io9
Even if you just hear a science fiction movie or TV show playing in another room, you'll instantly recognize it thanks to the weird sounds of alien spaceships and laser weapons. No genre of entertainment has ever challenged sound-effects designers as much as SF. We've gone through some of scifi's most identifiable and iconic sounds and boiled them down into a list of the coolest and the most earwormy.
We've tried to stay away from sounds made by an actual character, like Soundwave's awesome voice from The Transformers, or Darth Vader's breathing from Star Wars. Note: click on the name to hear the sound effect.
- Spaceships in the 1950s: Back in the heady days of early science fiction movies, the Theremin (probably one of the coolest instruments ever invented) would provide the "Ooooh-EEEEE-oooooh" sounds of spaceships flitting about in the sky and other spooky paranormal sounds. It tended to be overused, and instantly became identifiable with cheesy scifi. If we ever get our own office Theremin, this is the first sound we'd ever make on it.
- The Alien Heat Ray from War of the Worlds: In the original 1953 movie, the alien heat ray has an awesome cycling sound buried within the sound of the beam. We hope a real heat ray blast sounds this way some day — and we may have found our new cell phone ringtone.
- The Alien Probe from War of the Worlds: This terrifying sound is one of those things you'd imagine from under the covers as a kid. Nothing is more "wet the bed" inducing than a good, scary scifi sound effect. Cursed alien probes.
- The automatic doors from Star Trek: These doors were one of the most iconic sounds from The Original Series, and were even parodied by Shatner himself in Airplane II.
- The communicating whistles and doorbells of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation: While the old Star Trek communicator used to make a sort of wolf-whistle sound at you, the doorbells on The Next Generation were crisp and punctual. How many people out there are using these as ringtones today?
- The transporter beam from Star Trek: Besides the doors, this was another one of the sounds most identified with Star Trek. The original beaming sound is a bit dated, but still retro cool and... long. It took so much time for them to appear that you wonder why their enemies were ever caught off guard.
- The Bionic sounds of The Six Million Dollar Man: Whether he was using his bionic strength to toss a tree out of the way, spy on folks with his bionic peeper, or jumping over something with smooth Wonder Woman-esque bionic legs, Colonel Steve Austin cornered the market on iconic sound effects. Even though it's cheesy, we still love this sound.
- The lightsaber from Star Wars: Even above blasting lasers and beeping droids, the lightsaber is the most identifiable sound to come out of the Star Wars universe. In fact, you've probably used a flashlight to make a lightsaber in the smoke from your campfire, and made these same noises with your mouth, admit it.
- A TIE Fighter passing by from Star Wars: For some reason, the wailing sound of a TIE Fighter was much cooler than the whining engine sound of an X-Wing, or the "whoomph" sound effect of the Millennium Falcon. It still sounds very alien, and creepy cool.
- This video shows off the Top 10 sound effects from Star Wars, but half of them are character based, which we've stayed away from in this post, i.e. Darth Vader's breathing, R2-D2's beeping and booping, etc. However, those seismic charges were admittedly pretty damn cool, and just check out the lightsaber montage at the end.
- The Cylon Eye from Battlestar Galactica: Probably the most iconic sound from Battlestar Galactica, the 70s edition was the scanning sound of the Cylon eye. My brother and I used to hide behind the couch when they'd come onscreen and talk in their awesome vocoder voices.
- The DRADIS from Battlestar Galactica: In the new series, they spend so much time staring at this thing that the sound becomes embedded in your head. Of course, it does tell them if something is about to vaporize their ass, so we can understand why.
- K.I.T.T.'s scanner eye from Knight Rider: Owing a lot to those cyclops-esque Cylon eyes was the scanner that both signified that K.I.T.T.'s scanner was active, and also served as his "heartbeat."
- The TARDIS taking off and landing from Doctor Who: The TARDIS had several sound effects: the whirring of the doors, the hum of the control room, the flying through space sound... but the most popular noise that endures to this day was the sound of it materializing and dematerializing. If you pick up this Electronic Flight Control Tardis, you can have them all at your fingertips on your desktop.
- The Sonic Screwdriver from Doctor Who: The Doctor's multi-purpose tool that seems to be able to do just about anything has its own sound, and it's changed a bit over the years. In fact, you can pick up your very own sonic screwdriver, complete with sound effects. Just don't complain when it fails to make money spew out of the ATM machine.
- The transforming sound from Transformers: Whenever Optimus Prime, Megatron, Jazz, or Soundwave would transform into their alter-egos, this sound accompanied them, and buried itself in the brains of billions of kids around the world. It still makes me think I can turn into something different whenever I hear it.
- The Wonder Twin Powers, Activating, from The Superfriends: Okay, we're breaking our own rule with this one, since it's character based, but we just love the cheesy music/SFX behind Zan and Jayna activating their lame superpowers. They really need their own campy show these days.
