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We sometimes over use the term “magic” when referring to Disney’s theme parks. However, I often get that sense when thinking about sounds that support our experiences in the parks. I definitely take the skills of sound designers for granted, especially on attractions. Joe Herrington has been a key figure in creating the audio that drives the magic for nearly 40 years.
Herrington is my guest today on The Tomorrow Society Podcast to talk about his career. We chat about how he got interested in this medium and his start at Disney. Herrington joined Disney in 1981 during the rush to complete EPCOT Center. He helped create sound effects for Spaceship Earth and pavilions throughout the park. That work was just the start of an extensive career at Disney.
This episode digs into the process that Herrington takes to build sound effects. For example, he explains challenges with the vehicle and combining the different elements into a cohesive whole on the Indiana Jones Adventure. Herrington also describes creating believable sounds for animatronics on attractions like the Country Bear Jamboree. We close the interview with a mention of his work on Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway, which just opened at Disney’s Hollywood Studios on March 4th.
Show Notes: Joe Herrington
Learn more about Joe Herrington’s work as a storyteller, author, cowboy poet, and more at his official website.
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Transcript
Joe Herrington: If you record an animal, any kind of animal in a passive state, in a calm state, no matter what you do to process it, it’s going to be perceived as something passive and calm. If you record that animal, that bird, for example, in an angry aggressive mode, no matter what you do to that sound, it’s going to come back as angry and aggressive. And so you learn to mix and match different kinds of animals with the moods that they are to get certain things that you’re after.
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Dan Heaton: That was sound designer Joe Harrington, and you’re listening to The Tomorrow Society Podcast.
Thanks for joining me here on Episode 96 of The Tomorrow Society Podcast. I am your host, Dan Heaton. One thing that I repeatedly learn when doing this podcast is really how little I understand and realize about the complexity of how attractions are put together, or even more broadly, how the parks function in terms of their presentation and especially their sound. I’ve talked in the past with Greg Meader and with Glenn Barker, and they have educated me on some of what goes into the sound of the parks, and that continues this week with Joe Harrington.
Joe has been with Disney since 1981. He joined right around the time that Epcot Center was in full swing, worked on creating sound effects for Spaceship Earth and other pavilions, and has been involved in so many of the big Disney attractions since that point. He still works there now. He’s worked on Indiana Jones, on Radiator Springs Racers and Tron, and even on the most recent attraction that Disney opened last week, which is Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway.
And Joe beyond his specific work just has a lot of insight into how does sound even function in these attractions. How do you make it seem like the bears at the Country Bear Jamboree are actually talking to you rather than moving their mouth and having a speaker nearby, present the sound that makes it seem like they’re talking to you. That’s just one of many examples that Joe gets into on this podcast, which I of think of as a masterclass in sound effects and sound design for the parks, and I’m sure that the way he explained it dumbed it down so much for me and for all of you. Yet there’s still a lot that he presents that I found so interesting during this podcast and I can’t wait for you to hear it. It’s really fun to dig into this topic.
So this was a really fun show. Joe took my questions and just ran with them and gave some really complicated answers that I was blown away by some of them. How much goes into the sound effects? So here is Joe Harrington.
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Dan Heaton: I am always interested, especially in something that I find that it’s easy not to think as much about which is the sound and media design, but I’d love to start back more at the beginning just with you. I mean, how did you get interested in doing sound design and working in audio when you were younger?
Joe Herrington: Well, I grew up as a ranch kid, but I always had a very strong interest in technology. I invented a lot of things when I was younger. They weren’t important things, but they were things that had not been done yet. So I loved to tinker and I loved electronics and I loved radio and television, so I got involved in that as much as I possibly could. In my late high school years, I got involved with television and radio, and by the time I was a senior in high school, I had my own radio show in the evenings kind of cut into my social life because my show was from six to midnight every night.
And so for a senior in high school that that’s not normally what you want to have happen. Then anyway, I left off, I went to the Army, and when I got back from the Army, I sort of changed my direction.
