Tomorrow - An Update

Episode Date: March 16, 2018

There are some things that never go out of style. Coca-Cola. Martinis. Denim. Ray-bans. Kylie Minogue. The Cruise missile. Joshua Topolsky ranting about B-movies, condiments, and our broken society while Ryan makes references to reality shows nobody has seen. So never fear, the Tomorrow podcast will return in it’s audio-only form very shortly – March 16th, to be exact. So keep refreshing your feeds for the moment the sweet stuff hits. If you’re new to the show, you can find the back catalog wherever quality podcasts are offered. See you soon. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey, and welcome to tomorrow. I'm just kidding. This is not new tomorrow yet, but new tomorrow is coming. I'm, of course, Joshua Tupulski, and I wanted to tell you that tomorrow has been put on hiatus, which you probably figured out. I hope at this point, because I've been launching this new thing called the outline on the internet. It's available at www.theoutline.com.

It's a fantastic, magooric, a new website full of thrills and adventure and exciting new vistas that I encourage you to explore. Tomorrow will be coming back in a few weeks. And if you need something to hold you over until you can taste tomorrow, once again, I highly suggest subscribing to and listening to one of our new shows. It's called Sound Show. It's a fantastic adventure through the world of audio and sound. We're actually going to put an episode of it at the end of this announcement, the thing that you're listening to right now.

And then you should go subscribe on iTunes or whatever your favorite podcast app is, is a handful of other episodes, and we're releasing something new every week, and it's very, very good. And then very soon, you'll have new episodes of tomorrow and all sorts of new things that are coming, just on the horizon, so close, you can taste them. And when they get into your mouth, you're going to like the taste.

So yeah, so listen to Sound Show, get ready for a whole new tomorrow, literally and figuratively, and go to theoutline.com because that's my life's work. And the least you can do is check out my website. Thank you. And as always, I wish you and your family the very best. Though I've got to tell you, your family is fucked. Sound show. The first time I heard this sound was around 1997, the beginning of a VHS copy of Twister, my parents bought. My dad cranked up the stereo and the windowshark.

It was awesome, like way better than the movie itself. People call this the THX sound, but it's got a name, deep note. And spin around for a lot longer than Twister. It goes back to George Lucas, Star Wars, and a desire for all movie theaters to sound uniformly great. Welcome to Sound Show, I'm John Lago Marciano. Today, we're listening to some sounds that define going to the movies. This one, Deep Note, is part computer program and part chance. It's a piece of music we've come to associate with big, fancy sound systems, but it's also

a piece that challenges some common beliefs about what music is. And it was almost lost forever. Deep note was created by this man, Dr. James A. Moore. Well, James is the name that's on my driver's license. I go by Andy. Andy's a really smart guy. I count myself among the pioneers of digital audio. He was on the founding team at THX.

He created one of the world's first digital audio workstations. It was called the Sonic System. And he's played a big role at Adobe, making parts of audition and premiere and other and more experimental things. He's a programmer and a musician, so it makes sense that he's always been into the experimental electronic music scene. I don't know why, but I always find myself running about, you know, five to ten years ahead of what's practical. The whole idea of DeepNote was to show off a new standardized audio system, T.A. Chex.

And that system was started because of one very bad theater. Back around 1983, just before the release of Return of the Jedi, some audio engineers at Lucasfilm went to check out the theater where the big premiere would take place. So they wanted to check out the sound system, make sure the sound was going to work all right. So in those days, there were three speakers

behind the screen in a standard theater. The engineers went back there to check them out. There were indeed three speakers there, one of which, the one on the right, was standing up and working properly. The one in the middle had fallen down and the one on the left was disconnected and facing backwards. So, they were completely horrified by this.

And then when they did hook them up, they thought, gee, this doesn't sound anything like what it sounds like in our studio. So they decided that they were going to fix that by standardizing all this stuff. They needed a name for it, so they just randomly picked THX, which was George Lucas's student movie THX 1138. The idea was that the sound in a THX certified theater would sound really close to the sound that the film's creators heard in their studios. And since Return of the Jedi was going to be a huge opening, George Lucas himself saw an opportunity to get a bunch of theaters in on it all at once.

George, as he often does, used the opening of Return of the Jedi to force the big 70 millimeter theaters into picking up the THX sound system. So they decided that they wanted a little, you know, logo for it that went before the movie. And the animator of that logo turned to Andy to make the sound for it. This is almost exactly the word where he said, I wanted to come out of nowhere and get really, really big. So I sat down and composed the piece and wrote a program. It was generated algorithmically. It took about four days to get the program to sound like I wanted it to.

So he gets the whole thing printed to film. He gathers some Lucasfilm execs in a room. The lights go down. They hear this sound and. And there was this big silence after I played the thing. It wasn't what they were expecting. They waffled for a while. They played it for some more people.

