Sound Makes All The Difference

[Metryq]

It's been a while since I watched certain episodes. And I was just cringing at the metal-bucket-being-kicked-down-a-hallway sound effects of Nomad's bolt hitting the Enterprise in the pre-title teaser for "The Changeling." I know television audio in the '60s was pretty dry, but check out "The Doomsday Machine" hammering the Enterprise—deeper, actual explosion-like sound effects followed by a long rumble, like thunder rolling across the hills. That made you feel the impact, and the size of the ship.

Overall, Star Trek's audio environments were superb. By "room tone" alone you knew if you were on the bridge, in engineering, the transporter room, or in the open on an alien planet. Even the dialog was written in such a way that if an episode were played over radio, you'd be able to follow all the action.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

As a kid, I thought the bridge sound with its whirring instruments was the coolest. But now I think it would be burdensome at best to hear it every day at work for the whole shift. Luckily, the Main Viewing Screen only goes "Be-beep be-beep, be-beep be-beep" when someone is looking at it. [KIRK: "Mister Sulu, I thought I told you to keep your eyes off that thing."]

The clattering sound of the ship's computer was made with an electric typewriter. I think this was meant to suggest the relays of a computer technology that came before vacuum tubes and transistors. The idea was already obsolete in 1966, but it made intuitive sense to most viewers that the computer must be "doing something" to churn out the answers. You can hear it working, so even the dumbest yokel would understand it's a talking machine, and not some woman on the intercom.

Robby the Robot made a brief clattering sound to announce his lines of dialogue, and while Star Trek probably recorded its own typewriter effect, I think they got the idea from Forbidden Planet.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

I suppose there's some logic to wanting a computer to sound like it's accomplishing something - a psychological source of satisfaction, a reassurance that everything is coming along. And eventually you get a sense of its rhythms and how long it will take to produce a result, how much time left.

 

[BK613]

As a kid, I thought the bridge sound with its whirring instruments was the coolest.

Me too. It made the ship feel alive. Good world-building, IMO.

But now I think it would be burdensome at best to hear it every day at work for the whole shift.

You'd get used to it.
Because ships underway have a myriad of aural sources—turbines, pumps, vent blowers, and the flow of the water passed the hull, to name a few—that create a background that is very noticeable at first but later, you only aware of it when that background is gone.
I learned to sleep with the noises of the ships I served on, and when I went from shipboard life straight into civilian life, I found I had to add noise at night just to fall asleep. It was just too damned quiet at first.

 

[Spock's Barber]

Kirk’s reaction to the male computer voice in the
Mirror universe was cool. Sound editor Douglas Grindstaff never failed to impress me with his catalog of sound effects.

 

[hbquikcomjamesl]

only aware of it when that background is gone

True in my office, too. One of the IBM Midrange boxes in the office is quite loud when powered up (thankfully, only when I'm doing actual development work on it), but even when it's just sitting there in standby, mode, there's a small amount of fan noise from it. It's hardly noticeable to me . . . unless the circuit it's plugged into goes out (I'm convinced that the breaker is a bit wonky). Then I immediately notice that it's too quiet.

 

[BK613]

The observant reader will notice I only mentioned mechanical ambient noises. I'll leave it everyone's imagination the background noises possible from the ninety-five other people I shared the berthing compartment with.

 

[Warped9]

There were of interior sound fx added that likely wouldn’t be there in real life or at least not as noticeable. But I agree it created a very cool effect to convince you something was going on. Flash forward decades to more recently when the upgraded director’s edition of TMP resurrected the audio that was supposed to be there all along and it made a significant difference to the overall experience of the film.

In extent we heard a lot of sound fx in exterior ship scenes to make them come alive. Seeing phaser beams and ships flying by without any sound would be more real, but also rather dull.

 

[Laura Cynthia Chambers]

My theory is that the sounds can't be heard in universe out in space, but the characters have a collective knowledge/idea of how it would sound if they could hear it, so their brains fill in the missing sound.

 

[Rowdy Roddy McDowall]

I truly can't see the point. Of course, two popular sci-fi films have purposefully omitted ''space sounds'' during critical scenes, but when it was ''2001', nobody complained about it to the theater personnel. JJ Abrams took out the sound for a few moments in his less-popular TREKs........but I rather doubt he'd've approved of the soundless explosion in THE LAST JEDI. Nor did a lot of the misguided general public.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I've never had a problem with the realism of sounds in space, because there's isn't a camera in space most of the time either. We're looking in on events from beyond the fourth wall and can perceive things differently to the characters on screen. I wouldn't have a problem with the characters hearing sound from space scenes on the viewscreen either, as the computer can generate simulated audio from sensor readings to provide more information for the viewers. And of course they can hear things hitting the hull of the ship they're in, because it hit the hull.

But it's great when an episode or movie cuts out the sound at just the right moment to sell the fact that the characters are actually in space.

In conclusion: the only thing TOS ever did wrong when it comes to sound is that ticking sound when the computer is processing things. That's something that really should be silent in space.

 

[NCC-73515]

When Frakes asked someone (while they were filming the cave scenes for INS) where the light comes from in a cave, the answer was: Same place the music comes from.

 

[Ray Hardgrit]

I've heard of unmotivated lighting, but non-diegetic lighting is a new one!

 

[ZapBrannigan]

I've heard of unmotivated lighting, but non-diegetic lighting is a new one!

