picture
Reckoning by Sound of Picture
Vox Bubble Rumba by Sound of Picture
Organ Groove by Sound of Picture
Bass Rider by Sound of Picture
Spring Comes Early by Sound of Picture
Lemonade by Sound of Picture
Repose by Sound of Picture
Wide Eyes by Sound of Picture

Twenty Thousand Hertz is produced out of the studios of Defacto Sound and hosted by D allas Taylor.

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View Transcript ▶︎

[SFX: TIE fighter/X-Wing fight]

You’re listening to Twenty Thousand Hertz.

The original Star Wars trilogy was groundbreaking in all kinds of ways. The costumes were incredibly creative. The special effects were mind boggling. And for sound design, Star Wars was completely revolutionary.

[SFX: TIE fighter/X-Wing fight continued]

[music in]

Whether or not you’re a Star Wars fan, is completely beside the point, because you know exactly what a lightsaber sounds like, [SFX] , you also know what R2-D2 sounds like [SFX] , and you also know what Darth Vader’s breathing sounds like [SFX] . These sound effects go well beyond the movie. They’re a part of our creative culture. And every bit as famous as the movies’ most quoted lines.

[music out]

[SFX clip: Obi Wan: The Force will be with you.

Yoda: Do or do not. There is no try.

Darth Vader: No, I am your father.]

[music in]

And there’s a reason sound designers keep going back to Star Wars for inspiration, even today, decades later. The sounds of Star Wars do such a great job of immersing us in a galaxy far, far away. They make this wild world of aliens, robots and space wizards feel real. Making these movies sound just right took an incredible amount of effort and creativity. And in the sound design world the mastermind behind these sound effects is truly a legend.

[music out]

His name is Ben Burtt.

Ben (Laserdisk): When I did Star Wars it was the very beginning of my career and I had a lot to learn. in fact I knew very little and so everything I did at that time was going down a new road to some extent.

That’s Ben Burtt in a 1993 interview for the Star Wars Laserdisc Box Set.

[music in]

Ben’s interest in sound started early. When Ben was just six, his father gave him a tape recorder. Growing up, Ben loved recording stories, TV shows, and any other interesting sounds he came across. By age 10, he was filming short dramas complete with customized music and sound effects.

[music out]

Flash forward to Los Angeles, in the early 70’s [SFX: tape fast forward].

[music in]

Ben had just earned his master’s in film production from the U.S.C. School of Cinematic Arts. Across town, a young director named George Lucas was working on his third movie. George’s dream was to adapt the 1936 sci-fi film Flash Gordon, but as hard as he tried, he couldn’t get the rights to one of the characters. So instead, he decided to make his own space opera. At that time, it was called “The Star Wars.”

To bring his vision to life, George knew he’d need to bring in all kinds of creative talent. Unfortunately, George’s go-to Sound Editor was unavailable, so he took a chance on a recent graduate named Ben Burtt. Little did George and Ben know that that one decision set off a creative revolution in the field of sound design.

[music out]

Up until then, people working in sound departments were considered more like technicians. But with Star Wars, Ben made it clear that sound design was an art of its own.

Marshall: He wasn't just editing sounds, he wasn't just dealing with dialogue and things like that. He was really creating a world from scratch, a character in the movie.

That’s Marshall McGhee. A game sound designer & host of the youtube show “Waveform”.

Marshall: Sound design is definitively a character in Star Wars.

Of course, sound is important in any movie, but creating the sonic landscape of Star Wars was a monumental responsibility.

[music in]

Ben (Laserdisc): A film such as Star Wars, the soundtrack is completely fabricated in the studio. Probably on the average, 15 or 20% of the dialogue which is in the final film was originally recorded on the set during the performance by the actors. The remaining 85% of that dialogue was added later with the actors coming back and replacing their lines of dialogue, or different actors coming in to give voices to characters or monsters or puppets or something that might be in the show. All of the sound effects you hear in the film are added later. Everything from footsteps to cloth rustle [SFX] to the handling of props [SFX] to the sound of vehicles, [SFX] weapons, [SFX] aliens [SFX] and exploding Death Stars [SFX]. Those are all things which didn’t exist at the time of shooting. They had to be manufactured after the fact.

