Sound effect in Star Trek IV: The Voyage home and /Clara and the Tardis/

October 7, 2021 4:30 PM

I watched Clara and the Tardis, and my first reaction was /I've heard that sound effect before, in /. Star Trek: The Voyage Home. Some of the beeps that the TARDIS (at 10-25s in) makes are recognizably the sound effects in the Trek clip, (at 10-15s) What is the origin of that sound effect? (and where is the full sample available?)
posted by oonh to Grab Bag (3 answers total)

It is probably from a commercial sound effects library—recordings you can buy that have various sound effects on them. Which one, there's no real way to tell. Most studios and production companies have a huge collection of these, not just commercial but ones recorded by the studio for its various productions over the years. The latter isn't the case here probably because the production companies of the two aren't related.

Here's a thread about another widely-used sound effect.
posted by kindall at 5:57 PM on October 7, 2021

BBC Rewind - Sound Effects - good luck.
posted by zengargoyle at 4:41 AM on October 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

I'm unclear on what sound we're talking about. The Doctor Who clip has a brief sequence of beeps at 0:19, and again at 0:30 at 0:43 – is that what you mean?

I'm even more unclear on what timestamp I should be looking for in the Star Trek clip. Your link goes directly to 6:56 in the video – was that intentional? Because I don't hear any beeps between 6:56 and the end of the clip. I hear some very quiet beeps from 0:10 to 0:15, so I guess that's what you're referring to? They don't sound very similar, though.

It's unlikely that an American movie released in 1986, and a British TV show released in 2013, would be drawing from the same sound effects libraries. (If only because of the vast changes in audio and video editing technology in the intervening 27 years.)

Besides, "computer making a short sequence of randomly pitched beeps" is a very common and basic sound effect, and has been a sci-fi trope since the 1960s (if not earlier). Any commercial sound library will certainly include this sound, and it's very easy for any sound effects artist to create their own version.

Here's where it came from:

The first commercial synthesizers found use in sci-fi soundtracks, as an auditory shorthand for "futuristic", "technological", and "otherworldly". These synthesizers commonly had a feature called "sample and hold".

A sample-and-hold circuit can be used in a variety of ways – but it was common to use it to produce a series of random pitches, as head in the intro of this video.

Synthesizers have evolved dramatically from those primitive beginnings, but that sound had already been established as a sci-fi trope. Nowadays, you can create the same effect on a computer – or, yes, borrow it from any sound effects library.

Seriously, I can't emphasize enough how easy it is to produce this effect with almost any (hardware or software) synthesizer. Unless it's literally the exact same pitches in the exact same pattern, it's unlikely that these two productions used the same sound. Their sound effects artists probably just created them on the spot, for that specific production.
posted by escape from the potato planet at 1:49 PM on October 8, 2021