How The THX Noise Was Created 243
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."
Re:Blasting Speaker Noise (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.thx.com/mod/cinema/survey.html [thx.com]
Wow! A one pole smoother... (Score:4, Informative)
Occasionally called a resistor and a capacitor.
Links to the original THX sound (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.digital-audio.net/sounds_o.shtml [digital-audio.net]
Re:Two words: Styx & Krakatoa (Score:2, Informative)
Sheesh, man, learn your rock history. Styx wasn't even close.
Re:Two words: Styx & Krakatoa (Score:5, Informative)
Have a listen... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:pfft ... 20k lines of C (Score:2, Informative)
Re:20,000 lines of code??? (Score:2, Informative)