THX 1138

The quality of the voices that you're hearing now is something...

...that we needed to do to distinguish...

...these communication chatter voices...

...from the voices that you'd hear in public spaces.

If you were in the shopping mall, for instance, you can hear people say:

"Buy now. Buy more."

Today only, blue dendrites are only 47 credits. Buy now.

These are sounds coming over speakers in a space...

...but we wanted it to be different...

...to have another quality to it.

And I remembered that there's something...

...that you get out of ham-radio recordings.

You get a very rich chromatic quality if you're slightly off-tune.

We are sorry, but we must deny your request.

A woman's voice has an incredibly deep quality to it...

...which comes from the radio frequencies...

...creating subharmonics within her voice...

...so that it's almost like shifting the pitch of a voice.

But it's got this other quality to it...

...which is something else that sounds like radio.

If you feel you are not properly sedated...

... call 348-844 immediately.

The way we did this was we took our tape recorder...

...to a school of electronics in San Francisco.

And they had a ham-radio setup...

...where they could take our tape...

...and actually broadcast it out into the universe...

...and another radio which would pick it up.

George would manipulate one dial of the sending radio...

...and I would manipulate the dial of the receiving.

And we would get these kind of:

Quality to the voices.

74. Analyze: Severe.

An explanation for blocking, so allow me to make correction.

You are entering a red phase, THX.

It was like tuning a musical instrument...

...not knowing exactly what you'd get...

...because it was subject to all kinds of atmospheric peculiarities.

One of the challenges for anyone making a science-fiction film...

...in 1970...

...was to come up with a voice...

...that would at least stand comparison with HAL in 2001.

Now, THX has a pervasive voice.

All of the policemen speak with the same voice.

And whenever you go into the confessionals...

...there is the voice of OMM...

...and it turns out to be the same voice that the policemen have.

My time is yours.

- Masses for the masses. - Go ahead.

I was wondering, " What will George come up with? Who's this gonna be?"

The day of recording came...

...and in walked a funeral director.

And George laid out the dialogue and said:

"I just want you to say these words...

...as if you're talking to the recently bereaved widow of somebody."

Prevent accidents.

And...

... be happy.

I'm sure he didn't know what to make of all this, these crazy movie people.

I love echo. Any kind of reverberation or atmosphere around a voice...

...or a sound effect which tells you something about the space you're in...

...is, I think, for anyone who works in sound, it's really something...

...that we all love to do, because you start with what's called a "dry" sound...

...it's a sound recorded in a studio.

And then you can create...

...a kind of a fuzzy ball of echo around this sound...

...and it can make you think that this voice is in a bathroom...

...or in a large amphitheater or in a cave.

Today, this is as easy as pushing the button...

...on a digital reverberation device which is programmed...

...with hundreds, if not an infinite variety...

...of different kinds of echo.

Back in 1970, not only did we not have these kinds of devices...

...we didn't even access to what then was a normal echo chamber.

So, in self-defense, I worked out a system of taking the sound...

...that I wanted to add color to and actually going to the environment...

...where I would get this color, say, a basketball court...

...and playing the sound or the voice in this space...

...and on another tape recorder, I would record the sound and its echo.

And then when I got back to the studio...

...I would have two pieces of film running in sync together, side by side.

One would be the original sound, and the other one would be the sound...

...with this echo around it. And by changing the proportion...

...of these two sounds, you could make it sound dry...

...with just a little bit of echo, or you could reverse it...

...and have nothing but echo and almost nothing of the original dry sound.

Performance perfect is perfect performance.

In this specific case, you are listening to another discovery I made...

...which is that if you are in an ordinary-size room...

...and play the voice at four-times speed...

...so you've sped it up four times, and you record it...

...on the other tape recorder is also running at this very fast speed...

...then, when you play the second recorder back...

...at normal speed, you get the original sound...

...but you get the space of the room...

...as if it were four times larger than it really is.

It's something to do with the physics...

...of recording a sound...

...at that speed and then slowing it down.

The original voice returns to normal...

