How The THX Noise Was Created

devilsbrigade writes "The blog MusicThing is running an interesting interview with Andy Moorer. Mr. Moorer is the man who created the sound called Deep Note, now heard in every THX-enabled movie theatre. The interview is originally from last year, but the tech-heavy discussion is still a timeless analysis of a great sound." From the article: "The score consists of a C program of about 20,000 lines of code. The output of this program is not the sound itself, but is the sequence of parameters that drives the oscillators on the ASP. That 20,000 lines of code produce about 250,000 lines of statements of the form "set frequency of oscillator X to Y Hertz. The oscillators were not simple - they had 1-pole smoothers on both amplitude and frequency. At the beginning, they form a cluster from 200 to 400 Hz. I randomly assigned and poked the frequencies so they drifted up and down in that range."

Now the art is

to turn that sound into an onomatopoeia. Any takers? "Bhhwuhhhhhhhhhhoooooh"

Re:Now the art is

"NEEEERRAAAOOOWWWWWUUUMMMMMMMMMM"

was how I was always told to spell it in Kindergarden.

er, um...

where exactly did you go to kindergarden?

Re:er, um...

Probably at the Death Star's day care center. [daycaresdontcare.org]

(I couldn't find the original link at The Onion, alas.)

pfft ... 20k lines of C

could've done it in 5 lines of perl

Super Mario World's keyhole sound

deepnote.mp3: No such file or directory (ENOENT)

I would plug in Super Mario World (either on cartridge or on an emulator), head to Donut Plains, grab the cape, fly up near the end of the stage, and stick the key in the hole. This causes the game to play a humorous sped up version of "Deep Note" [ytmnd.com].

Re:pfft ... 20k lines of C

It's called "humor", Gavin...

Re:OMG! Welcome to CompSci101: Intro to Algorithms

First off, if you RTFA, this guy worked at Stanford in Artificial Intelligence. You don't get to do that, if you're as dumb as you imply he is.

You also have no idea how many lines of the 20,000 are data tables. Note the part where he says "the frequencies of the big chord (which had been typed in by hand - based on a 150-Hz root)..."

I'll tell you what: I'll give you 4 days to write your 5 lines of Perl. When it executes, it should algorithmically create (not download off the internet, or some bullshit) a wav file which 8 out of 10 people can't distinguish from 'Deep Note' based on a side-by-side sound test. If you succeed, I'll send you $300 through PayPal.

Until then, STFU. Some of us are trying to enjoy the show.

I always thought it was

THEEEWWWWAANNNNNNNNGGGGGGGGGG

You know, a slowed down version of the sound of what happens after George Lucas unzips his fly.

This Is Very Old

This was posted a long time ago...what's next? Bell makes phone call?

Re:This Is Very Old

Ug Make Fire! Story next on RockDot.org

They created it by

recording the sound inside my head when my former wife talks.

Some tangential "Deep Note" trivia

This always amused me: http://www.benedict.com/Audio/dre/dre.aspx [benedict.com] When the Napster maelstrom hit the recording industry, Dr. Dre, along with Metallica, was one of the first to hurl accusations of copyright infringement at the popular file sharing site.

Dr. Dre is furious that people are using Napster to download his song "Lolo" without permission or license - an obvious "copyright infringement". The irony is that the prominent feature of that song is a sound that Dr. Dre appropriated without permission or license - an obvious "copyright infringement"?

Yeah but...

how much of them lines are gotos?

He was a Gentoo fan...

how much of them lines are gotos?

None of them. Not a single one. I'd guess that there probably isn't any branching or looping logic in the entire program...

Talk about -funroll-loops!

Could you add one more line of code

to please for the love of god turn the damn thing DOWN A NOTCH?!?!?!

Re:Could you add one more line of code

My date was mortified; still got laid, though.

Do you know for sure that she got laid? She might only have told you she did out of spite ;)

I like the THX signature sound so much...

That depending on the movie that follows it, that sound is the best part of the sitting.

Blasting Speaker Noise

Their stated goal was to demonstrate the clarity or depth or somesuch without being overpowering..

