Episode 474 - The Synthesizer Sounds of Star Wars

Blast Points - Star Wars Podcast

Tv & Film

4.8 • 563 Ratings

🗓️ 31 March 2026

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We all know Ben Burtt was out recording real world sounds that became the iconic audio of the galaxy far far away but did you know just how many of those sounds were made with help from a synthesizer borrowed from Francis Ford Coppola? Join us as we explore the unique role synths had in creating of the sound of Star Wars and the voice of R2-D2! So get out your ARP 2600, celebrate the love and listen today! JOIN THE BLAST POINTS ARMY and SUPPORT BLAST POINTS ON PATREON! MANDALORIAN SEASON 3 BOBA FETT BEACH PARTY COMMENTARY! NEW ANDOR SEASON 2 EPISODE COMMENTARIES! HEAR EPISODES EARLY! Theme Music! downloadable tunes from episodes! Extra goodies! and so much MORE! www.patreon.com/blastpoints Blast Points T-SHIRTS are now available! Represent your favorite podcast everywhere you go! Get logo shirts while supplies last! Perfect for conventions, dates, formal events and more! Get them here: www.etsy.com/shop/Gibnerd?section_id=21195481 If you dug the show, please leave BLAST POINTS a review on iTunes, Spotify and share the show with friends! If you leave an iTunes review, we will read it on a future episode! Honestly! Talk to Blast Points on twitter at @blast_points "Like" Blast Points on Facebook Join the Blast Points Super Star Wars Chill Group here www.facebook.com/groups/BlastPointsGroup/ we are also on Instagram! Wow! www.instagram.com/blastpoints Your hosts are Jason Gibner & Gabe Bott! contact BLAST POINTS at : contact@blastpointspodcast.com May the Force be with you, always! This podcast is not affiliated in any way with Lucasfilm Ltd. LLC, The Walt Disney Company, or any of their affiliates or subsidiaries.

Transcript

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0:00.0	R2D2 was probably the most difficult voice to work on because it was the most abstract.
0:13.0	Here we had supposedly a machine that was going to talk, it was going to act, it was going to draw on our emotions,
0:20.0	it was going to be in scenes with
0:21.1	Alec Guinness and work as another actor. Yet it was a machine. It didn't have a face with a smile
0:28.6	or a mouth or eyes or ears. And it couldn't speak English and it couldn't even mouth words.
0:34.4	The initial experiments in coming up with Artu's voice were all directed toward making a machine type of language, something that would come out of a computer, out of a robot.
0:43.3	And although the voices were very interesting, I think, which I made, they all seemed to lack a sort of human quality. They seemed too machine-like.
0:51.3	And R2 was not really just a machine.
0:55.0	He was also this lovable little assistant robot.
0:58.9	And it came about after trial and error and trying different sounds that one day I just
1:05.0	started making the sounds.
1:06.4	I said, well, maybe R2 should kind of sound like this.
1:08.6	And you'd imitate a little baby sound, ooh, ah, you know, something like that.
1:13.1	It's a sound you might have heard a little infant making
1:15.4	when they were learning the talk.
1:17.6	Communicating, some kind of emotion,
1:19.3	but not using well-formed English words.
1:22.9	So the idea came up to really combine this sort of human sound with the electronic sound.
1:29.3	That way we'd still might be able to have the character of a machine,
1:32.3	but get the personality and the emotion of a living organism.
1:36.3	So I learned to combine my voice with electronic sounds,
1:40.3	which I would play on a keyboard of a synthesizer. And in combining the two,
	...

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