Ben Burtt

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

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[]

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. 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.^[2]

He studied in the University of Southern California where he met Rick Victor, and Richard Anderson, who would later become his friend and assistant.^[2]

Ben Burtt started working for Star Wars: Episode IV A New Hope in 1975, and was 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 droids and creatures. For this he collected human-made, animal-made, even synthesized sounds that conveyed nuances and intonation, even for the growls of Chewbacca. He followed George 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 oportunity to record walruses after their 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]

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]

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 practiced a technique Lucas suggested, calling "worldizing"; recording lines in locations with specific acoustics that match the setting of the film, in order to catch an authentic ambience and reverberation. In preparation for recording Jawaese, 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]

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]

He also provided the original idea for the character of Salacious B. Crumb.^[6]

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

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^[7] and Lushros Dofine in Revenge of the Sith.

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.^[8]^[9]