the submersible dirigible

Ben Burtt, four time Academy Award winning sound designer and voice of ET and R2-D2 — among others — explains the unique challenges in developing Pixar’s Wall-E character.  While Burtt’s R2-D2 robotic vocalizations have already successfully translated human emotion into beeps and boops, these same electronic flourishes were stretched to an extreme for Wall-E.  Burtt’s abstract vocalizations, sounding something like a toddler speaking through a vocoder, needed to stand on their own for the entire first third of the film.

Burtt’s work has always distinguished itself, making a profound impression on audiences, despite tough competition from the industry’s best storytelling, cinematography and special effects accompanying his work, diversions that could easily overshadow less accomplished sound creations.  Wall-E, for the first time, truly makes Burtt’s sound creations the central focus of the film.  Lovers of sound and music absolutely must see Wall-E.

Mix Sound for Film Feature: WALL-E

The trick has always been to somehow balance the human input to the electronic input so you have the human side of it. In this case, for Wall-E, it ended up being my voice because I was always experimenting on myself sort of like the mad scientist in his lab, you inject yourself with the serum. After weeks and months of experimenting it was easier to try it on myself as we worked it out. You start with the human voice input and record words or sounds and then it is taken into a computer and I worked out a unique program which allowed me to deconstruct the sound into its component parts. We all know how pictures are pixels now and you can rearrange pixels to change the picture. You kind of do the same thing with sound.

I could reassemble the Wall-E vocals and perform it with a light pen on a tablet. You could change pitch by moving the pen or the pressure of the pen would sustain or stretch syllables or consonants and you could get an additional level of performance that way, kind of like playing a musical instrument. But that process had artifacts in it, things that made it unlike human speech, glitches you might say, things you might throw away if you were trying to convince someone it was a human voice. That’s what we liked, that electronic alias thing that went along with it, because that helped make the illusion that the sound was coming from a voice box or some kind of circuit depending on the character. — Ben Burtt Interview, Wall-E

“The characters’ voices were the hardest because people are highly critical of voices and hear them differently than sound effects. We’re experts at interpreting voices and the emotions behind them. I built special circuitry for my computer that allowed me to record my voice, digitally break it down into component parts, and reassemble it … processing the sound as if it were a musical instrument. The trick with robot voices is to retain the human element so people can identify and care while also giving it a machine-like quality—you don’t want the audience to think it’s just an actor in front of a microphone. That was my biggest challenge.” — If A Robot Falls On A Deserted Planet, Does It Still Make Noise?

also: Ben Burtt: The man behind R2-D2 and Wall-E’s beeps by Tom Russo

& Exclusive: Ben Burtt’s WALL-E Sound Masterclass.  The world’s most renowned Sound Designer teaches RT by Ben Burtt

(h/t usoproject)