What are your favorite Sci-Fi sounds.

srobert

srobert

macrumors 68020
The old sci-fi movies were full of delightful promises for the future.
Today's science has surpassed 1950s' sci-fi predictions on many
aspects (thinking computers here) but some other aspects were
left unachieved. (thinking flying cars here).

One other aspect on which sci-fi movies showed superior technology
to what has been achieved today, is the sound effects! How come
our modern technology sounds sooo boring. Come on! The old sci-fi
is chuck full of neat sounds.

Here are some of my personal favorites:

1- Basically anything coming out of an original War of the Worlds
movie "hovering" alien craft:

- Heat rays: Listen

- Green rays: Listen

- The alien probe: Listen
(That one scared the Space-Pope out of me when I was a kid) :D

2- Star Trek had some cool stuff.

- Communicators: Listen

- The bridge: Listen

- The sliding doors: Listen

3- Star Wars had tons of cool sounds but my favorites are:

- Gonk Droids.

- Tie Fighter engines. Listen

- Dart Vador's breather.

4 - Honorable mentions go to Goldorak (Grandizer, Goldrake, Shogun Warrior, etc…)

- Vega's saucer sound: Listen

- Vega's starship background sounds: Listen


What are your favorites? :)
 
If we're talking Sci-Fi, we've got to be talking about Doctor Who. :cool:

I'm thinking the famous battle cry of the Daleks, or the distinctive sound of the TARDIS – I've got that one looped as the ringtone on my mobile. :D

EDIT:
dynamicv said:
**Gets in before Jaffa Cake or ~Shard~**
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Bugger! :mad: ;)
 
Light-sabres and the heavy breathing of Darth Vader are classics.

Also like the 5 notes from Close Encounters... and the atonal spooky slab music from 2001; is it Ligeti?

The tripod's foghorns from Spielberg's War of the Worlds were good too.
 
The background sounds of the empire's ships including the death star and the imperial cruisers... (its the low humming noise) ... euhh for the non initiated, this is Star Wars the 80ies version
 
I will never cease being amazed by how the the adverts at the bottom of these threads can be topical for just about any thread (or so it seems!).

Along with those mentioned above, I like the sound of the Vipers launching in Battlestar, the sound of the staff weapons in Stargate, and the sound of silence in Space 1999.
 
Good submission guys. Kuddos for Silons' optics and Alien sounds.

Will I dare mention the "Mr-Radar" sound from Spaceballs ^_^
 
"The xxx====== are one of my favorite sounds, and in fact it was the very first sound I made for the whole series. For some reason after I read the script even though my assignment was to find a voice for Chewbacca, and then a voice for Artoo, and then, well maybe come up with some sounds of laser guns and other things. The xxx====== fascinated me at the time when the script had first come out, they had some paintings that Ralph McQuarrie had done. So that there were some concepts visually of what some of these things would look like, and those pictures were very inspiring because they gave an idea of the direction we were trying to go in the look of the film and it was inspiring to me to therefore think of sounds that might fit that kind of visual style.

I could kind of hear the sound in my head of the xxx====== even though it was just a painting of a xxx======. I could really just sort of hear the sound maybe somewhere in my subconscious I had seen a xxx====== before. I went to, at that time I was still a graduate student at USC, and I was a projectionist and we had a projection booth with some very, very old simplex projectors in them. They had an interlock motor which connected them to the system when they just sat there and idled and made a wonderful humming sound. It would slowly change in pitch, and it would beat against another motor, there were two motors, and they would harmonize with each other. It was kind of that inspiration, the sound was the inspiration for the xxx====== and I went and recorded that sound, but it wasn't quite enough. It was just a humming sound, what was missing was a buzzy sort of sparkling sound, the scintillating which I was looking for, and I found it one day by accident.

I was carrying a microphone across the room between recording something over here and I walked over here when the microphone passeda television set which was on the floor which was on at the time without the sound turned up, but the microphone passed right behind the picture tube and as it did, this particular produced an unusual hum. It picked up a transmission from the television set and a signal was induced into it's sound reproducing mechanism, and that was a great buzz, actually. So I took that buzz and recorded it and combined it with the projector motor sound and that fifty-fifty kind of combination of those two sounds became the basic xxx====== tone, which was then, once we had established this tone of the xxx====== of course you had to get the sense of the xxx====== moving because characters would carry it around, they would whip it through the air , they would thrust and slash at each other in fights, and to achieve this addtional sense of movement I played the sound over a speaker in a room.

Just the humming sound, the humming and the buzzing combined as an endless sound, and then took another microphone and waved in the air next to that speaker so that it would come close to the speaker and go away and you could whip it by, and what happens when you do that by recording with a moving microphone is you geta Doppler's shift, you get a pitch shift in the sound and therefore you can produce a very authentic facsimilie of a moving sound. And therefore give the xxx====== a sense of movement and it worked well on the screen at that point." xxx
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No...Forbidden Planet was MGM.

I've gotta take a short break, but if no one gets it I'll be back with the answer later.

Hint: the studio in question used that sound effect a lot back then. I've heard it in at least one movie and three TV series. Of those four, I think it's best known as the sound effect of the aforementioned spaceship.
 
Thomas Veil said:
No...Forbidden Planet was MGM.

I've gotta take a short break, but if no one gets it I'll be back with the answer later.

Hint: the studio in question used that sound effect a lot back then. I've heard it in at least one movie and three TV series. Of those four, I think it's best known as the sound effect of the aforementioned spaceship.
Click to expand...


Is it the one where the spaceship is underground and the kid watches it land?

I can't remember the name of the film.:(
 
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