The Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive malfunction

Sound designer Ben Burtt explains how the somewhat comical sound of the Millennium Falcon's hyperdrive malfunction in Star Wars was created.

The sound in question is a mix of eight different sounds, almost all produced by false starts or engine or gear failures. This demonstrates, once again, that being a sound designer doesn't require a technological expert, but rather a creative mind and, above all, a person who has spent so much time listening and experimenting with sound that he can understand the effect a certain sound can have, perhaps hyper-amplified or with the speed changed.

In fact, in this example, the technology is, at most, limited to a mixer and a variable-speed recorder. And 98% of the most famous film effects are made of this kind (the exception in Star Wars is the sound of R2D2, created with an ARP 2600 analog synthesizer).

Ben Burtt created almost all the sounds in Star Wars through mixing. For Chewbacca's voice, for example, he recorded hundreds of sounds from bears, walruses, lions, and other animals. He then tried to catalog them based on the emotions they conveyed, and by blending them together, he created Chewbacca's language.

It's also interesting to hear how he created the famous lightsaber sound:

Burtt said he could “hear the sound in his head.” At the time, he was still a graduate student at USC and was working as a projectionist. The old projector had an interlocked motor which, when idle, made a “wonderful humming sound.” Burtt recorded it, and it became the basis of the lightsaber sound. But it wasn’t enough — he needed a buzzing sound, and he actually found it by accident. Walking by television set with a live microphone, the microphone picked up the transmission from the unit and produced a buzz. Burtt loved it, recorded it, and combined it with the projector motor, creating a new sound that became the basic lightsaber tone. To achieve the aural effect of a lightsaber moving, he played the hum out of a speaker and waved a microphone by it; doing so created the fascimile of a moving sound, and in this case, the sound of a Jedi or Sith wielding a weapon in battle.

It all brings to mind Stockhausen's old lecture on discovery and invention, the essence of which is that in music (and sound), some things happen because they have been planned, while others are discovered purely by chance, often while working on something else..

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