Machine Language becomes poetry

Language development is a process that starts early in human life, when a person begins to acquire language by learning it as it is spoken and by mimicry. Children’s language development moves from simplicity to complexity. Infants start without language. Yet by four months of age, babies can read lips and discriminate speech sounds. Usually, language starts off as recall of simple words without associated meaning, but as children age, words acquire meaning, and connections between words are formed. In time, sentences start to form as words are joined together to create logical meaning. As a person gets older, new meanings and new associations are created and vocabulary increases as more words are learned. Wikipedia

Sound Designer Ben Burtt (who also created the sound for Star Wars) talks about creating the language for the machines in WALL-E from an array of mechanical devices.

Q: Do you find that sound design is still just as exciting for you now as it was when you first began your career?

BEN BURTT: Sure. I love recording sounds and exploring for sounds and yes, because every film seems to soak up and use everything I’ve got because there is always a need for something more and so I’m always on the alert for new things. They are harder to find because I’ve recorded so many airplanes and explosions and electronic noises that for Wall-E I think I and the team as well recorded every motor we ever came in touch with from appliances to jet planes, whatever. We just went wild. The world is full of sound and we found for a science fiction film like this – and others I’ve done – the idea of taking real natural sounds and imposing them into the fantasy film gives the illusion that these things are real because we kind of recognize them even though we can’t identify them specifically, but you say “Oh, it sounds like it is really a motor so I kind of believe it.” That has been the trick in these films.

Q: What are some of the sources of these sounds?

BEN BURTT: Well there are thousands of sounds. There were more sound files in Wall-E then any single feature film I’ve ever worked on, about 2500, because every character has a set of sounds and there are lots of movement and lots of dense activity. Stories of sounds, well let’s see – Wall-E’s treads, he drives around, he goes different speeds. When he’s going slowly, he makes a little whirring sound and that is the sound I heard it actually in a John Wayne movie called Island in the Sky on Turner Classic Movies. There was a guy turning a little generator, a soldier generating power. I said I like that generator sound, that is cool, and so where can I get one? I found one on eBay. I bought it. It came in its original 1949 box so we could take that into the studio and perform with it to tailor it to the speed of Wall-E. But that’s only good for when Wall-E is going slow.

When Wall-E is going fast, he needed something higher pitched and more energetic. Once again, I went back through my memory of things. I had recorded bi-planes a long time ago for Raiders of the Lost Ark. The old 1930s bi-planes have an inertia starter. It’s a mechanical crank that cranks the engine up. You do it by hand and then clutch – you connect it and it makes a wonderful whirring sound. So I thought I want to get that and do more with it. I couldn’t bring a bi-plane into the studio but on eBay I found an inertia starter, bought that again, and brought it in. So we built these props for many things. You know, it’s a tradition in animation to have sound effects machines. This goes back to the earliest days of Disney cartoons — like wind machines and blowing machines and things like that. We actually built several things so we could perform Wall-E sounds that way.

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Q: Wall-E reacts when something fascinates or surprises him. Where did those sounds come from?

BEN BURTT: There are a multitude of sounds like those little eyebrow type things are a Nikon camera shutter and his arms are the sound of a tank cannon, the asmyth motor on a tank. Name something and I will try to tell you what it is. There are a lot of things.

Q: There is one obvious sound joke which is the Mac boot-up sound. Are there others?

BEN BURTT: Once again, Andrew, that was his idea. I attribute that to him.

A Love Story

Future Evolution. Painting by Alexis Rockman

I went to see WALL-E today. The branch of robotics I write about isn’t anthropomorphic. Machines that allow one to work with something from a distance began with the Manhattan project with the scientists being able to manipulate the radioactive materials from a safe distance, and it’s hard to romanticise that kind of creation myth. I write mostly about the projects and theories of Dr Robert Ballard, whose remotely operated robots found the wreck of the Titanic, and Ken Goldberg, an engineer and artist who is now head of the new media center at Berkeley. Their robotic mechanisms are tending towards the deep background of invisibility and while the interfaces are simple, they don’t simplify the mathematical language and concepts for anyone wanting a more direct connection with the robotic devices.