[music out]

A quick note: Some of these Ben Burtt interview clips are from a commentary track for the Star Wars Blu Ray set, so you’ll sometimes hear the movie playing in the background while he talks. Here’s Ben:

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): Star Wars being a Fox film allowed us to, if we wanted to, to use some sound effects from their old classic library, and being a real fan of the old sound effects, I did pull a few things and use them here and there.

But Ben wanted Star Wars to have a totally unique sonic signature. So he made the vast majority of the sound effects from scratch.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): Most of the effort was put into customizing original sounds for the movie.

To get these sounds just right, he’d have to go find them out in the real world. The first one he found would become the king of Star Wars sound effects.

[SFX: Lightsaber]

[music in]

Marshall: The lightsaber was the first sound that Ben Burtt made for the Star Wars movies. I think that's an important detail because, when you think about establishing a world when you’re starting a new project it's important to get the mood right from the beginning. I think the lightsabers, because of the iconic role they play in the story, it was probably really important for Ben Burtt to sit down and say, here's what this Jedi weapon is going to sound like. Here's what the main emotion of this weapon is going to feel like.

[music out]

Ben (Ep IV sound design): At the time, I was just leaving U.S.C. film school. I was a projectionist at the school, I had a part time job. And in the projection booth were these old 35mm theater projectors, which, when they were just turned on and set idle, they had a very interesting humming sound. It was part of the interlock motors in the projectors. And I used to be in the booth working and I would enjoy that sound. It was a nice musical kind of hum.

To demonstrate Ben’s techniques, Marshall recreated the sound of a lightsaber from the ground up. Here’s his emulation of an idling projector, which he made on a synthesizer [SFX].

Ben (Ep IV sound design): And when I saw the pictures of the lightsaber in the artwork for the film, I thought “Wow, I think that hum of that projector motor is just the right thing.” So I went and recorded the hum and held onto it, as the basis for the lightsabers.

Marshall: When he recorded that originally, he thought it was a good start, but it didn't really sound mean yet. It didn't really sound like it could do any damage yet.

Ben (Ep IV sound design): And the other element came about by accident. I had a microphone cable that was broken, partially, and as I was carrying my tape recorder across my apartment one day, and I went near the television set, the microphone picked up the buzz from the television picture tube, just a direct electronic interference.

What you’re hearing now is Marshall’s recreation of that sound. [SFX]

Ben (Ep IV sound design): And I took the buzz and combined it with the projector hum, and the two sounds together became the basis for the laser sword.

Marshall: Now, when you finish making that, it's just a loop. It's just a humming loop, [SFX] which on its own sounds cool, but it doesn't sound like it's moving yet. It doesn't have any place in the environment.

BB (Ep IV sound design): To produce the sound of the moving lightsabers, I took the steady recording of the hum and buzz, and played it over a speaker in a room and then re-recorded that sound with another microphone. And I could take that microphone and wave it around in the air and it would produce what’s called a Doppler Effect. That is a pitch shift because the sound is moving relative to the microphone. And by doing that, I was able to take the steady sound of the lightsaber– and give it a sense of movement, of coming to and fro, or back and forth.

Marshall: It sounds like it's a physical beam of light that's arcing through the environment. It just sounds so real.

Again, here’s the humming loop Marshall made.

[SFX: Humming loop]

And here’s that same humming loop with a doppler effect Marshall added to it.

[SFX: Humming loop with doppler effect]

Ben Burtt combined unique sounds with a unique performance. This made each swing feel real and added a special human touch.

Marshall: It could have easily been a very sci-fi sound. It could have very easily been a synthesizer or something [SFX], but it sounds so grounded in reality. I think that's the sound for me that gets me every time.

Just like the TV buzz in the lightsaber, Ben found the sound for the blasters completely by accident.

Marshall: So there's this great story of Ben Burtt hiking through the Pocono mountains in Pennsylvania. He was hiking and his backpack caught on a guy-wire that was leading up to a radio tower, one of the giant metal wires that connects a radio tower to the ground.

Ben (Ep IV sound design): And as I went by it, it made a twanging sound, an unusual sound [SFX].

Marshall: You can sort of get an idea of what he heard if you have a slinky in your house. If you stretch it out across a room and you hit it with a metal object on one end, you can hear this sort of [SFX] this sound of the frequencies bouncing back and forth in the metal wire.

Ben (Wall-E Animation): That happens because the high frequencies travel faster than the low frequencies. So if you listen to the sound far away, down the wire, the high frequencies get there first, and the sort of mid frequencies and then the low frequencies, so you get [sfx].

