Recreating the THX Deep Note | Hacker News Reader

Recreating the THX Deep Note

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173 pointsnkurz27 comments

The song Spaced by Beaver & Krause made this sound before THX, in 1970 on the album Wild Sanctuary

3:10 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xKO3KAtDZ0

Edit: additional wikipedia searching reveals this unsourced fact

"A variation of the end of their track "Spaced" from the Wild Sanctuary album became the inspiration for dual gliding synthesizer soundtrack for the copied THX Sound Logo in movie theaters, also for which neither Beaver or Krause were compensated."

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_%26_Krause)

Iannis Xenakis' song Metastasis got there first as far as I know, in 1953 with a full orchestra. It has a slightly different (less harmonic) end:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SZazYFchLRI (mostly the first minute)

It's one of my favorite songs, mostly for when I want to be left alone in a room.

Makes you wonder how things would have played out if Dr Dre's Lolo sampled Iannis Xenakis instead of THX's sound. Would placing the sample at the beginning of a record the way Deep Note is placed in a movie have been a violation of THX's trademark?

There's another song of his, Concret PH, that is absolutely mind-blowing on a hi-fi system or with high end headphones. On lo-fi equipment its kind of staticy, but on good equipment it's like sitting in a room with thousands of thin walled crystal wine glasses shattering around you.

Here's a working link to the THX 'Deep Note' theme sound (the link on the page seems to be dead): http://www.uspto.gov/trademarks/soundmarks/74309951.mp3

In comparison, the modern "quintessential" Deep Note which (by my ear) is a lot more intense http://www.thx.com/consumer/movies/8286511

This one is great. How do I get a copy of this one?

Here you go: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/231528979/thx.mp3

It came out kind of quiet, but I think the quality is the same. May be able to just run it through a gain filter.

I appreciate the level of detail the author goes to in describing the creation process. Very informative. I did this myself once, but using a patch I made in Max/MSP for drawing and listening to line segments on a pitch vs time plane. For this particular use case, I generated the input score with a Python script rather than drawing them manually. I found that detuning the sustained tones made the biggest difference in matching the original sound, which the article author mentions. Here's a video of my patch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl4C4zsy9LY

I use Deep Note as the sound for my alarm clock. It's perfect.

The first half of it is a bit too creepy for me during Deep Sleep ;)

Shrek version was better.

http://www.thx.com/consumer/movies/8286492

I made a version in JavaScript based on this description. You can hear it here - http://stuartmemo.com/thx-deep-note-in-javascript/

The ChucK version is worth checking out as well:

https://lists.cs.princeton.edu/pipermail/chuck-users/2009-Ap...

Thanks to ahmetkizilay in the comments.

It reminds me of the score from There Will Be Blood.

I expect Greenwood was as influenced by that sound growing up as the rest of us - the bits of the TWbB score that echo DN are probably homage.

I think that both Greenwood and Moorer were influenced by the compositions of Iannis Xenakis and others, as noted in the article.

I've gotta say, making a sound like this is one of the very obvious things to do with any synthesizer that has more than one oscillator (which is most of them) and which allows pitch modulation (again, most of them). I made it by accident some 20 years ago when I was learning to program my first analog synth and didn't know about the similarity to the THX sound until someone pointed it out to me (I grew up outside the US and had never been to an Imax presentation at that time).

And who can forget The Simpsons' THX introduction?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nu0R96OZy6w

Anyone ever try this with an analog synth?

Well that was well worth my time. Awesome.

I'm guessing the down votes are because people think I'm being sarcastic?? I'm not.

Seriously, why?

hobby.

The only part of this "deep note" that I like is the very end; top of the crescendo. The first part has always creeped me out worse than watching Hostel for the first time.

Without the first part, a whole orchestra's worth of sawtooth oscillators playing octaves is pretty boring. The effect of the beginning is to build tension, which is released at the point when all the oscillators converge on the single note. Tension and release is the basis for most (if not all) music. Whether its in the form of a V7->I cadence, which builds tension harmonically with a tritone that "wants" to resolve to the root. Or the "riser" before the drop in electronic music, just a single note with it's pitch going up and up and up or a filter sweeping through white noise up and up and up with drums doing more and more subdivisions until a second of silence and then boom...the main theme. In and of itself it may be interesting but only within the context of it being the release of tension built up previously does it have that profound effect.

I wasn't trying to get fucked by the deep note, a tickle would have sufficed.

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