Galactic News

Tuesday June 18, 2002
The sound produced by the seismic charges were simply awesome. How did you get that "twang" sound?

This report comes from the Official Star Wars Site!

Answered by: Ben Burtt

I prefer not to discuss in detail this sound at this time. After all, can't I keep a few secrets?

I will say that this is something I've wanted to do since A New Hope, we just never had a sequence which allowed the explosion to be featured in a way that I could exploit the idea of delayed sound in space... what I call an "audio black hole", an explosion so cosmic that the energy of the sound is unable to escape at the time of ignition, but is released a moment later.

I originally made a variety of similar noises for what I called "Space Ether Explosions" for A New Hope. I used them as experiments, especially for exploding TIE fighters in the scene when Han and Luke are in the gun turrets. They were mixed into a scratch mix for the sequence, but George Lucas did not like them so I halted research.

Now, many years later I revived the idea using some new material and it seems to have found its place.