Ben (Ep IV sound design): And I immediately said to myself, “Well, that’s a laser gun!” It had an otherworldly sound to it. And when I returned to California, I went around Southern California, in the region of Los Angeles, banging on the guy-wires of different radio towers to come up with just the right sound.

Marshall: He found this great wire out in the middle of the desert and took a contact microphone out, and put it on the wire, and started hitting it with a wrench. What he got were the base of the blaster sounds for Star Wars. [SFX]

These recording sessions also produced the sound of the Y Wings.

Ben (Ep IV sound design): Actually, when I was up trying to record guy wires for lasers, the wind was blowing so hard through one set of guy wires that it was producing a musical note, it was almost a musical chord, and it was used principally for the background sounds of the pilots in the Y wing fighters.

[SFX: Y Wings]

Now, Y Wings are cool, but the coolest sounding ships in Star Wars have to be the TIE Fighters [SFX].

Marshall: The TIE fighters are one of my favorite sounds in Star Wars. I mean talk about an emotional gripping spaceship sound.

Marshall: That spaceship is an enemy spaceship. That's not a friendly spaceship. It's roaring at me.

Marshall: The TIE fighter, was made with two main elements again. The first being the sound of a car passing by a microphone on wet pavement. [SFX]

Marshall: And then layered on top of that are these elephant growls, these horrible elephant growls [SFX]. Not a lot of people even know elephants make this sound, but they do growl from time to time, and they produce this insane roaring. [SFX]

And here’s Marshall's redesign blending these sounds together.

[SFX: Marshalls Tie Fighter Redesign]

Marshall: So those two elements layered together are what creates the base loop for the TIE fighter.

This was one of those times when Ben used the Fox sound library. Here’s a clip of some elephants from the 1958 movie The Roots of Heaven [SFX].

Sound familiar? [SFX: Tie fighter]

This technique of layering animal sounds into sound effects is actually pretty common.

[music in]

Marshall: You find animal layers in a lot of stuff, It's a very widely used technique in sound design.

Marshall: I think the two examples that come to mind that people use animal layers a lot are explosions and gunshots. Or car engines for example, car starts. Like, if you listen to car starts in film, there's very often a lion growl layered in with a car start, just to make it sound even that much more full bodied and that much more interesting.

Here’s the sound of a car starting [SFX].

And here’s a roaring lion. [SFX]

Now here’s how it sounds when we layer those two together. [SFX]

Marshall: I like it in explosions too, when an explosion is going on, you're just looking for character. There's something missing. If you listen through libraries of explosion recordings, a lot of them sound great, but they just are missing an element of character or an emotional component. I find that sometimes I'll layer in like the sound of a screeching as an explosion goes off just to get that extra little intrigue in the high end of an explosion.

Here’s an explosion sound effect [SFX].

And here’s a red tailed hawk screech [SFX].

Now let’s put them together [SFX].

Marshall: One of the main benefits to using animal sounds as a layer in design, whether they're obvious or not, is that animals already have a place in our minds as sort of representing something. So for example, an elephant growl like that may be terrifying. A bird chirp may be sort of small, and it might evoke the idea of stealth or a smaller vehicle. Or for example, a whale might evoke something more emotional and low. As human beings, we already have in our minds ideas of what different animals represent to us.

To demonstrate this, Marshall made several alternate TIE fighter sounds using different animals.

Marshall: This base layer is the car pass by that I made to layer under all of these and sort of give them consistency [SFX].

Marshall: So here's the version of the TIE fighter sound that, instead of the elephant, I played a snake sound. [SFX]

Marshall: And this version, I used a bunch of different bird chirps layered on top of each other. [SFX]

Marshall: And then this final version I made with some underwater recordings of different whales and sea creatures. [SFX]

These alternate designs show that just one layer can change the ship's entire emotional impact. The elephant growls used in the TIE fighter make us feel fear on a primal level. And that’s why they are so powerful.

[SFX: Tie fighter]

[music in]

Making sound effects for the weapons and ships of Star Wars was hard enough, but there’s a whole other category of sounds that we haven’t even brought up yet: Star Wars is brimming with quirky robots [SFX: R2-D2] and bizarre aliens, and they all have their own unique personality [SFX: Chewbaca]. Giving voices to characters like Chewbaca and R2-D2 were some of the biggest challenges Ben faced. That’s coming up after this.

