Ben Burtt

This article is about the sound designer. You may be looking for his son, Benjamin A. Burtt.

"All sounds bring with them an association with something emotional. […] You search for the sounds that not only bring a sense of naturalness and reality to a film scene but also — and more importantly, one discovers — provide the appropriate emotional association. For example, you can pick out any number of wind backgrounds that will bring a scene very important emotional coloration. You can play a "friendly wind," or a "lonely wind," or a "spooky wind," depending upon the sound texture you have chosen."

―Ben Burtt^[2]

Ben Burtt (born July 12, 1948)^[1] is the sound designer for the Star Wars films, and others made by Lucasfilm Limited with subsidiary Skywalker Sound. His most famous creations are the sound of the lightsaber, Darth Vader's breathing, and the binary speech of R2-D2. He has created many of the languages heard in Star Wars—most of which are marked by shared etymological roots with English—and has written the Galactic Phrase Book & Travel Guide.

Burtt has a reputation for including a sound effect dubbed the "Wilhelm scream" in many of the movies he's worked on. Taken from a character named Wilhelm in the film The Charge at Feather River, the scream can be heard in Star Wars when a stormtrooper falls into a chasm in the Death Star, and in Raiders of the Lost Ark when a Nazi soldier falls from a moving car. The scream appears in many other movies.

Biography[]

Youth and education[]

Ben Burtt was born in Jamesville, New York, to Ben Burtt, Sr., a chemistry professor to Syracuse University. He fell seriously ill when six years old, and his father brought to his bedside a briefcase-sized tape recorder, a gift to alleviate his condition. Young Ben fought his boredom by playing with the machine, recording his voice and other sounds. This process made him aware of the role of sound effects and music in the films and shows he was enjoying.^[2]

In his childhood, Ben Burtt visited his grandparents in Ohio for summer vacations, and spent time with his grandfather's makeshift ham radio receiver in the attic, experimenting with the dials and listening in awe the various modulated voices and electronic sounds through the headphones. He had recorded some of those sounds, that would use years later as sound effects in Star Wars, such as the sound of the Viper probe droids.^[2]

At ten he started making home-made videos and audio dramas. In his early teens, he was making an audio drama on an audio tape, recording some "Martian" dialogue; for this he recorded speech on a twisted tape, which played back would be heard backwards. As it was a very trite method, he tried to speak backwards himself, then to be played backwards to convey a weird effect, although he was not satisfied with the result. He spent his teens producing adventures and comedies with his friends. Ben already had the role of "sound engineer", as he recorded the film's soundtrack, which they manually synchronized each time they played them together.^[2]

He studied physics in college, when he continued his hobby of directing amateur films, some of which won several awards. The 16mm special effects film Genesis granted him a scholarship, and became a graduate student at the University of Southern California School of Cinema. There he saw first time the professional technology of permanently synced soundtracks, and began his interest in sound effects. He also met Rick Victor, and Richard Anderson, who would later become his friend and assistant.^[2]

Work for the original trilogy[]

Lucas'sBasement — Burtt in George Lucas's basement during the production of *Star Wars*.

"…but that was the feeling about the whole project. There were many unknown experiments under way with the whole idea of Star Wars."

―Ben Burtt^[2]

Gary Kurtz became interested in Ben Burtt's work in the University, and upon graduation, Burtt started working for Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope in 1975, being in charge of special dialogue and sound effects for that film. Equipped with a Nagra III NP recorder suitable for film work, he was tasked by George Lucas with creating or finding the sounds and speeches of various characters, droids and creatures. The process took about six months, parallel to the film editing. At some point he used Lucas's basement as his editing room, complete with a Moviola, right under his kitchen.^[2]

Lucas suggested to him a technique, calling it "worldizing": recording lines in locations with specific acoustics that match the setting of the film, in order to catch an authentic ambiance and reverberation. Burtt found himself often alone at nights, with lights off — so as not to be disturbed by speeches, phonecalls or even buzz of fluorescent lights — in dark corridors, offices and bathrooms, playing back Darth Vader's voice, to find where it reverberated better, according to the movie setting.^[2]

For alien sounds, he collected human-made, animal-made, even synthesized sounds especially for the cantina scene: a spring peeper frog; the "laughter" of a hippopotamus; a friend's voice reciting Latin, edited in a synthesizer; then a group of volunteers after inhaling helium. His experimentation went as far as closing some dogs in a closet full of helium to see this effect on dogs, which did not produce any results.^[2]

Even the growls of Chewbacca had to convey nuances and intonations. He followed Lucas's idea to use bear sounds for Chewie; after failing to find high-quality samples from sound libraries, or making successful recordings at zoos, he turned to menageries of trained animals for Hollywood. Thus he met Pooh the Bear. Burtt and Anderson recorded the session with the help of stuntwoman Susan Backlinie. Pooh's sounds formed the bulk for Chewie's voice, with Burtt archiving his samples according to the intonation (whether angry, or interrogative) and through editing and pasting, engineered whole "sentences".^[2]

