Attention starwars fans and sabersmiths!!!!!!!

E

epicspidey

New Member
hello. im epicspidey.

i make costumes mostly but also build lightsabers and other props in my spare time from work. when im not working on a few of my costumes. ive called you guys here to ask... has anyone ever thought of making an actual realistic version of the swing sounds for the lightsabers on starwars? now i dont mean just individual sounds when motion is sensed. but i mean has anyone in fact tried to make the sound in the same way they did in the movies? they did this by swinging a microphone in front of a speaker that played the idle hum sound repeatedly. causing a sudden change in pitch. which in turn caused the humming lightsaber swing sound that we so often have heard in the films.

I herebly propose that we come up with a definitive method for producing this sound internally in saber props. so we dont get any more annoying swings without a sound. but instead. a nice thrumming pitch change identical to the film. this could revolutionize the way that lightsabers are made and programmed nowadays.


i have a few ideas. the first is to have the idle hum sound play silently into a small electronic device programmed to change the pitch properly when motion is sensed. you would use a motion sensor similar to that of a wii controller.



the seccond uses the first idea in part. but then uses a sensitive microphone to pick up the sound of air rushing past itself which would then make the desired sound/effect


please post your ideas and comments. i would love to take up this project with everyone here so that we can literally change the way that we make these sabers!!!!!!!!


as a huge fan and sabersmith. i would love to finally have a device that can produce the sound in the same way as they did in the films!!!!!
 
I would think the easist solution would be to add a more sensitive sensor devoted to playing only saber swing sounds already programmed on the sound board.

The only problem I see is, the sabers don't always make movement/swoosh sounds, due to movie audio mixing.

Personally, if my lightsaber 'swooshed' every single time my saber was moved even a tiny amount- I'd want to turn it off.
 
i see your point. which is why you would turn down the sensitivity to only make noise when you unmistakably swing it. the point of the thread is to get the sound effects as close to the film as possible. meaning no more audio mixing problems as well :)
 
Several years ago I had some ideas of making a digital synthesizer as a program on a microcontroller that would produce simple waveforms, where the waveforms would be modulated directly by the value from an accelerometer. In other words, the value of the accelerometer would be fed directly into the equations that control pitch, volume and higher-order pitch (vibrato).
The big work would be to analyse the lightsaber sounds from the movies and create the factors that control the waveforms. Doing a FFT analysis on some sound samples is one thing... but I recon that there would be a lot of tweaking to make it sound good enough when you move it around. In that phase I think it would be best to connect the lightsaber to a PC and do the processing there.

Back then I thought of using a one-axis accelerometer mounted on the saber's axis, preferably at the tip of the blade, and use a PIC microcontroller driving a D/A converter directly in realtime with some careful interrupt and instruction timing.
I did not get very far because the scale of the project was daunting compared to my skills at the time and just mentioning the ideas on the board caused slander from a board member who would have become a competitor a few years later if I had been successful and that just put me down. It had always been my intention to publish my work as open source, free of charge, and some people don't like that.

These days there are lots of options with AVR microcontrollers: ready-made tiny circuit boards with a microcontrollers, and various "shields" that can be put on them that have three-axis accelerometers, micro-SD card readers, power supply etc. I think that building a hardware solution from ready-made components should be possible without deep knowledge in analogue and digital circuitry, but there would still be a lot of programming.
The AVR is faster and easier to program than the PIC (C or C++ vs. assembly language) and there are lots of options. The most common Arduino boards are too large, but these days there are several that are quite small. Recently, I have been using the Teensy 2.0 from PRJC for some other projects but without Arduino libraries.

You would still need a separate clash sensor, because the method of using an accelerometer to trigger a discreet clash event for emitting a sound is patented by another board member who makes and sells his own sound modules.
 
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That was my point.

In the movies the 'real' lightsabers didn't always make movement sounds, because music was playing or someone was talking.

That's why I like my MR and Parks sabers, the movement sounds are accurate to the movie.

The same as you always didn't always hear C-3po's movements sounds. Sometimes you do, sometimes you don't.
 
would you like to work with me on creating something like what we both spoke of? id love to pursue the endevor with you! :D

- - - Updated - - -

it can be assumed however that the sounds were in fact meant to be there lol :)
 
Hello epicspidey as I read this thread I said to myself at last someone who is making the same question as I do. The answer however is not simple but after reading a lot on the web I found a controller that might be able to do the job it´s the propeller chip from parallax. From what I´ve read the chip has 8 cores that they call "cogs" that can work independently one from the other to perform multitasks or cooperative to ease some process. On that base and clarifying that my skills to programming are close to none I believe that one cog could read the inputs, the second cog read the accelerometer and pass to the third the value then the third cog would modify the wav form and the forth would play the file as it comes form the third cog but that is out of my league.
An example of the chip playing files is a proyect called audio trip soundboard Audio Trip Sound Board 1.0 powered by Propeller Chip
 
Guys--that soundboard is way too big to fit into a saber hilt.
Also, Audiotrip is now Paralax--please see this link:

Play WAV Files | learn.parallax.com

Your best solution might be to just use a Teensy Arduino board and two separate MP3 soundboards loaded with different sounds.
One with constant background hum, and the other with your swing loops.