However every theater I've been in with THX has for some odd reason put the audio level up to 11 to "enhance" the effect. So instead of a nice clean silly-sound followed by a clear and rich sound, I am treated to the sharp buzz of overmod followed by the grating pops of briefly exceeding the specifications of the speakers during the exciting parts of the films.

Fortunately, home theaters are cheap and it is quite easy to peg the audio at a level that doesn't stress the speakers. But it's a sad commentary when $60 walmart home theater has better sound than the real thing simply because some undertrained lacky failed to properly adjust the sound levels.

Re:Blasting Speaker Noise

Submit a complaint to THX, if they get enough they will check the theater and revoke their certification if things are not up to snuff.

http://www.thx.com/mod/cinema/survey.html [thx.com]

Re:Blasting Speaker Noise

If only mod points went to 11...

Volume has to be the most irritating problem in a movie theater. Granted, the 14 year old lackeys don't give a rat's ass what they set it at, but if enough people complain through the THX survey, those 14 year old lackeys will be the most educated in town on the definition of 'audiophile.' THX will work hard to preserve its reputation vs. DTS and competitors. They'll come down hard on theater management, who will have no choice but to train and weed out failing staff. With keeping a uniform or theater clean, or keeping food safety in mind, a theater's reputation spreads. So too does "that theater's too loud, let's go to the one across town."

I had no idea until now that THX had a public survey. I'll have to use it.

Re:Blasting Speaker Noise

Their stated goal was to demonstrate the clarity or depth or somesuch without being overpowering...

But there actual goal was to get everybody in the theater to SHUT THE FUCK UP and listen to the movie, which requires a burst of sound so loud that nobody can talk over it.

Brown note...

I randomly assigned and poked the frequencies so they drifted up and down in that range."

No luck finding the Brown note, I presume? Somehow "poked" and the "brown note" bring colorful images to the mind.

Flashback!

At first glance, not reading the article, "Deep Note" sticks out first thing I thought of was the infamous pr0n movie of the 70's Deep Throat [wikipedia.org]

And I always thought

it was just the movy skreen starting up. Don't they run on 8 cylenders ?

Doing it the hard way.

This is why there as still so many fans of programs like c-sound, pure-data, jmax etc.
Nothing beats creating a sound from scratch.
It takes a lot longer than pressing a preset button on a synth. :(

An instrument like a guitar is simple in a way, but with practice, people get so many sounds from it. C-sound is a bit like that too, you start off just making beeps and then eventually it sounds a bit like music.

They Didn't Sue FLA

Frontline Assembly either coped it or did a pretty darn close fascimile on the CD Live Wired. I would hope they wouldn't stoop that low. Hope I didn't just blow their cover.

Wow! A one pole smoother...

Occasionally called a resistor and a capacitor.

Re:Wow! A one pole smoother...

except when you are in the digital domain.

THX, DTS, etc.

I was trying to remember the first time I heard the "Deep Note", but couldn't. The only thing I could think of was "The Digital Experience" intro at the beginning of Jurassic Park (I think the first or at least one of the first movies released using DTS), but I don't think that was quite the same thing. Really cool though, and it was a great opening for the bone-rattling bass in that movie. Anyone know what the first thing the "Deep Note" was attached to?

Re:THX, DTS, etc.

Probably the THX logo.

So, in other words ...

I randomly assigned and poked the frequencies so they drifted up and down in that range.

He fiddled with it until it sounded nice.

it can't be that complicated...

How'd you make this crunching noise, in this part of the song, here?

Well, it's, it's really a combination of... I used celery. I broke celery sticks, and then pitched it down, and I added lots of reverb. I guess I'm giving away some trade secrets here.

But nobody will ever really know exactly how much celery you used.

I also added corn starch, and then we went and crashed our van. And recorded that. And I mixed it in.

It sounds incredible.

Simpsons

My favorite use of this sound was in a Simpsons episode. Video here:

http://media.putfile.com/The--Simpsons--THX--Parod y--DIVX [putfile.com]

Links to the original THX sound

Here's a good place to get them. Apparently there have been some variations over the years:

http://www.digital-audio.net/sounds_o.shtml [digital-audio.net]

Many Variations on a theme.