I thought maybe I wanted to teach astronomy, so I went back to college for the purpose of teaching astronomy, and I had an astronomy professor that really kind of guided me in a different direction. He was doing public shows, astronomy shows for Republic and for schools, and he wanted me to get involved in that because he said he thought I might be good at it.
So I started doing them and he liked what I was doing. And then he said, there’s this internship in Rochester, New York. It’s a year long and I think you ought to track for it. Well, I was a kid from the sticks. I’ve never tried anything like that. So I tried it and I got it, and so I moved to Rochester, New York for a year and did an astronomy internship. When that was over, I was looking for a place to work.
So I looked at several places all over the country and one of the interviews that I got was the Rueben Fleet Space Center in San Diego. They were just about to open up and they needed somebody to produce their material to write and produce their material. I was fortunate enough to get that job. So I came down to San Diego and for eight and a half years I wrote all of their school shows and public shows and produced them. And in the course of that, I got back into my old technology ideas and I started creating the soundtracks and mostly out of necessity.
So I was creating music and sound effects and recruiting the entire soundtracks. In those days, there wasn’t much technology available. So again, I got into inventing a lot of different technology, tape delays and different things like that and looping machines. There was no such thing as a loop machine back then. So I would record on the quarter inch tape splice giant loops together and stretch ’em around the room on mic stands and let ’em come back through the machine and create my soundtracks with those kinds of loops.
What I was experimenting with was the concept of creating an instrument that you couldn’t recognize what it was, and my primary source for that was the human voice. So I would take the human voice and loop it in those giant loops and then pitch shift it. In fact, in those days we didn’t have any, there was no real good one. We had seven and a half, 15 and 30, that’s about all you could do on a tape machine. So I needed something that could BSO and I had a very brilliant engineer that made a machine to do just that.
So I was able to build up my cords and things like that. I was able to make this music and really when you would listen to it, you couldn’t tell really what the instrument was, but it was very ethereal. It belonged in the space programs that I was doing. And so I was doing that for like I said, eight and a half years. Then Marty Sklar and Randy Bright from Disney were down there on vacation in San Diego and they saw one of my shows and Marty called me aside and said, you need to come work for me.
So I did, and that’s how that got started. Originally, they wanted me to do soundtracks for Spaceship Earth and then all of Epcot because at that time at Disney Imagineering, WED Enterprises at the time had all their soundtracks done over by Jimmy McDonald or with the studio, at least the complex things.
WED did not have a sound designer, and he wanted me to head up a brand new sound effects department and have the best sound effects anybody had ever heard from the fraction that was good word. So I started that up and I came up here and really did not know what my job would be. I mean, I knew I was side effects design, but what that entailed in those early stages of being at Disney, I was still bewildered. They stuffed me in an office with Buddy Baker. I shared an office with him, and that kind of pulled me out of my shell because you can’t be around a guy of the caliber of Buddy Baker very long without a lot of it rubbing off, and a lot of it did. And so that’s how I got to Disney.
Dan Heaton: You mentioned Buddy Baker who was involved with so many important songs for Epcot and beyond, and I’d love to know a little more about what it was like to work with him. How did that experience go for you? It sounds like it was really good.
Joe Herrington: My experience with Buddy Baker was very good. Like I say, it wasn’t just Buddy Baker, I should really back up and give credit to several of the others at the time that I came to WED Enterprises, I mean, there were legends walking the hall and I worked with those guys every day, X Atencio, Wathel Rogers, of course Buddy and Jimmy McDonald, Ward Kimball and Claude Coats, and of course Marty Sklar, Harriet Burns and Rolly Crump. I mean, these people were just there at our disposal and we talked to them every day and they really had a powerful influence on all of us young Imagineers who really didn’t know what we were doing.
We didn’t know really anything about story about putting infractions together. But they had done this with Walt, these guys knew their business to just have daily conversations with Buddy Baker and some of these other guys, and you come up with the problem and they give you the benefit of their wisdom.
When guys like that called you listen, you don’t need to listen. You take notes, you really pay attention to what they have to say and you take it to the bank. And I did. So years later when we opened up the MGM Studios, we had some in those days, some serious audio problems, mostly because of technology and things of that nature. We were trying to do more than technology really allowed.