...but the space of the room balloons outward...

...to four times the size that it really is.

So even though this sound that you're listening to...

...was recorded in a living room, it sounds like it was recorded...

...in a large space.

The music you're listening to now...

...was written and conducted by Lalo Schifrin.

But it was based on what's called a temp track, temporary soundtrack...

...that I put together for the entire film...

...based on sound...

Music that I had extracted from records...

...mostly classical music.

I would take the music and record it backwards...

...or I would slow it down by 400 percent.

And I would layer it so that one piece of music would fade in...

...from another piece of music.

So I was treating music the same way that I would treat different tonalities...

...room tone or atmospheres as a sound effect.

So music as sound effect, even though it's music.

So I did this throughout the whole film, and when it came time...

...to have the real music for the film, we showed this version...

...of the film to Lalo, and he said, "I love this sound.

This is exactly the kind of stuff I'm doing anyway...

...and I like what you guys have done...

...so, with your permission, I'm going to adapt...

...what you've created.

And I'll just transcribe all the notes."

And I thought, "Oh, great."

So we then were on the stage at Warner Bros. With the orchestra...

...and here was this orchestra performing things...

...that I knew was music that was backwards and upside-down...

...and slowed-down by 400 percent.

In fact, if you take the opening music for THX...

...and play it backwards...

...and speed it up by four times...

...you'll hear "Stabat Mater" by Pergolesi.

One of the things that we thought of...

...as a way of organizing our creativity on THX...

...was something we called "cubistic sound"...

...which is that each scene...

...was a cube of sound.

And it would have a certain quality to it that was different...

...from the next scene, which was another cube...

...that was slightly different than the scene before.

So here we are in the trial, and I took my cue from the fact...

...that everything was photographed through panes of glass.

This was shot in a recording-studio control booth.

And so there's glass behind glass, and you see reflections of people...

...in the foreground. So I thought, "What's the audio equivalent to this?"

At the time, I was listening to some compositions by Steve Reich...

...who was a San Francisco composer...

...who had a technique of doubling up sound.

I didn't know how he achieved this...

...but I looked at the equipment that we had, which was...

...compared to what we have today, Stone Age equipment.

But I thought, " If I take the voices...

...and thread them through this first machine...

...and then, instead of winding up on its spool...

...I thread it through the other machine...

...through its soundhead...

...and then through the other one over here, and then the next one...

...and finally, I had this crazy-eight loop of film.

And what that meant was that you'd hear a voice...

...and then the film would travel to the next soundhead...

...then you'd hear that voice again.

Then a second after that, you'd hear it again.

- This is not a race issue. - He must be destroyed.

We must not continue to consume these erotics.

We must exterminate the source of sin.

Economics must not dictate situations which are obviously religious.

Then I took the original voice and isolated that...

...so that at least you had a chance of understanding what was being said.

And that was placed relatively loudly in the foreground...

...with all of this repetition chatter going on in the background.

One of the rules that we made for ourselves on THX...

...was no electronic sounds. Or very little electronic sounds.

Because the tradition in science-fiction films up to this point...

...which was 1969, 1970, was, "Let's have lots of electronic sounds."

I think Forbidden Planet started the trend.

But people just associated science fiction with:

Kinds of sounds.

Here, you're looking at these kind of electronic cattle prods...

...that THX is being tortured with.

They come close to him, and when they touch him...

...there's some kind of electronic discharge that makes him flinch.

The particular challenge here was to come up with something...

...that was a believable sound that these poles would make...

...when they touched someone, but it could not be electronic.

So I had looked around the house, George's house...

...where we were working, and he had some metal lampshades...

...over the workspace that I was using...

...to reflect the light down onto the workboard.

And I hit them...

...and it made a really interesting tone...

...but it had a buzz to it. The metal was cheap and thin.

So I put the microphone up inside this thing...

...and hit it with a variety of different instruments...

...my knuckle, pencil, anything, until I got something that sounded right.

And then I'd put this...

Recorded it on tape, and then played it forwards...