What The Beep?:

Legendary Sound Designer Ben Burtt Creates Unique Robot Voices Along With A Universe Of Sounds For "Wall-E"

The cast of characters in "WALL-E" includes a wide assortment of robots, including several that speak or communicate in their own unique language. For the film's producer Jim Morris, and director/co-writer Andrew Stanton, there was only one clear choice to create the specialty voices for these robot characters and design the sounds for this film. And that choice was multiple Oscar®-winning sound designer Ben Burtt, the legendary talent who created the voice of R2-D2, the crack of Indiana Jones' whip, the hiss for "Alien," and many other iconic sounds known to moviegoers everywhere.

"Ben is one-of-a-kind," says Stanton. "He is such a master of sound design, and he's the name that's been made famous by every kid who ever liked 'Star Wars' and all the films that followed.

"When I realized I was actually going to get the chance to make 'WALL-E,' I knew that in many ways the film had to rely on sound to tell the story," Stanton continues. "I wanted our robots to communicate more on the level of R2-D2 than C-3PO -- with their own machine-like language. I felt it would be more clever, more interesting that way. When Jim told me that he had worked with Ben at ILM for many years and suggested that we invite him over, I was thrilled. I pitched the movie to Ben and told him that I would need him to be a good deal of my cast. Thank goodness he said yes because it soon became obvious that we couldn't have done it without him. He's the absolute best."

Jim Morris adds, "Ben's ability to create other worldly voices and special voices that have emotion and sentiment made him a perfect casting choice for WALL-E and we're so delighted that he worked on the film. Some of the character voices he created are completely synthetic, some are made up of a conglomeration of various types of sounds that Ben has found or created, and some of them are based on a little bit of human performance that is then manipulated. Ben was also extremely important with all the sounds in the movie."

"It was a weird balance between sounding like it was generated by a machine but still had the warmth and intelligence -- I call it soul -- that a human being has."

~ Ben Burtt, Sound Designer

Burtt explains, "My background on 'Star Wars' gave me lots of experience in working with robot and alien voices, but 'WALL-E' required more sounds for the robot characters than any previous movie I'd worked on. The challenge of this film was to create character voices that the audience would believe are not human. Yet they could relate to the characters with all the intimacy, affection and identity that they'd attribute to a living human character. The voices couldn't just sound like a machine with no personality, or like an actor behind a curtain imitating a robot. It was a weird balance between sounding like it was generated by a machine but still had the warmth and intelligence -- I call it soul -- that a human being has."

Burtt got the call to work on "WALL-E" just months after completing work on the last "Star Wars" film. He had told his wife "no more robots," but the temptation to work at Pixar on an entirely different kind of robot film proved to be too strong.

"Fortunately, it was such a fresh and exciting idea, and the challenge of the sound in the film really appealed to me," says Burtt. "Sound and the robot voices were going to play such an unusual role that I couldn't help but be inspired. So of course, I signed on to work with Jim and Andrew, and do the sound design for the film."

Regarding the voice for the character of WALL-E, Burtt explains, "It starts with me in my little recording chamber in our sound department. I take those original recordings and run it through my computer in which the sound is analyzed and broken down into all its component parts. Much like you'd take light and run it through a prism to break it into a spectrum of colors, you can do the same thing with an audio file. Once you've broken the sound into all its component parts, you can start re-fabricating it back together again. But now you can control the amounts of one thing or another. I can inject a machine-like quality into the sound, and do things to it that the human vocal chords could never really do. You can hold a certain vowel longer and stretch it. You can change the pitch of something up and down. You can put two sounds close together. In re-fabricating the sound with a particular program I developed, I was able to keep as much of the original performance as I wanted but add a bit of synthetic form to it.

"If sound were silly putty," adds Burtt, "you could stretch it and make it longer. And I found a way of working on WALL-E's voice where I could do that. It gave a quality that Andrew really liked, and it allowed us to keep the personality going."

In addition to the character WALL-E, Burtt was also responsible for the voices of M-O, Auto and EVE, whose tone he created by manipulating the voice of Pixar employee Elissa Knight.

For the other sounds in the film, Burtt created a library of 2,400 files -- the most he's ever accumulated for any film. "WALL-E" was Burtt's first animated feature. "Animation is very dense and the sounds are all really fast," he observes. "When I was initially making sounds for WALL-E, I found I was always doing it too slow, so I had to speed up everything in my life to get the sounds fast."

Burtt had to be resourceful in creating sounds for the film. To make the sound of the cockroach skittering, he found a pair of police handcuffs and recorded the clicking as he took them apart and reassembled them. To get the sound of EVE flying, he found someone who had built a 10-foot long radio controlled jet plane, and recorded it flying immediately overhead. Running up and down a carpeted hallway with a big heavy canvas bag created a howling wind effect that was perfect for an Earth wind storm. And a hand-cranked inertia starter from a 1930s biplane did the trick in creating the sound of WALL-E moving into high gear.

"The best part of working on any film when you're the sound designer is when you're alone in your editing room and you've got some finished footage in front of you," says Burtt. "And you put the sound in for the first time, and something really clicks. You're the first one to see it and that's a sweet moment. Wandering the halls at Pixar was really inspiring because there are so many talented people there doing incredible things. I would go back to my studio and think, 'can my sound be as good as what I'm seeing?'"

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