So Marty established something called the Audio SWAT team, and it was X and Buddy Baker, and our job was to go through all of our attractions and find out what was wrong and find out how to fix it. And so, boy, lemme tell you, that was an incredible learning experience being joined at the hip with those two guys. I was a young snotty nosed kid, and these were two veterans who had walked and worked with Walt and they knew their business. So what an incredible opportunity to learn that was.
Dan Heaton: Wow, I can’t imagine what that would be like because both of those guys, X Atencio was, did so many things with Pirates and Haunted Mansion and so much else there. I’m curious too about Epcot Center when you started, because I know it was very chaotic to get that open in time, like you mentioned so many new technologies with sound. What was it like with Epcot Center and with Spaceship Earth coming in so new into that craziness of trying to get that park together?
Joe Herrington: Well, when I came on 81, this thing was that ball was rolling, and so I had to catch up with it pretty fast. Not only did I have to catch up with it, I had to learn a new job. I had to learn what it is they expected of me because well, Marty expected me to turn that thing into a position. And so I did.
But it took a while. I had to discover what had to be done and then set out ways to figure out how to do it. Prior to coming to Disney, everything I had done in the field of sound production had been really, really low budget. And suddenly, well, in my book I had carte blanche. Of course I didn’t. But it seemed that way to me because I remember one time I told Buddy, I said, I’d really like to use a particular synthesizer for this particular thing.
I wasn’t much of a synthesizer person. I was a more of a real sound person, but I had a unique need for this. He said, well, go buy it. And after I recovered from the shock I did it, it was things like that. But when I needed equipment, I got it and it was a remarkable learning curve for me that I could do things like that.
Then slowly I set up one of the studios as my sound design studio and had it kind of decked out to do sound design work because most studios are not set up for that kind of work, especially in those days, sound design required some pretty crude technology that wouldn’t belong in a regular studio. And so I got a lot of that stuff and I kept up with the technology and when samplers came along, I was able to get the samplers and learn to use those in a most efficient way in our attractions. So it was just a wonderful opportunity to have that ability to have the resources that I needed when I needed them.
Dan Heaton: Right, yeah, because essentially it was so new, so much of the technology seemed like it was being invented at the time, and it sounds like you were doing the same and working that together as you went along. So when it got time to put those in the attractions, what was that experience like? I know you didn’t do it all yourself, but I’m just saying for your sounds then to be mixed and put actually into an attraction like Spaceship Earth.
Joe Herrington: Well, in those days, like I say, I was working as the sound effects designer, so my job was just to do the sound effects for each one of the shows. So I wasn’t responsible for the whole soundtrack of the whole show. That was kind of a committee of people that did that. Very often it was led up by some of the more senior members in the company.
For example, when we did American Adventure, Randy Bright was in there up to his collar and he was calling a lot of the shots with Rick Rothschild. And so these guys carried that ball forward, and my job was just to create the sound effects. So then the load wasn’t so terribly big, but it was distributed across every single thing that we were doing at the time. So I was constantly jumping from one project to the other, to the other, to the other.
And when it came time to put that in, for the most part, my stuff had been mixed in to the attraction already into the soundtrack already, and then it was installed later and it wasn’t like we do it today where we do an awful lot of that in the attraction. In those days, we didn’t have the ability to do that, so we would create the soundtracks here in California and send them out there, and if they sounded bad, we would make notes and bring them back and remake them.
That’s kind of the way that that was done. But in those days, I was back and forth to Florida two weeks there and two weeks here. I would go out there and try things and work on things and realize what didn’t work, and I’d come back here and fix all of those things and go back out there and try it again.
It was a lot of trial and error because most of the things that we had done we’re calling it, it had never been done before. We were using brand new technology that had never been done before in our studios. We had the very first digital tape machines, and of course that didn’t last long, but we were the first ones to get it and trying to edit with those things. Of course you couldn’t do nice smooth edits like you can today, like a cross fade. It was a thump edit pretty much.
