Star Trek Used Kissing Sounds to Create the Sound of a Classic Monster

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I remember watching a rerun of the “Star Trek” episode “Operation – Annihilate!” (April 13, 1967) as a child, and tickled by the stupidity of its central monster. The monsters were small, rubbery, veiny shreds of flesh that could fly through the air and stick to the backs of their victims. The creatures then inject some of their own organic matter into a host, driving it crazy. Indeed, the whole central concept of monsters is straight out of HP Lovecraft. Kirk (William Shatner) and his team eventually discover that the monsters are singular cells of a large, ineffable hive-mind creature.

It’s a scary concept, and appropriate for a horror-adjacent series like “Star Trek,” but the fear is lessened by the monsters’ stupid appearance. My sister and I felt like they looked like rubber vomit or artificial bacon. Even today we talk about single-celled organisms. from “Operation – Annihilation!” like flying space bacon.

And the noises they make are certainly unique. The bacon-like cells make a noise that sounds like a cross between squeaking and sucking. They make their sucking chirping sound when flying through the air, giving them a nightmarish quality. According to a 2016 article published on the Audible blogthe creature noises were created by sound designer Doug Grindstaff by sampling and mixing hundreds of different human kissing noises. It seems that the use of kisses would have been considered a ridiculous mite in 1966, so Grindstaff never shared his secret with the show’s producers. They only heard strange alien chirps and didn’t ask any questions. Grindstaff finally revealed all of his secrets on the 2016 blog. Many of his “Star Trek” sound effects came from unconventional sources.

“Star Trek” was full of noise. Series creator Gene Roddenberry, according to Grindstaff, hated silence and was happy to fill the series with strange ambient noises. Not only can we constantly hear the hum of the Enterprise’s engines in the background, but the ship’s bridge is making all kinds of strange beeps and whirs, implying that the machines are still at work. Grindstaff even once confronted Roddenberry about all the noise, feeling it was a bit too cartoonish. Roddenberry insisted on sound throughout. Grindstaff remembers what he once did, when Roddenberry requested a sound effect for a vaccination scene:

“I worked on a scene where [Dr. McCoy] give someone a chance. Gene says, “Doug, I’m missing one thing. The doctor gives him an injection and I don’t hear the gunshot. I said, “You won’t hear a shot, Gene.” He said, “No, no, it’s Star Trekwe want a sound for it. So I turned back to the mixing board and said, “Do you have an air compressor?” » And they did. I turned on the air compressor, squirted it for quite a long time near the mic, went upstairs, played with it for a bit, then put it in the show. And Gene loved it. So that’s what Gene was like. He didn’t miss anything!”

In terms of creatures, Grindstaff also invented the iconic monster sound. for the tribbles. Tribbles are, of course, featureless balls of fur that eat profusely and breed wildly. They coo like doves. Grindstaff said he took a recording of a dove’s cooing, then rubbed the magnetic tape with steel wool to make it sound more alien. “Whatever I can do to make things work,” he said.

Author Jeff Bond, author of “The Music of Star Trek” also offered some comments in the Audible blog entry, emphasizing the importance of sound in a show like “Star Trek.” The series is rarely filmed on location, often having to recreate alien worlds and alien vistas on small soundstages. Adding strange alien hums to such cheap scenes gave “Star Trek” infinitely more depth. And although sound designers like Grindstaff were instrumental in creating such sounds, most of the effects in “Star Trek” were original sounds from older films. Bond said:

“The recorded sounds had to be manipulated using tape techniques: speeding up, slowing down, adding reverb or echo to the sounds. Some of the familiar effects came from Paramount’s own sound effects library. The photon torpedo sound was originally created for the “skeleton ray” in George Pal’s film.War of the Worlds,’ and a few others ‘Hiking’ sound effects can be heard in low-budget sci-fi film ‘Space children.'”

The original photon sound effect was achieved by stretching a large spring inside a long tube and then rotating it. The echoing metallic noise would then be electronically modified to sound more like a laser. It was an effect used for decades. Unfortunately, many of the original sound effects masters were discarded in the 1960s, with Grindstaff not thinking there was any reason to keep them. If he had known that “Star Trek” would still be going strong nearly 60 years later, he said he would have been a better archivist. “If I only knew, I would have kept stuff like you wouldn’t believe!”