In 1951, a sound designer on a Gary Cooper western called Distant Drums needed to overdub a scream onto a scene in which a man is killed by an alligator. He brought a contract actor into his studio and rolled tape as the man did six brief, anguished screams in one take. These screams were then added to the Warner Brothers sound library, and over the next couple of decades they found their way into dozens of Warner Brothers films.

In the mid-’70s, a young sound designer named Ben Burtt gave these sounds a name: “the Wilhelm scream,” after a character in one of the earliest films that utilized the sounds. A couple of years later, Burtt was hired to work on a film called Star Wars. As an homage, he overdubbed the scream onto a scene in that film. Then he overdubbed it onto a scene in The Empire Strikes Back. And Return of the Jedi. A fellow Lucasfilm sound designer began using the Wilhelm too, in Raiders of the Lost Ark and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, among other movies. And thus a film-geek in-joke was born. In the last 30 years the Wilhelm has been used winkingly in dozens of movies and TV shows, from Reservoir Dogs and The X-Files to Aladdin and Return of the King. More details are at Hollywood Lost and Found.

The video below is a compilation of dozens of Wilhelms from the last half-century.

[via an excellent blog called Cynical-C.]

This is fantastic: On transom.org, a site devoted to “channeling new work and voices to public radio through the Internet,” the film editor and sound editor Walter Murch is spending several weeks as a sort of philosopher-in-residence. I learned of Murch’s transom.org appearance through a guest post by the former New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler on one of my favorite sites, Design Observer.

Murch has won Oscars for both film editing (The English Patient) and sound editing (The English Patient and Apocalypse Now)—a remarkable achievement, given some of the very different skills those two jobs require. Murch is responsible for at least one of my all-time favorite film sequences: the scene in The Conversation where the surveillance expert Harry Caul (played by Gene Hackman) assembles a listenable mixdown from several shoddy recordings of a single conversation. The sound editing in that scene is a perfect example of Murch’s genius.

In several essays and a discussion thread in his special transom.org section, Murch relates a number of details about the ways the human brain processes sound. He then explores how these details inform the arsenal of techniques a sound editor must use to impart complex, multilayered audio information without smothering the listener in a gelatinous blob of noise. The extraordinary centerpiece of Murch’s transom.org residency is his detailed breakdown of the various threads of sound that run through the monumental “Ride of the Valkyries” helicopter sequence in Apocalypse Now. Murch demonstrates his concepts with a series of videos of the scene, each one isolating a separate component of the audio track. As Murch explains, he originally set up the sequence’s audio as six separate layers of sound. But he eventually realized that six layers was one too many: “[A]t any one moment (for practical purposes, let’s say that a ‘moment’ is any five-second section of film), five layers is the maximum that can be tolerated by an audience if you also want them to maintain a clear sense of the individual elements that are contributing to the mix.” In the case of the helicopter sequence, he writes,

I found I could build a “sandwich” with five layers to it. If I wanted to add something new, I had to take something else away. For instance, when the boy in the helicopter says “I’m not going, I’m not going!” I chose to remove all the music. On a certain logical level, that is not reasonable, because he is actually in the helicopter that is producing the music, so it should be louder there than anywhere else. But for story reasons we needed to hear his dialogue, of course, and I also wanted to emphasize the chaos outside—the AK47’s and mortar fire that he was resisting going into—and the helicopter sound that represented “safety,” as well as the voices of the other members of his unit. …

Under the circumstances, music was the sacrificial victim. The miraculous thing is that you do not hear it go away—you believe that it is still playing even though, as I mentioned earlier, it should be louder here than anywhere else. And, in fact, as soon as this line of dialogue was over, we brought the music back in and sacrified something else. Every moment in this section is similarly fluid, a kind of shell game where layers are disappearing and reappearing according to the dramatic focus of the moment. It is necessitated by the “five-layer” law, but it is also one of the things that makes the soundtrack exciting to listen to.

In 2002, Knopf published The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, a collection of transcribed dialogues between Murch and Michael Ondaatje, the author of The English Patient.

The fantastic American Memory section of the Library of Congress’s website has a great online exhibit about Emile Berliner (1851-1929), the man who invented the gramophone—the precursor of today’s DJ equipment. Berliner, an immigrant who was mostly self-educated, also helped develop the first early microphones and a new kind of acoustic tile, among other inventions. The online exhibit, Emile Berliner and the Birth of the Recording Industry, has an excellent short history of early sound recording devices, as well as an archive of dozens of audio files digitized from original Berliner recordings. (A recording from the 1890s called “A Few Words in Regard to Drinking,” by an apparent comedian named John Terrell, is an amusing time capsule.)

As a kid growing up in Bloomington, Indiana, I was creeped out by Jaws, Sleestaks, and a cheesy local public-access show called Haunted Indiana. As an adult, few things have given me the heebie-jeebies more than recordings of so-called numbers stations—mysterious shortwave radio stations that broadcast endless blocks of seemingly random numbers. Shortwave listeners around the world have been encountering these cryptic broadcasts for decades. As this site explains, “All available evidence indicates that some of these transmissions may be somehow connected to espionage activities.”

The sounds that emanate from these stations are mysterious and hypnotic and eerie. If you were to listen to them alone in a darkened room at 3 a.m.—not that I have, mind you—you might find yourself believing you’re listening to the voice of Death itself. Music groups such as Stereolab and Boards of Canada have used samples from numbers stations in their own recordings, and the director Cameron Crowe used some in his movie Vanilla Sky.

And now, the hook for this post: The British label Irdial-Discs recently rereleased its 1997 four-CD set of numbers station recordings, The Conet Project: Recordings of Shortwave Numbers Stations. Irdial’s main Conet Project page contains this description of the numbers station phenomenon and the questions it raises:

[Continue reading "The Conet Project"...]