For Chewbacca, he also found an opportunity to record walruses after a pond at Marineland, Long Beach was drained for cleaning. Friends who were aware of his quest, gave their dogs for audition, although he could get only a few interesting barks or moans; in that process, an aggressive dachshund offered the sounds that would be used later for the Rancor Pateesa in Star Wars: Episode VI Return of the Jedi. The sounds were later adapted to fit the movements of Peter Mayhew's mask.^[2]

For the nonverbal speech of R2-D2, he experimented with producing electronic sounds of different tones with Moog and ARP synthesizers. In order to add personality, intelligence and emotions, Burtt added some mechanical sounds which he performed himself; whistling through a plumbing tube, or interacting metal with frozen carbon dioxide, producing gas with various pitches as it melted (such sounds were used also for lightsaber hits). While showing R2's prototype sounds to Lucas, the latter exemplified a dialogue between Artoo and Threepio with nonsense babbling of various intonations, and Burtt realized that babytalk communicates the babies's emotions and needs by intonation even without words. Initially Burtt started recording samples of babies but this attempt failed for practical reasons, as babies would not cooperate. Burtt ended up recording himself delivering scenes in babytalk in Lucas's basement, end eventually melded the electronic tones to the voice. He programmed the synthesizer to make an interactive blend of tones and babytalk, so that when he played while vocalizing, the electronic tone shaped its envelope to conform. His first samples were used for the brief scene with WED-15-77, which however was cut from the final film, and went on to record "dialogues" for R2-D2; in order to make his sounds as "logical" as possible, he wrote in English what he imagined Artoo saying to C-3PO, and created tones consistent to the context.^[2]

While researching for humanoid speech, he sought to find interesting and "exotic" human languages so as to not sound similar to English. He monitored shortwave transmissions, the distortions and aberrations of which gave him further inspiration; listened to recordings from language lessons and samples from university linguistic departments. He favored African languages, specifically Zulu, for their exotic sounds and rhythms. Samples of Quechua of Peru attracted his attention, as it sounded musical, and the rhyming of some phrases seemed comical to him; furthermore it possessed some exotic click-like sounds that don't exist in the languages familiar to English.^[2]^[3] Burtt did not intend for the aliens to speak copies of those languages, but to derive other sounds from those patterns and sets of phonemes and emulate how he felt listening those languages.^[2]

Burtt collected samples of Zulu and Quechua, and was able to interview speakers of zulu, while narrating stories in a dramatic way, so as to record specific (checklisted) emotional states in that language; in one case a Zulu warrior refused to narrate a dialogue with fear in his voice, claiming he didn't know any fear. Zulu became the basis for Jawaese, and most of the dialogues heard in New Hope came from a passionate argument between a couple in a narration.^[2]

In preparation for recording Jawaese, and following Lucas's suggestion for "worldizing", he travelled with his friend Rick Victor to Vasquez Rocks and spend the evening shouting Jawaese phrases, since in the movie those scenes took place in the rocky deserts of Tatooine.^[2]

Burtt however was not able to find a speaker of the endangered^[4] Quechua language; in his search he met linguistics graduate Larry Ward with whom they worked together. Ward was familiar with eleven languages and was able to transcribe the Quechuan samples, and even mimic comfortably the sounds of the language as if he was fluent. Together they invented their own words emulating the elements of Quechua they liked; this "fake Quechua" would become Huttese. Burtt then studied Greedo's snout movements, writing phrases timed to fit with the scene, and recorded them with Ward, replacing his earlier "oink-oink" language.^[2]

Burtt was the first person who ever saw completed scenes of the film, and the full story in sequence, as he was the one receiving them from three separate editors who worked independently, in order to add sound.^[2]

He had the same capacity in the 1978 TV special The Star Wars Holiday Special^[5] and spent two days in the Olympic Game Farm, recording different bears for other Wookiee characters: grizzlies for Itchy, black bears for Malla; he also recorded a lion that would be used later in Alien (1979); in the San Jose Baby Zoo he met baby bear Tarik that made the voice for Lumpy.^[2]

For Star Wars: Episode V The Empire Strikes Back he recorded baby raccoons in a bathtube for the Ugnaught language. For the Omnisignal unicode transmitted by the probe droids, he mixed unused sounds from Alien with broadcast recordings of his grandfather's radio.^[2]

The languages would need more work for Return of the Jedi, showing extensive dialogues, and songs, of Huttese and a new language, Ewokese. Unlike in the case of Greedo, where he recorded the lines to fit the scene in the footage, he had to write the Huttese dialogues before filming begun, so that the puppeteers would move Jabba's mouth according to the words. He wrote the Ubese dialogue of Leia/Boushh, which was performed by Pat Welsh, a senior lady he had met and worked together for E.T.. Welsh introduced Burtt to Kipsang Rotich, a Kenyan student, and Burtt recorded him narrating and acting folk tales in his native language, for the Sullustese language of Nien Nunb; out of curiosity, Burtt gave him to read Nunb's dialogue translated into his language. Because of time pressure, and because Burtt liked the result, he decided to use some of the samples as they were, without editing them ro fabricate a new fictional language.^[2] He also provided the original idea for the character of Salacious B. Crumb.^[6]

