Ben Burtt

Overview

Ben Burtt was born on July 12, 1948, in Jamesville, New York, the son of a chemistry professor at Syracuse University and a child psychologist. He grew up fascinated by sound, spending his childhood recording audio experiments and making homemade films. As a teenager, he created audio dramas on tape, recording speech backward and experimenting with playback effects to create alien-sounding dialogue. He studied physics at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania before earning a master's degree in film production at the University of Southern California. In 1975, George Lucas hired Burtt, then a young and largely unknown USC graduate, to create the sound for a science fiction film called Star Wars. It was a decision that would transform the art of sound in cinema.

Why He Matters

Before Burtt's work on Star Wars, the job title "sound designer" did not exist. Sound effects for science fiction films were typically electronic and synthetic. Burtt took a radically different approach, going into the real world to record "found sounds" and then manipulating them into something entirely new. He created the lightsaber hum by combining the drone of an idling film projector with the buzz of a broken television set. The blaster sound came from hitting a guy-wire on a radio tower with a hammer. Darth Vader's breathing was Burtt's own breath recorded through an old scuba regulator. R2-D2's voice blended Burtt's own vocal sounds with an ARP 2600 synthesizer. He also rediscovered and popularized the "Wilhelm scream," a single 1951 recording that has since appeared in over 400 films as the inside joke of sound designers. Burtt went on to design sound for all of the Star Wars films, the Indiana Jones series, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, and WALL-E (for which he also voiced the title character).