Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1401019
28 I m ps e . o rg and they trust that we're going to be doing what is needed. It's been wonderful how trusting they are of us. MT: I remember going through the archival units for the singing plants, and it was just a loop. It was really pretty cool to hear. It was like, "Oh yeah, that's the old looping sound effect." It was really neat. NM: When you guys had the tribble sound on Lorca's desk, I think I texted Eric and said, "Oh my God, that's the sound! That's what a tribble sounds like." It's a comfort food to some degree. MT: It's just Tim cooing. [makes sound] TF: Well, some of them. [laughs] The tribble on Lorca's desk was the original sound. We went back to the TOS archives and got the actual sound for it. NM: Yeah, I'm very curious how Discovery ties into The Original Series in terms of sound. So the transporters—when the Enterprise shows up at the end of the Discovery Season 1, it sounds like the Enterprise transporter —do you create diˆerent sounds for diˆerent ships? Do the transporters each have their own sound profile? TF: I think I spent a week trying to create the original transporter for the Discovery—well, it was technically the Shenzhou transporter, which eventually became the Discovery transporter as there was simply no time to create a new one with our super tight schedule Season 1. I worked really hard to create a sound for it that really sounded like the original, but that was also updated, because the visual look had all these particles and spirals and details—it was a totally different thing, and it had lots of visual movement and life. So I spent a lot of time creating sounds that seemed to stick to all the new visual details of what I saw and then ultimately used these elements throughout the entire series. That is, until Season 3 where we jump 970 years into the future and everyone has a personal transporter. Those had to be designed again from scratch. NM: Right. [ laughs] TF: The transporter in Picard is also completely different. I took the original TNG sound and put my sweeteners from Discovery on top in the hopes of connecting the two. But when I did it, it just kind of sounded the same as Discovery and the TNG element disappeared. So I had to start over on Picard also. As far as each transporter having its own sound profile, the short answer is, yes, but era and technology dependent. So, the Klingons have their own unique sounding transporter, the Romulans, the Federation, but all the Federation ships have the same technology and thus the same sounding transporters. The main sound of the Federation transporter exists for me in about six different pieces so it does change each time we see it based on the animation of the visual effect. The pieces get slipped against each other, or sometimes I'll pitch or change things tonally, depending on if it's up close or far away. So while each transporter has the same source elements, it's built differently every time we see it and therefore, each time sounds a little bit different. MT: Neil, I remember specifically while we were mixing that, sometimes the execs will ask to change up the mix of the transporter depending on perspective. So if we're inside it, you'll probably hear more of the shimmer and flutter stuff that Tim added. NM: So Matt, I actually rewatched Discovery episode 14 at the end of Season 2. That episode sounded very diˆerent than even all of the other Discovery episodes to that point. There was so much going on—she's going out in space, there's pods going all over the place, and ships shooting. That had to be a monumental task. Could you talk about that since that episode was filled with so much? MT: Yeah, so that wasn't a planned episode. We were halfway through the season, and Alex Kurtzman and Michelle Paradise, the other show exec, walk in and say, "Hey, we're going to split the last episode into two, so we added a whole other episode with the typical resources for sound editorial that would come with that, but then we added on more." That was just huge. It was a space battle, a wormhole, a time suit, an on-ship battle, zero gravity stuff— TF: It was the kitchen sink. It was everything that could ever exist in a show, ever. Slow motion. [laughs] Just everything. MT: Gosh, we brought on a fair amount of people on that last episode, Tim—it was like you, Clay [Weber], Dan [Kenyon], Mike [Schapiro]… TF: It was anybody who we could get, yeah. That was the hardest thing we ever did. I'm so proud of the work we did, but there was the challenge of having to suddenly add probably the biggest episode of television I've ever seen with basically no time to do it as the schedule had been set months before it had even been conceived as its own episode. NM: Listening to this and the whole season when they were on the Enterprise, were the Enterprise bridge sounds unique to the Enterprise ship's bridge versus the other bridges in Discovery? It sounds a lot like TOS bridge sounds. TF: The Enterprise bridge was a huge fan service. We took a lot of time to pull all the original bridge