Star Trek iconic sounds with Analog Box

[Keith Blackwell]

Challenge: pick some of your favorite sounds from the original series Star Trek, and see how close you can get to recreating them using an analog box circuit.

Sound like fun? I tried it. Most of them I can get pretty close, so far. But a few are just too weird to figure out adequately, probably because they use some sources you simply cannot synthesize. See this interesting note for some background: https://groups.google.com/d/msg/rec.audio.pro/46FHQGA1lsE/01LBDeRc6BwJ .

You can find samples for download all over the web, but I don't know if they're legal or not (maybe "fair use"). Anyway, I wanted to recreate my own version of such sounds from scratch. Sometimes I start with Analog Box, then finish in CEP; sometimes I use only CEP. But when it comes to oscillator combinations and complex modulations, AB is best!

Here are a few of my circuits that get really close. I've not been able to get quite this close for the "astrogator" sound -- and would love to see/hear what the rest of you might come up with. Also, the complex modulations of the phaser sounds have thus far eluded me.

Consider it a "dare", like we have over on freesound.org. :-)

--
Keith W. Blackwell

[John Paul Burtell]

oooh, this does sound like fun! i have to ask though, what is CEP?

 

thanks for presenting this challenge, Keith.

--
Keith W. Blackwell

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[Robert Jarvis]

I had to look that up as well….

 

Cool Edit Pro

 

 

R

 

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[Keith Blackwell]

On 2/16/2013 7:58 AM, Robert Jarvis wrote:
> I had to look that up as well�.

Yeah, sorry for being obtuse. I wasn't talking about another CEP I'm quite familiar with, which is Complex Event Processing. :-)

Drifting a bit...

I still prefer Cool Edit Pro over any other audio editor (including Adobe Audition). Some backstory -- Syntrillium, who made Cool Edit Pro, had really perfected the program and optimized the interface on CEP, when Adobe bought them and turned CEP into Adobe Audition. Along the way, Adobe threw away the CD Burning plug-in, which actually gave you more control than most commercial CD burning software (allowing hidden tracks, etc.), and they changed the interface to not only look a bit different but to also not have as much functionality (especially for right-click actions). They then went on to add some pretty neat additional functionality, so in the end Adobe Audition wasn't all that bad. But I have always preferred the original CEP because I'm so used to it. Besides, I'm still using Windows XP (on my old laptop, anyway). For folks who had paid for the original CEP and made it to the final version (2.1), there is really very little incentive to pay for a newer version of AA.

Adobe recently put their earlier versions of stuff (CS2), including Adobe Audition version 3 (mostly a superset of CEP functionality), available for free download. They say it's not a give-away, however, and intended only for those folks who bought CS2 back in the day. It's easy to find lots of discussion of this and pointers with a quick search (CS2 Download), so I'm not going to recommend what you should do in response to that -- its just FYI.

From my perspective, CEP/AA seems like a good fit for folks who enjoy dinking around with Analog Box, just because CEP was designed from a very mathematical view of audio. It gives you great tools that you have complete control over in a mathematically accurate way. Not only is it a fantastic audio editor, it is also an uncompromising multi-track studio DAW (2 distinct but integrated modes). Sorry to make it sound like an advertisement, I'm just explaining what I like about it.

--
Keith W. Blackwell

[Keith Blackwell]

Now back to the sound design topic...

For the Star Trek sound recreation efforts, I used CEP extensively for changing the playback rate (Adjust Sample Rate) and doing spectral analysis (both are relatively effortless in CEP). The communicator chirps sound I put on freesound was done solely with CEP (not AB), though I went back and adjusted my earlier AB attempt to use what I learned in doing that (and I included that in the original post). I've also used CEP alone to do the red alert klaxon, the boatswain whistle, etc. To do all sorts of filtering, effects, etc., CEP is a much better environment than AB -- I still prefer AB when complex oscillator networks or control logic is required. But to each his own, and YMMV, etc.

The "planetary" sound effect (also used as part of one of the flavors of a transporter sound) was where I first decided I needed to add some noise to the oscillators. That's probably because the original sound effect used orchestra for the steady notes, not just some electronic oscillators (or B3, which are electro-mechanical in nature). How to add noise in an FM way that still sound good was an interesting AB challenge, and I decided I had to filter the noise quite heavily, but that wasn't enough, so I used a comb filter (tuned delay) as well to add resonance. You can control the amount of noise to add and how much resonance is used. I'm sure you all could do better (and probably have done so already). In the extended sample I uploaded to freesound, I think I overdid it -- giving it way too much of a metallic ring.

After I put the noise-FM sub-module together, I went back to the transporter-start-beep circuit and used it there also, though it only slightly altered the sound.

I would point you to the sounds on freesound.org, but unfortunately, they are still awaiting moderation. The moderators have been slow lately, but I can't complain since they do it as volunteers anyway. One of these days they'll show up (I hope) in my SciFi pack, here: http://www.freesound.org/people/zimbot/packs/7708/ .

BTW: if you want to find a convenient (not necessarily best quality) source of the original STTOS sounds, try http://www.trekcore.com/audio/, though I think the legality is questionable (given the extent of coverage of the sound effects, it's hard to claim "fair use" here). The one that gave me so much trouble (out of those I tried) is the one you can hear as "Astrogator 1" on that page (or direct: http://www.trekcore.com/audio/toscomputer/sequences/tos_astrogator_1.mp3 ). So if you're up for a challenge, let's see how close we can get to that.

--
Keith W. Blackwell
(aka zimbot on freesound.org)

PS: if any of you knows of more details of the original sound design (like the link I included in the OP), please share.

[John Paul Burtell]

D'oh! I should have known that. I have been looking into Composer's Desktop Project (CDP) for specialized processing so my acronymns have been all over the place.

 

CEP was definitely a useful editor...of late, I've been using GoldWave myself.