Sound effects

It’s interesting how Steven Spielberg created his sound effects in movies. For example, in Raiders of the Lost Ark,

Indy’s whip is the treated sound of a jet taking off; the punches in fist fights are the result of bashing leather jackets with baseball bats; and the rolling boulder rumble is a Honda station wagon coasting down a gravel road mixed with a rocket blast-off.

… or in E.T. The Extra Terrestrial

… the bulk of E.T.’s utterances were delivered by Pat Welsh, a 65-year-old Marin County housewife. The sound designer, Ben Burtt, overheard her distinctive vocals in a camera store and cheekily asked the retured elocution teacher to remove her dentures and talk without her teeth. Convinved that her screechy voice was ideal for the role, Burtt paid her $350 to spend a day recording E.T.’s minimal dialogue. Subsequently her voice was enriched by watery textures.

… or in Jurassic Park

… many raptor screams were taken from dolphins recorded at Marine World. The call of the brachiosaurus came from both whale songs and donkey brays slowed down with added echo. The dilophosaurus had its sound broken into two types: for the early, playful spitter, Rudstrom employed a variety of swan calls; yet as it turns nasty, and egret sound is mixed with Rydstrom’s own voice (to add a sense of weight) to suggest venom. The rattling noice produced by an exotic insect doubled for the sound of the spitter’s vibrating cowl.

Yet the most complex-sounding character was the mighty tyrannosaurus. The vocal effects came from a diversity of sources — elephant, alligator, penguin, tiger and dog sounds — all mixed together to create a rich, naturalistic dinosaur vocabulary. Whale blowholes repeated into a regular rythm created tyrannosaurus breathing patterns. For his world-shattering road, a blast from a baby elephant created the high end of the frequency, while the low end was provided by alligator growls and tigher shrieks.