[music out]

MIDROLL

[music in]

For his work on Star Wars, Ben Burtt is considered one of the forefathers of modern sound design. To create these iconic sound effects, Ben spent countless hours recording sounds out in the world. Really, just anything that caught his ear.

Ben (Laserdisc): Animals, aircraft carriers, jets, appliance motors, whatever it might be.

Eventually, Ben built up a personal library made up of thousands of hand-recorded sounds. Back in the studio, he’d manipulate them and mix them together like a mad scientist.

[music out]

For instance, in the Empire Strikes Back, the Millennium Falcon’s hyperdrive keeps breaking down. To make the sound effect for it, Ben combined eight different recordings. One of these sounds was a starter on a vintage biplane. [SFX]

There was some hissing air from a piece of dental equipment. [SFX]

The sound of an arclight motor. [SFX]

There was the motor of a tank turret, recorded from inside the tank. [SFX]

Then there was the sound of the groaning old pipes from the building Ben worked in. [SFX]

Ben (Hyperdrive): Now, if we took all these sounds and played them together, we’d get the following effect of the hyperdrive malfunctioning. [SFX]

And Here it is in the movie. [SFX]

[music in]

Think about the hours of recording it took to make that one sound effect. Now multiply that for all of the sound effects in the original Star Wars trilogy. Keep in mind that this was before the age of computers. Back then, you had to record everything to tape. Today, sound designers have access to digital sound libraries that come with thousands of pre-recorded sounds.

Marshall: I have everything in my computer. I have three terabytes of sounds that are just like, I can just click on anything and instantly hear it.

The convenience of digital sound libraries is a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it means that amateur filmmakers don’t need access to all kinds of expensive equipment in order to have sound effects. On the other hand, it means that Ben’s analogue style of recording everything manually is a lot less common.

[music out]

Marshall: I mean when you look at Ben Burt's work and you think okay, basically everything, other than a few things he drew from the Fox library, basically everything was a recording project. He was out there getting sounds from you know hitting a guy wire with a wrench for the blasters [SFX] and things like that. You don't see that very often anymore because people who grew up with digital audio just sort of open their library and they go, “Well, do I have any laser guns in my library?”

Marshall: There's a temptation there to start every sound from within your own library or “in the box,” as they say.

At some point, that approach can stifle your creativity.

Marshall: It can just sort of feel stagnant when you design that way.

Marshall: It acts as a crutch because your work starts to sound the same if you just use the same library over and over again.

For Ben, virtually everything had to be made “outside the box.” This was especially true when creating the sounds of the many strange characters of Star Wars. Unlike a Stormtrooper’s blaster, which might be something you can somewhat reuse, each of the characters needed a whole set of sounds, or even a believable alien language. One early challenge was Darth Vader.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): Vader was described in the script as having this life support suit on him and keeping him alive, as if he was badly damaged in some way. And so what I did in the early concepts of Vader I had some clicking, like there was some kind of relays and mechanism associated with him. Some signature that always told you he was around. The script mentioned he had some kind of breathing apparatus and so on. The early concepts of Vader I made up, he was beeping [SFX] and clicking [SFX] and breathing [SFX], and he sounded like the ER, the whole room at once, you know? It was kind of distracting.

So Ben cut it back to just the breathing.

Ben (Ep IV sound design): The breathing is me breathing through a particular scuba tank regulator. I went to a local scuba shop one evening, and after they had a class, where people left, there were numerous tanks and regulators laying around the pool. I just went around and recorded different ones. I would breathe through it, and I had a little tiny microphone, and I actually put that down inside one of the regulators so it was extremely close to the valve that opens and closes, and then I breathed through it.

Marshall: That sound was then taken back to the studio and pitched down and became the iconic breathing loop of Darth Vader. [SFX]

As you may know, Darth Vader’s menacing voice was performed by James Earl Jones, but Jones wasn’t the person in the Vader costume. On set, Darth Vader was played by character actor David Prowse. Prowse did perform Vader’s lines while filming, and it’s pretty amazing to hear.

[SFX clip: Prowse Vader “Start tearing this ship apart piece by piece until you find those tapes. Find the passengers of this vessel. I want them alive!”]

Now here’s the final version.

[SFX clip: Vader “Commander, tear this ship apart until you’ve found those plans, and bring me the passengers. I want them alive!”]

Here it is again on set… morphing into what we hear in the final film.