This definitely is not meant to be a conclusive list, and we want you to tell us what your favorite science fiction sound effects are!
Comments
The images (except for the youtube link) they be brokens!
Ben Burtt is my personal hero.
Happened to me a couple nights ago actually, I was in my den and heard the motorcycles from Akira.
My nephew laughed so hard when I popped my head out and said it looked like I smelled somebody baking cookies.
@Belabras: Yes they are, but my geek brain generated most of them anyway.
Someone brilliant on the Net while TNG was airing coined the term "tweedlesquerge" for the communicator noise. We have ever called it so.
@Belabras: Yeah, we're fixing some techincal issues.
All the sound effects from Space Cruiser Yamato were burned into my tiny soul when they first aired in the U.S. as Star Blazers.
Particular favorites were the Yamato's shock cannons, the laser pistols, the Gamilon ship cannons (that sound always reminded me of snakes, for some reason) and of course, all those explosions.
I'm fond of hearing people do acapella renditions of the Transformer sound: I wonder how it was made and who created it? That'd be fascinating to know. When I played with my Autobots + Decepticons, I'd often vocalize the transformation sound as I was manually turning them from a truck to a bipedal machine o' war or whatever.
I have awesome respects for great sound designers, including Burtt - who is legendarily resourceful.
While it's more of "music" than a strict SFX, I like the melody from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which was also sampled to great effect in Enigma's first album.
Buck Rogers' Twiki sputtering "BEDEBEDEBEDEE" gets me every time, too. :)
The jumping sound from Speed Racer. Chaun-chaun-chaun-chaun! Looks like the Wachoskis are using the same (or similar) sfx.
Transformers sound FTW!
The ambient background hum of any Startrek ship from TNG on up.
The opening of the stargate, the opening of the iris, the button activation sounds on the DHD, the electric discharge of a zat'niqita, and the clatter and clank of a Replicator's steps.
The sound of Mal's pistol firing (Firefly).
The sounds of the Rifles, AutoTurrets, and the huge plasma assisted autoguns that Mendez and Perez carried in Aliens.
The Predator's shoulder cannon.
The birds on Endor (Return of the Jedi).
I'll also second those awesome depth charges that Jango Fett used in Episode 2. I love that twang noise they make.
Do tauntauns count as characters? Sure, there are a lot of animal sounds in Star Wars that all blend together, but I always had a particular fondness for them.
And that one podracer's engines from Ep 1 that went Waanh... waanh... waanh...
Twiki's bidibidis
Gleep and Gloop glooping and gleeping (?)... Hell, all the Herculoids... Tundro plopping pellets from his horns, etc...
The sound of the Star Warsseismic charges were ripped off from V'Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.
What a great post.
Transporter Beam: Damn. It is long. I could have walked there faster.
James Earl Jones, Tie Fighters, the Cylon Eye, Bionic Man - it's amazing how many memories rush back with those.
But the TARDIS has to be my favorite. The way the sound evokes both some wonderful unimaginable SF adventure about to happen and an old heap whose engine doesn't quite want to turn over. It completely captures a dichotomy that makes Doctor Who, as a whole, what it is.
The alien disintegrator from War of the Worlds. Recycled on Star Trek as the photon torpedo sound, and as a variety of handguns since then.
I always Our Man Flint's phone. It's been re-used practically anywhere you find cheesy hi-tech gadgets (Hudson Hawk's musical lock, Austin Powers, lots of TV spy shows, etc.).
TIE fighter • The screech of a TIE Fighter is a drastically altered elephant bellow.
[just pulled it off a website, so not sure how accurate, but it seems credible]
POWER OF A GIANT TIGER
POWER OF ...a bucket of water?
All these SFX in the same place made me actually drool.
Gotta include the Filmation sound
Here it is
+ Watch video
@ithidet: You'd be surprised how often you need an ice bridge.
The button click sound in X-Com is iconic to me. It's a stock sound so it pops up elsewhere, but anytime it does, I think Chrysalid...
My favorite was that floating squid-looking robot from the Star Wars prequels that beeps "shave and a haircut". Cracks me up.
So many of these have such a flashback element. The WotW Martian heatray is, in my opinion, one of the scariest noises in all of scifi: shrill and malevolent and vicious.
Some other noises that I would have included:
* the power sounds of the different animal members of The Herculoids: Gloop, Gleep, Igoo, Zok and Tundro;
* the sound of Voltron forming the Blazing Sword;
* one word: SNIKT;
* the noise which accompanied the yells of "Power EXTREME" on Centurions;
* the effect when Sam would leap out and in on Quantum Leap;
* another word: blipverts.
As usual, I could keep going, but I have to sleep sometime.
What happened to Lobot after "empire"? Did he get out of his contract? Go with an interstellar temp agency? God damn you lucas for leaving loose ends you old bastard!