But I’m susceptible to the charm of anthropomorphic robots, and given my gypsy lifestyle might well have satisfied my longing for owning a fox terrier by acquiring Sony’s robotic terrier, AIBO (“man’s next friend”) if it hadn’t been discontinued. I’m fascinated by the mythological framework of WALL-E. We’re in an era where changes to the natural environment are caused by humankind, by domesticated flora and fauna and the machines we’ve created. Back in 2004 scientists were observing that the “Anthropocene age” has arrived: “Scientists are beginning to accept that Earth has entered a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, so named because humans have come to rival nature in their impact on the global environment. The EuroScience forum in Stockholm heard on Thursday that climate change was the most obvious of a complex range of man-made effects that is rapidly changing the physics, chemistry and biology of the planet.Paul Crutzen, the Nobel Prize-winning atmospheric chemist who first proposed the term Anthropocene four years ago, said the concept was winning wide acceptance from colleagues in other fields.”

WALL-E is a tender, dear-hearted machine charged with the responsibility of cleaning up after the humans who have abandoned the planet. He creates skyscrapers of compacted consumer refuse that sit among the skyscrapers of Manhattan. The landscape reminded me of Alexis Rockman’s musings about the environmental future of Manhattan, particularly the cover of the book he collaborated on with Peter Ward, who says, in his introduction: “I explained the thoughts that make up the subject of this book, starting out with the basic assumption that colours all that follows: for the biological life span of the planet, humanity is essentially extinction proof, and, if we manage to develop effective interstellar travel, completely extinction proof as long as the galaxy survives…It is far more likely that the future will be … a digital wilderness of humans co-evolving with machines, or a wilderness of genetically altered plants escaping from agricultural fields to change the world into a landscape of weeds, or a wilderness of cloned sheep walking amok among their even more staid and normally bred bretheren.”

Like a Victorian naturalist WALL-E saves paleontological wonders: a rubik’s cube, a light bulb, garden gnomes, strings of fairy lights. He wonders about love. His only frame of reference for love and connection with another creature is a video of the movie musical, “Hello Dolly” and a pet cockroach.

I’m reading everything the Australian explorer, environmentalist and paleontologist Tim Flannery has ever written and the book I’m reading right now is Country, where he talks about his yearning to be a paleontologist in order to understand the history and magnificence of the kangaroo. He observes that Australia’s environmental woes have been exacerbated by the ill-suited European agricultural systems and flora and fauna introduced by the British settlers. But to walk away from the land and leave it untended would be a worse fate. The land and its creatures can only regenerate with our help, he writes. He was mortified by a farmer killing a steer in front of him when his scientific colleagues made a request to buy some meat: “Would it not be morally preferable to avoid eating meat?” he wonders. “What, then, would become of the outback, which is unsuitable for agriculture? Without industry no-one would live there and manage the land, so central Australia would become a vast degraded reservoir of feral animals, in which native species and introduced ones alike would, in drought, suffer and die by the millions. Care for our ecology must underpin everything we do, for without a viable ecosystem humans and animals will not survive.”

WALL-E tends the destroyed environment and cares for the creature he lives with, his pet cockroach. And he’s rewarded with the regeneration of plant life. The story of a fearless, big-hearted robot saving the human race, which returns to earth to help him regenerate the planet, is highly entertaining and exquisitely rendered. There are sweetly ironic references: when WALL-E powers up he plays the Mac start up chord. And Eve, WALL-E’s love resembles the Roswell alien. The movie is seen from the robots’ point of view, the demons and heroes are their demons and heroes, the malevolent computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey, and R2D2 (there’s an homage to its trash compactor sequence from Star Wars.)

The credits roll over civilisation forming, again, with humans and machines intertwined, that might be a scenario from Will Wright’s game, Spore. Equivalents to the cave paintings at Lescaux, Egyptian, Greek and Etruscan mythologies, all the way up to the present. And then … ? I’m tempted to buy a version of Spore for the iphone, if there’s one in the app store. I want to know how this ends, again.