[SFX: Prowse Vader “Start tearing this ship apart piece by piece until you find those plans, and bring me the passengers. I want them alive!”]

Vader also needed a sound for when he used The Force, the mysterious power of the Jedi and the evil Sith. But what would something like that even sound like?

Marshall: The Force is another one of those sounds that just is so menacing and works perfectly, I think, in every scene that it's in.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): There’s a few different effects associated with Vader using The Force. We always put in a deep, low frequency kind of earthquake rumble, which could be amped up as Vader tightened The Force on someone [SFX: Vader using the The Force]. The deep rumbles came from a number of different sources, some of it was just some thunder that was slowed way down, and the high frequencies rolled off, some of it was the slowed down sound of a missile launch, and some it was from the Fox library, actually it was some earthquake material made for Journey to the Center of the Earth. [SFX]

Marshall: I think it works so well in the scenes that it's in, because it's almost scary in how simple it is. It could have very easily been an overt scifi spell cast kind of hybrid sound [SFX] and it would have probably been too much, and it would've evoked the wrong feeling. But when it's just the simple low rumble, you can really feel the space around Darth Vader when he uses it [SFX] it's just like, it’s terrifying.

Making the sound effects for Darth Vader had its challenges, but finding voices for the non-human characters was even harder. [SFX: Chewbaca]

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): My first assignment was to develop the voice of Chewbacca. They wanted to have samples of what Chewbacca might sound like prior to shooting, because it would be an aid in the actual directing of the film.

Chewbacca was famously played by Peter Mayhew. But, again, Mayhew wasn’t the voice of Chewbacca. Here’s how Chewbacca sounds in the final film. [SFX]

...but while filming, Peter Mayhew often spoke Chewie’s lines in English. So here’s what Chewie sounded like on the set.

[SFX clip: Chewie “That old man is mad.” Han “You said it Chewie”]

Marshall: I think some people believe that Chewbacca's voice was actually performed by Peter Mayhew or by an actor in the studio, or by some human being, but it was not performed by a human being.

To get Chewie’s voice, Ben recorded all kinds of animals.

Ben (Sound Advice): …walruses and lions and badgers, sick animals, domestic animals… all sorts of things.

But there was one animal he kept coming back to.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): Ultimately, Chewie’s voice was made up of mostly recordings of bears. And eventually, I was led to a cute little pet bear named Pooh who lived on a farm in Tehachapi, California.

Marshall: Ben Burtt would go out to this farm and collect just hours of these recordings of this bear.

Ben (Screen Stage TV): It wasn’t a simple recording session. Bears don’t just sit down in front of a microphone and just emote. You have to just sort of document whatever they’ll do.

Ben started categorizing these animal sounds by emotion.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): I took the angry sounds [SFX] and put them in one collection, I took the cute sounds [SFX] and put them in another, I took the sounds which sounded like an animal asking a question [SFX], at least the intonation was such that it sounded inquisitive.

He tweaked the sounds to give them just the right character.

Ben (Screen Stage TV): Slow the recordings down, maybe speed other things up and manipulate the bits of recordings and I essentially started a word list for the wookie [SFX].

Marshall: And he would then later in the film would look through these folders that are based on emotions and sort of say, “Okay well Chewbacca is happy here or he's angry,” and he would throw them in based on what the scene felt like. [SFX]

It was clear from the beginning that Chewie’s voice would involve animal sounds. But for R2-D2, there was no obvious starting point. [SFX]

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): The voice of R2-D2 turned out to be the most prolonged and difficult sound to develop because it involved a performance, and it also had no precedent.

Ben (Sound Advice): Here we had, supposedly, a machine that was going to talk, it was going to act, it was gonna draw on our emotions. Yet, it was a machine. It didn’t have a face with a smile or mouth or ears, and it couldn’t speak English and it couldn’t even mouth words. At least Chewbacca could make kind of animal sounds, which you could attribute a personality to.

The script wasn’t much help either.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): The script did not prescribe the specific lines of dialogue that he had, but merely said that R2 “Responded” or R2 “Beeped” or something of that sort, and it was left up to me to come up with possibilities for George Lucas to listen to.

In the beginning, Ben tried a bunch of computerized, mechanical sounds. But nothing he tried had enough character. R2D2 was a robot, but it needed to feel human.

[music in]

Ben (Sound Advice): So the idea came up to really combine this sort of human sound with the electronic sound. That way we still might be able to have the character of a machine, but get the personality and emotion of a living organism.

