La storia di Deep Note
Fast Company racconta la genesi di "Deep Note", il soprannome dato al suono generato al computer più famoso del cinema: quello che si sente prima dell'inizio di un film che utilizza lo standard di certificazione audio THX e sviluppato da James A. Moorer per la Lucasfilm in occasione dell'uscita nelle sale de Il ritorno dello Jedi nel 1983.
The father of the THX Deep Note was James A. Moorer, an employee of Lucasfilm's Computer Division, a pioneering skunkworks that eventually sprouted not just THX but Pixar as well. THX was Lucasfilm’s new audio certification standard, a project that sprang from George Lucas's interest in ensuring that The Return of the Jedi played in theaters at the highest possible quality. As Jedi approached release, the THX team was busy putting together a mark for THX to show before the film, and they wanted a singular sound to play with it.
The spec was vague. THX creator Tom Holman asked Moorer, who was head of the computer division's audio group at the time, to create a sound that "comes out of nowhere and gets really, really big." Not much to go by, but Moorer got to work on a massive computer mainframe that Lucasfilm had just built: the ASP, or Audio Signal Processor, which was used to mix sounds for Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and other '80s Lucasfilm productions.