We had, in fact, there was a little poster on the wall of a creature that X Atencio drew. It was called an S Snap. It was an ugly looking little bug and digital when things would go wrong, it would make a little popping sound, and we got to calling it an S snap. And so X gave it a character and it was on the wall of the studio for a long time. Snaps were a real, real thorn in our side because the digital machines sounded good, but it didn’t take much to screw ’em up.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I can imagine, especially given from what I know, I mean like you said, the digital machines, this was the cutting edge technology at the time, right? There were only a few at all. When you’re creating the sound effects, you mentioned before you started at Disney, you were doing a lot of things with the voice and everything. What were some of your tools that you used to create those effects? I’m sure there were many things, but I’m just curious because what were you using to create them before they even got to the attraction since you were working on the effects?
Joe Herrington: Well, you have to understand that I was powerfully influenced by Jimmy McDonald. Jimmy of course, is a sound effects legend for Disney. He created literally thousands and thousands of sound effects devices, and he was also the voice of Mickey Mouse for almost 40 years. I was influenced by what he did. He created sound effects devices.
Now, in his day, he did it out of necessity, but I quickly realized that I could give his devices new life by recording them in different ways, and he would always very intrigued by that. He would love to see me take his old props and record ’em in different ways and process them in different ways, and they wouldn’t even sound like what he started with. So I got very fascinated with using organic sounds, both sounds in nature and props that I could make to create the sounds that I wanted.
And like Jimmy, I was always on the lookout for something that would make a unique sound that I, and I got to where I could think I could turn that into this. You don’t hear it the way it is. You hear it with what you can do to it. And I get the feeling the same way with insects, with animals and birds, things like that because there’s some interesting techniques in recording animals that pretty much stay with you. If you understand those things, you can visit to your benefit, and if you don’t understand ’em, you can just make a mess of it.
But for example, if you record an animal, any kind of animal in a passive state, in a calm state, no matter what you do to process it, it’s going to be perceived as something passive and calm. If you record that animal, that bird, for example, in an angry aggressive mode, no matter what you do to that sound, it’s going to come back as angry and aggressive.
So you learn to mix and match different kinds of animals with the moods that they are to get certain things that you’re after. Now, I started off like everybody else creating for Epcot, the energy diorama with full of dinosaurs. I had to create a whole bunch of dinosaurs; I would use a lot of the techniques that most people in the business had been using for years, and that’s combining different kinds of animal sounds and things of that nature.
I got to where I started also adding organic sounds that weren’t necessarily from some kind of life for; I found that I could get some amazing things that way to really color and influence the signs that I was trying to create. When I started making those dinosaurs, the first thing I did, I studied all I could and I found out that most dinosaurs didn’t roar. Like the movies make ’em more, so I try to be much more believable with them.
I would study a particular creature and I would try to imagine based on my studying of their size and the size of their nasal cavity in the voice box, just what I might really do that might be realistic. Because after all, Epcot was supposed to be a place of learning. It wasn’t supposed to be a place for sensationalism. I tried to make everything as true to life as I possibly could, and I followed suit. Even when I recorded birds, I refused to put a bird in a location that he didn’t live in, which was a common thing.
I mean, you’ve heard a Cuba in every jungle movie you’ve ever seen live in very restricted areas. So it’s stuff like that. So with a combination of animal sounds and insect sounds, I mean, I did things like I would record sand bands and got incredible sounds out of sand beds, placing my mics underneath the sand and letting the sand do its thing, placing mics inside of trees and down inside of burrowing, down inside of an anthill, I was in a real experimentation mode.
There was no place that I would not stick a microphone, and I looked for very specialized microphones to do just that. When you do that kind of stuff, you find sounds that nobody has ever heard before. And then when you begin to manipulate those sounds, if they have ’em before, you can bring out things that they haven’t heard before, highs and lows that are beyond or below the human hearing, you can bring them into play and use ’em as articulating characters in your sound. So I did an awful lot of that kind of stuff. Then I would make things, for example, let’s see, it was an American Adventure for the wind, an American Adventure. I went out to a canyon that’s near here and I stretched switch and fishing line all over that canyon.
They were cliffs. There were two almost vertical cliffs. I would climb those cliffs and stretch fishing line very tight until I had about 150 strands across that canyon. Then when I started recording it, the wind went through that canyon across all that fishing line. It was just awesome. And so there were a lot of things like that that I did.