They dubbed it off to a tape, and Andy goes back to his regular job. Two weeks later, they decided they liked the sound after all, and they're gonna use it. So they go to edit it into the copies, going out to the theaters. And they lost the original. They lost it. Gone.

And the problem is that it wasn't so easy to recreate. All that randomness in the piece stems from a single random number fed into the program. That's the seed of the whole piece. In this case, it was based on the date and time the program was run, and Andy didn't keep track of that. They said, okay, we'll just re-record it, just bring in a re-record it. Well, the thing is, the score was produced by a random number, right? So I went to the big re-record and they said, well, that's not the same.

They said, where's that big base note that goes shooting down to the seller there? So I sit there, every time you run the program, you get a different one. So I sat there running it over and over and over again, still finally, for about 20 minutes, I got one that sounded about right. So that's the one that became the icon, but the original is still lost forever. But what's actually going on inside deep note? It sounds like almost nothing else I can think of. Annie made the sound by programming this big computer called the Lucasfilm Audio Signal Processor.

It had 30 sound generators or oscillators, so deep note is made of 30 generated tones or voices. These 30 voices start the piece all scrunched up in a narrow two octave range, where it's impossible to pick out any individual pitches. So you know, when it comes on, you're sort of whatever the audio equivalent of squinting is.

Each of the 30 voices kind of drifts around slowly along random pitches in that two octave range, for around 20 seconds. Every oscillator, every second, it gets a new pitch, and it just sort of wanders up and down. So here's what one of those voices might sound like isolated. And here's a couple of them together. You can start to see how this could all add up into a gentle, teeming cluster of tones. Now somewhere around 20 seconds in, each voice starts slowly drifting to its final note

in the big chord. And that chord, it's huge. It spans 5 octaves and it's made up almost entirely of these intervals called octaves and fits. It's what we call an open court and it's big and bold and full of space. That's all octaves and fits. So that trick I swiped from the opening of Beethoven's Ninth, which was all in octaves and fits. So still from the best.

tonight, which was all in octaves and fifths, so still for the best. Now, deep note is probably not as famous as a Beethoven symphony, but it's become a staple in its own right. A quick YouTube search returns all kinds of parodies. The beat of the audience is now dead. Andy has a favorite. It starts off, you hear a vacuum cleaner in the background, you see a picture of a harmonica and slowly, by slowly, the vacuum gets closer and closer. And when it grabs the harmonica, the harmonica makes it chord. That one's my all-time favorite. A few years ago, though, these parodies couldn't really have existed.

For almost 20 years after it was created, Andy wasn't allowed to talk about deep note at all. The original management at THX was pretty aggressive in going after people who used or copied the sound. The recording was copyrighted, and during that process, THX asked Dandy to submit a written score of the piece in musical notation. Okay, so I got my indie-ack pens and my protractors and my compass and made a graphic score for it. It's curious that this score even exists. A work of music can be registered at the US Copyright Office for two different purposes.

So first, there's the musical composition, and that's the content of the piece, including lyrics if there are any. Then, there's the sound recording, which is, quote, the fixation of a series of musical, spoken, or other sounds. But according to the copyright office, both of these can be registered at the same time by submitting just a sound recording. So why go through all the trouble of transcribing this thing? I suspect the issue really comes down to what the US Copyright Office thinks music is. Andy certainly seems to consider deep note to be music. After all, he borrowed ideas from Beethoven when he made it. Now, a performance of deepNote relies on a computer program,

but that program doesn't seem to be with the copyright office, or THX's lawyers had in mind as representing a piece of music. They came to me and asked me to write a score for it. And I said, well, the score is the program. I said, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, you're like a, you know, a trouble-cloth and basecloth and that kind of thing. So it's conceivable that this manuscript is about proving that deep note is indeed music. By forcing it into musical notation, perhaps the lawyers thought they'd be better protected against claims that this computer program didn't count as music. It's kind of charmingly archaic.

This big, weird piece of computer music was made to represent the future of sound, but its creator was forced to justify it to a narrow mind of government agency. Last year, Andy got to revisit the sound when THX asked him to remake it from modern surround sound systems. And this was an absolute delight because instead of 30 voices, I got to use like 80 voices. I wasn't limited by the hardware that I built at Lucasfilm. He built a new sound engine

and fed it a variation of the same program that drove the original. Did you keep track of which random number you were using for any take this time? Yes, yes, yes. I had to print out the eight digit number at the beginning of each run.

Yeah, here we are. And this is in hex. It's 53, ECC 300. And so this is the one that you consider like the canonical deep note now. Yeah, yeah, that's the Magnum of Whistle. Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, note and made those really great single oscillator examples in the middle. You can find more of his stuff at earslap.com.