It was a start, but neither of them knew where this human sound should come from.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): George, at one point, thought that perhaps even recording babies, before they could talk, the sounds that babies make, cooing and sighing and little vocalizations they make as they learn to talk, might be the key to R2’s voice. And it was definitely the right direction to go, because R2 is, well, kind of an ornery child. He’s smart but also has a certain innocence about him. He can be insubordinate, but overall, he’s lovable.

Still, nothing quite seemed to fit.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): One day, when George and I were discussing the voice, we both found ourselves imitating, making little funny noises as we kind of described what R2 might be like.

As Ben and George cooed and beeped at each other, it dawned on them that maybe they didn’t need recordings of babies or anything else. Maybe Ben could give R2 its human side.

Ben (Ep. IV sound design): I ended up doing vocalizations at the same time I’d play a keyboard on an old ARP synthesizer, and I learned to sort of whistle and beep along with what I was playing on a keyboard. And through a lot of practice, I would get something that sounded expressive, and I could say, “That’s R2 saying ‘Come this way’ or 'He’s making a rude remark to Threepio' or something."

Ben’s voice turned out to be the magic ingredient that gave R2-D2 its quirky, adorable personality. [SFX: R2-D2]

Performing that voice meant that Ben could also add “Voice Actor” to his long list of duties on Star Wars. Ultimately, it’s that level of dedication and achievement that makes Ben such an inspiration to Sound Designers.

[music in]

Marshall: I think sound designers keep coming back to it for inspiration because of how much emotion he captured in every sound.

Marshall: He takes all of these opportunities to include performance in something that may not even need it. Like the lightsaber, for example, he took the extra effort to actually swing the microphone around in time with the video himself.

Marshall: R2-D2's voice being him just performing his own voice, like whistling with the synthesizer, things like that. He really took every opportunity to put emotion into things that otherwise could have just been done very cheaply and blandly.

Marshall: It's those things, I think, that separate him from a lot of other sound designers. Not only of the time, because he was clearly in a class of his own at the time, but just even today.

If Ben had retired after Star Wars, he still would have been a sound design legend. Fortunately for us, Star Wars was only the beginning of Ben’s long career. Ben’s impact on Sound Design is so huge that it’s hard to imagine what the field would even be like without him. His influence is especially important to sci-fi. Ben’s mastery of sound helps audiences suspend their disbelief, and lose themselves in these strange alien worlds.

Marshall: Sound design gives all the authenticity to these weapons that you're hearing. It gives all the authenticity to these environments. Without it, I don't think Star Wars would have been anywhere near as popular as it's become, because people wouldn't believe what they were seeing.

Marshall: When people first see A New Hope, they're not thinking about sound design, but they're just believing what they're seeing because of the sound design. When sound is done well, that's of course what it does.

Ben (Wall-E Animation): When you use sounds gathered in the outside world, the real world, and you bring them into a science fiction film, you get the credibility of those sounds, to sell to the audience what’s really just a very fantastic world.

[music out]

[music in]

CREDITS

Twenty Thousand Hertz is hosted by me, Dallas Taylor, and produced out of the sound design studios of Defacto Sound. Find out more at defactosound.com.

This episode was written and produced by Casey Emmerling, and me, Dallas Taylor. With help from Sam Schneble. It was sound designed and mixed by Jai Berger.

Special thanks to Marshall McGee. Marshall made all of the recreated sound effects for this episode. He’s also the host of a fantastic Youtube channel called Waveform. It was actually his Youtube video called “The Sound Design Secrets Of The Star Wars Universe,” that was the inspiration for this episode. You should immediately go subscribe to Waveform on Youtube.

Ben Burtt’s interview clips came from the 1993 Star Wars Laserdisc Boxset, a commentary track from the Star Wars Blu Ray, Episode 46 of The Commentary Track Podcast, a 1989 20/20 interview, an ABC documentary called Screen, Stage Television, and a special feature on the Wall-E DVD.

The music in this episode came from SoundofPicture.com and Musicbed.com.

If there’s a show topic that you are dying to hear, you can tell us in tons of different ways. My favorite way that you can tell us is by writing a review. In that review, tap 5 stars and then give us your show idea. If your podcast app doesn’t do this, you can always tell us your show idea on Twitter, Facebook, or by writing hi@20k.org.

Thanks for listening.

[music out]