I think of it as the Omnicient point of view. When we see the Enterprise in space, there is no character who could see it that way, especially at warp. So I think the ship ought to be well-lit, TOS style, because if anybody can see in the dark, God can. And that's what the camera is portraying. Nobody is out there looking, it's just the Universe!

Sound in space is similar. Surely the Almighty could hear phaser beams if He wanted to. 2001 and Interstellar, and I think Gravity, made excellent use of "jarring silence" in space, and that approach works for me, too.

The execution is always more important than the mere idea.

 

[Metryq]

People complain about sound in space because they've been programmed to—it's a posturing thing. Yet all of cinema is an evolved language. The first movies were incredible simply for re-creating a life-like scene. Audiences were startled by an approaching train that almost "drove out of the screen."

Many years ago I asked my younger brother, "You're watching a movie, and you see a cut, and a dissolve. What's the difference?" He replied, "The cut is just a change in view. We do it mentally as we blink and re-focus on something else, and don't 'see' the sweeping move of our eyes and movement of the head. A dissolve slows down the pace, maybe shows the passage of time." And all without classes in movie-making—just from watching movies.

I remember a videogame from about 20 years ago—"Unreal" or something like that, a big calligraphic "U." It used the latest 3D engine and had a very gritty environment. One of the things about it that rubbed my fur the wrong way was the near pitch-black scenes where you couldn't see anything. But you knew you were being attacked from the sound, and some random patches of light showing movement in your first-person point-of-view.

It's a videogame, guys! Sight and sound are all you have. There are no other sensory inputs! You can't smell the monster, or feel your way along the walls, sense a draft, etc.

Default movie craft is already a tunnel-vision experience. We can see only what the camera is directly pointed at, or hear what the mixer has added for us. Anything the moviemaker can do to fill in the gestalt of a full environment, to let us know what is going on and tell a story can never be too much (such as cut-aways of details, or another perspective). Thus, I do not begrudge the "unrealistic" sparks of soft-metalled, non-ferrous bullets flashing around the hero, or the pulse-quickening and foreshadowing music giving me an adrenaline rush as the hero senses that there is something not quite right as he approaches a coming danger.

Forget actual cinema verite. Cameras do not see the way we do, nor do microphones hear the way we do. A "realistic" scene in a movie requires the careful crafting of its details, sound and light, because watching movies or video is a highly unnatural experience.

 

[Warped9]

I didn’t intend to sound like a complaint, but rather an observation. TOS was a product of a time where audio fx were “the thing to do” and I have no problem with. But producers back in the day did understand these things and no-sound-in-space was utilized in films before and around the same time TOS was made, 2001 being the most familiar.

Even TOS didn’t always use sound accompanying a ship fly-by. There were Enterprise, and other ship, maneuvers not accompanied by sound fx, but solely by music soundtrack.

 

[ZapBrannigan]

Even TOS didn’t always use sound accompanying a ship fly-by. There were Enterprise, and other ship, maneuvers not accompanied by sound fx, but solely by music soundtrack.

I wish we'd been consulted when TOS-R was redesigning the soundscape for 2006. Engine rumble as the Enterprise sailed by was a charmingly primitive touch, almost "early-segment weirdness."

The CBS Digital geniuses didn't understand that the rumble was supposed to be gone in later episodes. The feel of the series evolved, and that evolution was part of the show. What we now call retro-futurism got a little less retro, and that was cool. But no: You get a rumble! And you get a rumble! And you get a rumble!

 

[Warped9]

^^ I won’t go on at length, but there was a lot about TOS-R I think they got wrong.

 

[M'Sharak]

And I was just cringing at the metal-bucket-being-kicked-down-a-hallway sound effects of Nomad's bolt hitting the Enterprise in the pre-title teaser for "The Changeling." I know television audio in the '60s was pretty dry,

It wasn't just dry. Imagine all sound having to go through a single 2-inch transistor-radio speaker, and you begin to get the idea. There was no stereo, no Dolby, no 5.0 / 7.0 Surround, no nothing. Just tinny-sounding lo-fi mono.

Any cringing complaints about sound quality come from the privileged perspective of home-theater stereo mixes with full-spectrum audio, none of which existed in broadcast television at the time the show was produced.

 

[Hofner]

The physical testing lab where I used to work could have kind of an interesting sound environment. By 'physical testing' I mean breaking pieces of plastic in several different ways that could be noisy. The most noisy tests were the impact tests where basically, you're hitting a piece of plastic with a hammer.

One other test that could have an 'interesting' sound was tensile testing. This engineering polymer that was about four times stronger than the plastic used for one liter bottles for example. In tensile testing, the test specimens were bars 7 inches long with a cross section of 1/2x1/8 inches that were pulled apart by the testing machine. About half the time, when the engineering polymer broke, it would shatter into scores of small pieces under a load of about 2000 pounds or 1000 kg. When first starting to test this material, it was discovered that these shattered pieces were punching through three layers of thick plastic sheeting that had been hung to keep them from spraying all over the lab.

So eventually, we had transparent bulletproof Lexan panels installed on the testing machines as shields. More than once, I've seen visitors to the lab jump when one of these brittle test bars break with a bang followed by the sound of the shattered pieces hitting the Lexan panels like shotgun pellets.

It was fun working in that lab.