You also have to account for power supplies and controlling the boards.
 
Yes, that is the kind of motion sensitive sound that is discussed here.

However, what I think the author of the first post is after, is something that is a bit more sensitive than the MR or Hasbro "Force FX" sabers.
You have to swing the saber in just the right way to get it to make a motion sound, and there is a small delay before the sound starts playing.
 
I think you may be trying to reinvent the wheel here. There are two top tier saber soundboards already, the Crystal Focus from Plecter Labs and the Igniter from Naigon. Both are awesome soundboards already that can be loaded with many sound effect features and adjustability of the sounds are insane. You can find many sound fonts using clips ripped from the movies and looped.

But I see what your looking for as well (I think). You want to re-create the effect that was used in making the original sounds and incorporate that process into a saber. Good luck as it sounds like quite an ambitious project.

Oh, and I wasn't aware Parks was adding sound to his sabers?
 
And let's not forget all the fonts (sound wav files) at soundfonts.com great stuff. They really make your saber come alive. There are many adjustment with those boards. You can't go wrong they have different sizes of cards also.

If you don't want to spend the money you can get a MR board from an old saber. There out there.......search and you shall find.
 
Valdius said:
And let's not forget all the fonts (sound wav files) at soundfonts.com great stuff. They really make your saber come alive. There are many adjustment with those boards. You can't go wrong they have different sizes of cards also.

If you don't want to spend the money you can get a MR board from an old saber. There out there.......search and you shall find.
Click to expand...

I think you may have misread the OP's intentions.
He's trying to replicate the way Burt actually got the original sound, but at the hilt level.
 
From Wikipedia-

The lightsaber sound effect was developed by sound designer Ben Burtt as a combination of the hum of idling interlock motors in aged movie projectors and interference caused by a television set on a shieldless microphone. Burtt discovered the latter accidentally as he was looking for a buzzing, sparking sound to add to the projector-motor hum.[7]

The pitch changes of lightsaber movement were produced by playing the basic lightsaber tone on a loudspeaker and recording it on a moving microphone, generating Doppler shift to mimic a moving sound source.[7]

Trying to recreate that inside a saber may be near impossible. I can't imagine coming up with a better way of doing it than one of the established soundboards. But if someone does come up with a better way, I'm listening...
 
Robiwon said:
From Wikipedia-

The lightsaber sound effect was developed by sound designer Ben Burtt as a combination of the hum of idling interlock motors in aged movie projectors and interference caused by a television set on a shieldless microphone. Burtt discovered the latter accidentally as he was looking for a buzzing, sparking sound to add to the projector-motor hum.[7]

The pitch changes of lightsaber movement were produced by playing the basic lightsaber tone on a loudspeaker and recording it on a moving microphone, generating Doppler shift to mimic a moving sound source.[7]

Trying to recreate that inside a saber may be near impossible. I can't imagine coming up with a better way of doing it than one of the established soundboards. But if someone does come up with a better way, I'm listening...
Click to expand...

Exactly.
2 soundboards would yield the closest results.
 
Back in the days of assembly language programming on the C=64 I was experimenting with sample playback. I wrote my own routine and sequencer and to change the pitch you just called the sample playback routine more or less often.

I know nothing about programming modern embedded systems, but if the sample playback is not built into the chip (and left to the programmer to write) then any input from an accelerometer would just be used as a multiplier to speed up or slow down the sample playback rate.

The only problem I can think of is this: in the SW movies the camera is the viewer location and sound mixing would all be done relative to the viewer position... saber swings towards the camera and the doppler effect would shift the pitch up. Likewise, saber swings away from the camera and the doppler effect would shift the pitch down.
...Now, if you mimic the Doppler effect inside the saber hilt - there is no external point of reference, so the hilt doesn't know if it's swinging towards or away from a listener..and even if it did it wouldn't work for multiple listeners (only one would hear the realistic Doppler shift).

Thinking about it - if a real jedi were swinging a lightsaber, then he/she wouldn't hear as much Doppler shifting as a 3rd party - purely because their relative position to the blade would be moving far less. The Jedi would hear a hum with almost constant pitch (compared to someone who is not moving WITH the blade) - perhaps with a windy "swoosh" or crackle when they swing the blade.

Edit: Think of the Jedi as an engineer on a steam-train (pitch is constant) and the camera position as somebody standing still as the train approaches (pitch shifts up) then passes (pitch shifts down).
 
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The ideal solution is to turn the blade housing itself into a kind of sealed speaker box. Having the blade enclosure emit the sound would produce a natural Doppler shift.

Failing that, have the blade tip partly open and channel some sound from the hilt up through the blade.
 
There is some footage of Ben Burrt moving his mic around in front of the speaker at the end of this video.
I think that he is recording Vader's saber in that video, waving around his mic in much faster movements than Vader is moving the lightsaber.
Also, there isn't just doppler shift, but also change in amplitude. The change in amplitude would be emphasize by using a directional mic.
So, the effect is indeed exaggerated compared to the natural doppler and amplitude shifts from moving a speaker around.
 
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