I've got a Home Theater Calibration DVD that contains all the recent variations of that THX sound. They made dozens of them. The coolest one? The one made for the movie Aliens, by far. I think they did a few for the Star Wars movies too, and other movies where sound quality was paramount. (no pun intended) It cost a ton of money to get my theater to the point where it sounded just like a cinema, but now it is sometimes the highlight of the movie watching experience. Which says a lot about the quality of movies these days. Only the overhead rumble of the first Star Wars movie matches that THX sound clip in its viceral sound impact, along with the opening segment of Top Gun with the subwoofer cranked up.

I bet he's a real party anmal

I can imagine Mr Moorer is a real chick-puller at parties:

"Hey, I invented this really really famous sound - it goes like...well..actually I have it here on my iPod, or you can come back to my place to hear it on my home theatre if you want? Here take this copy on CD, it's free..."

Think Rick Moranis in Ghostbusters!

TODO: log random number generator seed

Some months after the piece was released (along with "Return of the Jedi") they lost the original recording. I recreated the piece for them, but they kept complaining that it didn't sound the same. Since my random-number generators were keyed on the time and date, I couldn't reproduce the score of the performance that they liked. I finally found the original version and everybody was happy.

Whew!

I was in a somewhat similar spot a few years back, where a script I'd written to generate random data for load testing a server, used date and time as a rand() seed. One set of data I generated uncovered a weird threading issue, and it was pretty reproducible with that dataset. Then a disk crash wiped the dataset. I still had the script, but couldn't seem to get another dataset that would repro the issue.

In addition to being better about backups, I now log whatever random seed is used to generate a dataset like that.

Talk about feeling left out...

The THX "Find a cinema" search function told me my ZIP Code didn't appear to be valid! I appear to live over 100 miles from the nearest theater that plays this supposedly "famous" sound.

Nothing beats the Boston Imax theatre Noise...

Leonard Nimoy saying ,"Who put the boop in the boopseboop?" Note: This is a song. I just don't know the corect line.

I know what it really is.

They put a lavalier (wireless microphone) on Lucas and followed him around for a day-in-the-life thing, and at one point he pulled out his wallet and opened it.

So they sampled that, air-balled it once, and patented it.

Cameo appearance in anime

Deep Note made a cameo appearance in the anime "RG Veda" as the sound made by somebody's big-ass sword. I remember laughing my ass off when I first saw that sequence.

I doubt Lucasfilm or THX authorized that usage.

Here's how it *really* went down

George Lucas: How'd you make that sound Andy?

Andy Moorer: We electrocuted a sperm whale.

George Lucas: God damn that sounds great.

Andy Moorer: [Giggles} I *know*

George Lucas: Thing is... we need a story that's not going to bring those Greenpeace punks down on top of us.

Andy Moorer: I coded the sound with 20,000 lines of C?

George Lucas: Nice. Let's go with that.

Two words: Styx & Krakatoa

Seriously, did the guy think he'd get away with this? What total and utter plagiarism! Styx did the whole "notes appearing at random points and sliding at random rates toward a crescendo chord" thing ages ago. And better, if you ask me. It's not so much that he copied them almost directly that bugs the crap out of me every time I go to the movie theatres. The fact that he claims that it's original and "had never been done before." Total crap.

Re:Two words: Styx & Krakatoa

Actually, I thought I was ripping off the end of the Beatles' "Day in the Life". I never heard the Styx&Krakatoa version. I always say when you rip, rip from the best!

Something cool to try...

If you can find an MP3 (or Ogg Vorbis, or FLAC, or WAV, or...) copy of "Deep Note," try playing it backwards and/or at various different speeds. If it's played at around 14x the original speed it actually sounds sorta neat. And backwards it sounds like a nuclear reactor going down.

(Uh... not that I'd know what a nuclear reactor would sound like... yeah, uh, you can get back to dealing with Iran now...)