After watching a documentary, he thought Tibetan would be an exotic basis for Ewokese, however he had difficulties finding Tibetan speakers. He found a San Francisco-based owner of a gift shop near Embarcadero,^[7] and Burtt interviewed him and his father, but they could not "perform" satisfactorily.^[2] They introduced him to a relative of theirs, Kosi Unkov,^[7] an elderly Mongolian woman who spoke only Kalmuck in a raspy high-pitched voice, and, in her 80 years, left her tribe to live in a city. Despite this, the "Grandma Vodka", as they affectionally called her, was friendly and charismatic, and passionately narrated some folk tales, especially while enjoying vodka.^[7]^[2] After this, Burtt sought some low-pitched female voices. He directed a subset of the Oakland Inspirational Choir to record Ewokese babbling and chanting.^[2]

Return of the legend[]

"Time and gray hair had given me a new objectivity. I no longer looked at the films and saw what had not been accomplished: those fallen expectations compromised by lack of time, technical limitations, or cretive failures. Rather, I saw and heard all that had been successful. It was inspiring."

―Ben Burtt, about re-watching the trilogy after twelve years.^[2]

For the rest of the '80s and the early '90s Burtt worked for Star Wars: Droids, also contributing as a writer for a few episodes, while he worked for further installations of the Indiana Jones franchise and Willow. In 1990 he left Lucasfilm to become independent; he returned to directing, including some episodes of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, IMAX films and documentaries. He wrote and directed the documentary Special Effects: Anything Can Happen which was nominated for an Oscar award.^[2]

Exhausted by the "first grand phase" of Star Wars, after which he "never wanted to hear another laser blast", he didn't revisit the trilogy for more than a decade; neither he encouraged his children to watch it, especially if it wasn't for the big screen it was intended for. The idea for a 20th anniversary prompted him to watch the whole trilogy in a theater, his interest was rejuvenated, and was excited with the perspective of creating more movies of the saga with new technology.^[2]

Burtt provided some Huttese dialogues for the 1998 video game Star Wars: Jedi Knight: Mysteries of the Sith.^[8]

New trilogies[]

Burtt was both sound designer and picture editor for the Prequel Trilogy films. For Star Wars: Episode I The Phantom Menace, Burtt was equipped with new digital technologies. The Huttese dialogues were the first thing he finished by "translating" the lines, then recording their intended pronunciation and intonation, and distributing reference tapes to the voice actors. As for the battle droids, he initially experimented with the idea of them talking with phrases synthesized by independently recorded single words, without context or intonation, in order to highlight their rudimentary computer and low intelligence. Soon he scrapped the idea and opted for a performed dialogues.^[2]

Burtt spent about a month of research, with the Kyma digital tool, in order to be used as the voice of the Neimoidians, but George Lucas found the result too artificial. Burtt experimented with several dialects and liked an experimentation with a voice of a sports announcer (an antithesis of their external appearance), but didn't suggest to Lucas. He found new inspiration when they heard a voice-audition tape for the future Thai dubbing and he liked the quality of the accent. There was a casting call for Thai actors, but it was answered mostly by Thai Star Wars fans with no acting experience. They settled with professional actors who mimicked Thai accent.^[2]

The Geonosian language that was known as "Geonosian hive-mind" was created from three sounds recorded by Matthew Wood under the direction of Ben Burtt while in Australia. In the city of Melbourne, Wood recorded the mating cries of penguins at a reserve. In the city of Cairns, Wood recorded a group of fruit bats fighting over a banana. Wood also recorded the sounds of flying foxes. Burtt mixed all of these sounds and created the Geonosian language.^[9]^[10]

Burtt returned as sound designer for 2015's Star Wars: Episode VII The Force Awakens. He is credited as sound designer and re-recording mixer, with David Acord, on Star Wars Forces of Destiny. He voiced the droid BD-1 in the 2019 video game Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

Cameos[]

Burtt appeared in two of the Star Wars films as an extra. He appeared in Return of the Jedi (as the Imperial officer Colonel Dyer, who yells "Freeze!" before Han Solo throws a toolbox filled with explosive charges, causing him to fall off a catwalk; he utters a Wilhelm scream at that moment) and The Phantom Menace (as Ebenn Q3 Baobab, who appears in the background near the end when Amidala congratulates Palpatine). He also provided the voice for Wat Tambor in Attack of the Clones^[11] and Lushros Dofine in Revenge of the Sith.

Other involvement[]

Burtt was heavily involved in writing the animated series Star Wars: Droids.

In early '80s he worked in E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, where he collaborated with Pat Welsh as the voice of the extraterrestrial title character. According to Burtt, voice of elderly women is ideal for alien voices, as, with some editing, can seem ageless and genderless, an idea that he used for his later works, such as Ewokese.^[2] He worked with Welsh again in Return of the Jedi.

Ben Burtt appeared at Celebration IV in 2007 for a question-and-answer session.^[12]

Personal life[]

By the early 2000's, Burtt resided in Northern California with his wife Margaret and their children Alice, Mary, Benny and Emma.^[2] Benny followed his father's steps as sound effects editor, and was his assistant in Attack of the Clones.^[13]