As part of the continuing series of Empire at 40, the official site talks to sound designer Ben Burtt about the many real-world audio sounds that became some of the most enduring creatures, vehicles, and backgrounds sounds in The Empire Strikes Back and beyond.
Inside Ben Burtt’s home office, he’s flipping through a notebook from his time working on Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back in search of the name of the farm where he recorded the sea otter behind the bleating vocals of Hoth’s tauntauns and a bathtub full of raccoons for Dagobah’s unseen wildlife. Among the copious notes and audio tapes from his more than four-decade career is a detailed record of the nine months Burtt, the sound designer on the film, and his team spent on road trips across the United States where they recorded everything from a squeaky dumpster lid in Burtt’s yard to a lion feasting on an animal skull. More than a quest to create the soundscape to convey the otherworldly ambiance of Dagobah and so many other locations, vehicles, creatures, and sounds in the Star Wars sequel, it was also the chance to capture more than 1,000 individual audio elements to create the basis for what would become Lucasfilm and Skywalker Sound’s audio effects library.
As for that tauntaun? “It was an Asian Sea Otter that was recorded at a game farm to the south of [San Francisco],” Burtt says from behind his notebook. “The sea otter had a very high-pitched squawking and the nice thing about it was that it almost sounded like it was talking.” For a moment, Burtt slips into his own rendition of the otter’s chattering, one of many sound effects he intones in his storytelling. “Slowed down, it became a terrific tauntaun.” The name of the animal was Mota, he finds, scrawled next to the date of the recording. “But it doesn’t say the place,” he says. “What kinda notes are these, Ben?!”
Raised in a family of scientists, Burtt’s approach to sound design in the late 1970s had a decidedly academic undertone. “I was thinking I was going to be a science teacher,” he says. “I was brought up in a family of scientists…notes and notes and lab coats. And I was a physics major in college, so I was just trained to keep a record of what I was doing professionally. I don’t think I was thinking I’d be doing interviews 40 years later.”
But more than a scientific log, Burtt’s notes are a window into his creative process, his passionate energy for capturing sounds and preserving the history of sound in filmmaking. “I was always very interested in the history of sound effects in Hollywood in general, everything that led up to my career, and yet I found there was no information saved,” he says. “There’s very little behind-the-scenes material going back into the 1940s or 1930s about sound effects, and it’s extremely rare that any information comes to the surface because no one at the time left a record. They obviously didn’t do behind-the-scenes documentaries or interviews. Sound was not important enough to get documented, and the studios liked to keep their process a trade secret.”
And yet, when George Lucas first brought moviegoers along on a journey into a galaxy far, far away, he knew an authentic audio track, created from real-world sounds artistically manipulated and layered, could help define and create all-new worlds and make them feel entirely lived in and believable. To celebrate the 40th anniversary of The Empire Strikes Back this year, Burtt digs into his personal archives to share some of his favorite stories behind the sounds that defined the film.
Read the article in full and hear some of the sounds used here.