Nice guy

A few years ago my company was organizing a speech/audio engineers' conference (ICASSP) in Orlando. Mr. Moorer was one of the keynote speakers. His topic wasn't the THX sound, but he did talk about it. His story matches TFA, so I guess it's legit ;-)

I ended up playing his sound samples for his talk through the auditorium sound system. I didn't know he was involved with the THX sound, and when he mentioned it, I realized I now had an interesting (somewhat) story. "I ran sound effects for the guy who invented the THX sound." It impressed me, anyway.

I'm picturing the source code...

#include <sounds.h>
main(argc, argv)
int argc;
char *argv;
{
SOUND_T *snd = create_sound();
/* 19,990 lines of "alter sound slightly" */
play_sound(snd);
free_sound(snd);
}

Yeah, and you know it's K&R style too.

Have a listen...

For those who want to give it a listen, the trademarked THX sound is available on the USPTO's web site here [uspto.gov].

They have a whole bunch of others here [uspto.gov]. It's kind of a fun page to click around on.

DTS

I like the DTS sound a lot more... too bad there arn't as many of those around...

Do we really need more advertising?

I'm getting pretty sick of the loud pretentious dolby ads at the front of movies. That's all they are, and they are mostly repeated, so it gets dull after a couple of times.
Imagine if every technology involved in movies got a 30 second ad at the start of the movie.

Strangely similar to an "Asia" intro

The "freaking orchestra" sound of THX is very, very much the same as the opening of Asia's "Countdown to Zero" song, part of the "Astra" album. I always wondered if the THX guys had bought the rights from them. I guess they wrote 20 klocs of C to reproduce a sound made with a couple of Moogs.

Breaking news

"Posted: 25.5.05 by Tom"

Sounds like a lot of work

Sounds like a lot of work for one sound effect... couldn't they have just downloaded it off of some pirate site somewhere?

For me

this was always the sound played to wake people up after the commercials so they can actually see a difference between crappy ads and a crappy movie and the critics don't accidently write their resume on the ads. Would be kinda embarrassing.

THX noise based on a song?

From chapter six of the book Analog Days, talking about the album In a Wild Sanctuary:

One of their new techniques, used on a track called "Spaced," was quickly copied by a famous Marin County film company and became a standard in movie theatres. It is played right at the start of the show: a distant note seems to get closer and closer to the listener before splitting into a tumultuous eight-note chord.

Do any of you put the sound in your OS startups?

In my Windows systems with good speakers, I like to put these THX, Dolby Digital, etc. sound clips in my startup wave file. :) I used to do that for other OS like Linux and MacOS X, but they are not connected to good speakers so I don't bother.

Or you could just use your voice!

The songstowearpantsto.com [songstowearpantsto.com] guy did.

It's rad.

mp3: http://www.archivestowearpantsto.com/tracks/0072_t he_thx_sound_with_just_my_voice.mp3 [archivesto...antsto.com]

20,000 lines of code???

Isn't this big by a couple orders of magnitude? I've written an entire Java interpreter in 23,000 lines of C.

Sounds a lot like a prop-jet starting up

I was on an overhead wing propjet (some Korean or Chinese made thing, looked kinda like a Dornier 328) taking off from Ventiane (Laos) last week, and when the the engines kicked on, it sounded so much like the THX berzschwaaaangahn! that I had to smile. After that, it was just a regular sorta scary, sorta funny (but mostly predictable) ride, and the food was crappy, so the whole experience was very movie theater like.

Look at the frequencies in action...

by loading it into Audacity. Set Spectrogram size to 4096 on Preferences, maximum freq to ~2500Hz. Load up Deep Note from the USPTO website [uspto.gov], stretch the audio tracks, and enjoy. It actually seems the description is pretty accurate - at first frequencies drift randomly, and then they converge to a set of fixed ones.

What about...

...getting an interview with Brian Eno about how the Windows 95 sound was made?

On Purpose? (Temporal Masking)

Much like some of the methods of lossy compression (Temporal Masking [wikipedia.org]). Maybe the point is to provide a loud sound such that your ears cant really distinguish the crappy audio afterwards -- I do realize that temporal masking is generally on the scale of milliseconds. But maybe they know something we don't.