The WOTW heat ray sounds like a flooded car motor that won't turn over. Which brings up a whole other set of nightmarish feelings ...
The Hoverboard in Back to the Future II was essentially made out of sound effects.
Physically it's just a painted wooden board glued to Michael J. Fox's Nikes, but add a few "whoo whooow" sound effects and you have a hoverboard, complete with squelchy pitch shifting when it takes weight.
I always thought the communicator whistle from the original Star Trek was quite reminiscent of Captain von Trapp's bosun's whistle.
@Chiper:
You mean, uh, Vasquez and Drake?
Fantastic post, KK!
Ben Burtt is a true genius. He made me listen to the world a different way.
I just want to point out that the TARDIS noise is made by scraping a door key over the strings of a piano, which sound was then manipulated via tape distortion. Neato!
@Chiper: yay for "birds on endor." whenever i hear these in real life (something very close, at least), i think of rotj. vividly. and think 'oh what a nerd i am.'
Awesome post!
I'll throw in my vote for Twiki and his bidibidi, although it is character based.
The ultimate sound effects team would be Ben Burtt and Mel Blanc... Not to take anything away from the fine Foley artists out there. If only marvin the Martian had better sound effects his Illudium Q-36 Explosive Space Modulator would have successfully destroyed Earth!
[upload.wikimedia.org]
Yes that is the actual Spirit Rover mission patch.
I have to applaud anyone who was working in this field before modern synthesizers and mixing. Any of the listed efforts from the 50s and the 60s involve a bunch of real-world industrial sounds, modified cleverly for use. Ben Burtt followed this tradition closely, because he understood the importance of verisimilitude.
The scary ambient HAL 9000 sound? Anyone?
The sound of a lightsaber being waved is the sound of a microphone with broken shielding being waved beside a CRT monitor. There's some great video of a sound technician watching a rough cut of A New Hope while waving a mic around to get the sound synced up with the motions of the duel.
Also HIGHLY recommended, "Making of the 80s Dr. Who Theme":
»
+ Watch video
Shows how Peter Howell tweaks params on a synth to achieve the familiar signature sounds.
@twreckx: I always figured it was deliberate, what with all the Starfleet/naval parallels, that Gene and co. used the good ol' Earth bosun's whistle-noise as an attention-getter.
Despite the nacelles, NCC-1701's just a tall ship with a lot of stars to steer her by.
Great list. For me, one of the most memorable SF sound effects is the sinister whirring of the UFO spacecraft from the Gerry Anderson TV show, "UFO."
(It always bothered me that they kept calling them UFOs, even though they knew exactly what the spacecraft were...)
+ Watch video
Anytime I hear a Theremin, all i can think of is the "The Thing from Another World"
The one thing that always pissed me off about the Star Trek sound effects is tat there was no real way to get anything past the TOS sound effects loops from GlenGlen sound.
There was a grouping of about 15 that were included with the ST: Generations OST, but I've had major need for some of the sounds from DS9 and Voyager, and have never been able to find a qualified source.
For example, I really liked the Voyager Internal Comm Hail sfx, and when I got my iPhone, I hacked it to put my own system sounds on it. For the life of me, I couldn't find ONE clean sample of that sound effect. No cd's were released of those series' SFX, and the two places on line that I could find "LCARS Sounds" (lcarscom.net, and some other ukranian site) didn't include it in their SFX packages. A damn shame.
What was even more angering: I was listening to the radio at work after I gave up what seemed like a futile quest, and some podunk radio commercial was using Star Trek SFX and had the Comm Hail in the commercial. Pissed me off somethin' fierce. So I know they're out there for corporate consumption (probably as royalty free loops for sound design studios), but not for people who are fans. Unfortunate.
~JYH
PS: please excuse the uber geekiness of this post, I know that this type of stuff isn't exactly frowned upon here as most of us are geeks as well, but when considering things like this, it sometimes crosses a line from fan to "WTF".
What, no Wilhelm Scream????
And seconding the Photon Torpedoes and Phasers from Star Trek TNG.
And the Stargate Even Horizon Blast/Woosh.
And the sound those little robots from Farscape make.
And every single sound and voice effect from Starcraft. FOR AUIR!
@JYHASH: Contact the company who the commercial is for, find their commercial makers and ask.
In the 70s cartoon Valley of the Dinosaurs, they used to always have a Kookaburra and other native Australian bird noises as the sound they played when the family was really scared in the jungle, and I think it made it into other Hanna-Barbera cartoons as a traditionally scary noise...
Being Australian, this used to make me annoyed as I could never understand why they would be scared of those noises. To me it was comforting :)
The motion tracker from Aliens would be in my top 10. My hair still stands up when I hear it -- in full expectation of hearing a possible top 25 sound: the Alien's pre-strike exhale/hiss sound.
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