Dan Heaton: Wow, that’s incredible. I knew there was a lot involved with it, but now hearing you talk about just so much experimentation that you did, it amazes me. I love it, Joe. It’s so good. So I’d love to know too, I mean this is a little bit later on, but I have some questions on attractions and how you set up the sound, which I know I’ve heard you talk about before.
But for example, when you have something like Country Bear Jamboree and you’re trying to make us believe the sound is coming from a bear’s mouth or an animatronic or something like that, how do you set up the speakers or how do you make the sound work that actually makes that believable? Because to me, I sit there and I think it’s coming from the bear, but I know that’s not really true, so I’d love to hear you talk about that.
Joe Herrington: Well, that is a challenge. We’ve got a number of solutions for challenges like that, but it’s always a challenge because every place that I want to put a speaker, which is where the speaker really belongs, the art director or the lighting director or somebody else says absolutely not. You cannot put a speaker there. So obviously the sweet spots are everybody’s sweet spots.
So we have to play some games in sound and for example, in the Country, Bear Jamboree actually probably just back up, you start off, we don’t just put speakers in a room and let ’em play back sound. We design the room and the sound system around the story that’s going to be played in there. We have the luxury of doing that. Most nobody else on the planet has that luxury because very often we are building our facilities for that particular attraction.
We know what’s going to happen in that room. We know where the characters are. We’ve been working on this forever. So we go through it, we try to get the acoustics, and then we put the speakers as close to where they can possibly do the best storytelling that they possibly can, but there’s always those that don’t. Country Bear Jamboree is a good example of that because you can’t get a speaker large enough in a bear to make it believable that it’s coming from him.
So a couple of things that you have to understand just about the physics of sound. Human beings are really, really good at picking out sound left. You can hear a degree one way or the other left and right, but up and down is real sloppy. You might have seven to 10 to 12 degrees up and down, but you can’t tell where it’s, and so you put that in your back pocket and you let that work for you.
But what that means is if I put a speaker beside Big Al, the speaker’s going to sound like it’s beside Big Al. So preferably what I would like to do is put a speaker online on a vertical line with his voice above him or below him, and most death will never understand there’s a difference, but even sometimes that won’t work because then you can’t get the sound loud enough. An example of that is Great Moments with Mr. Lincoln when we’re trying to get Mr. Lincoln to talk to this giant theater, which is spread out in large wings on both sides and try to make everybody believe that the sound is coming from him.
So there’s another trick that we play with very often, and that is to put a smaller high powered speaker as close to the mouth source as we can possibly get it, and then use fill speakers in the theater around the character and delay those speakers so that the sound that comes to your ear precedes the sound that comes from the fill.
So it puts your brain and your brain says, oh, it’s coming for Mr. Lincoln. When in fact only that initial high, if you just heard that high frequency sound coming out of him that would say, oh, that’s awful, that’s awful, but that’s not what you hear. You hear a totality of that. Plus everything else, all the mids and lows are coming from the fill speakers, but they’re all delayed to hit your ear after this is called the Haas Effect. So you just believe that it’s them talking and you don’t have to play him super loud. Suddenly you realize, hey, this is him in itself, like he would sound if he were standing there. We use that all over the place because in almost everything we do, you can never get a character’s voice speaker where you want his voice to come from.
So you have to play those tricks. Other times you put speakers on both sides and phantom it in between with a center source speaker working again a little bit with the ho effect. There’s a lot of games that you can play by the same token. Many times you want to turn that around and say, I do not want to point source sound. That’s especially true of things like ambiances.
I started doing this practice a long time ago, and of course it’s not in the book, and many of my engineers would just have a hissy fit when I would do it, but I would take an ambient speaker and turn it around away from the guest and hit it against the wall and let it splatter against the wall, and by the time it came back out at the desk, instead of having a point source of eight or 10 inches that had a wide wavefront that’s maybe eight feet across.
So it’s much easier to disguise. Sounds like that is ambiences than it’s to put a little speaker there and expect the ambience out, expect it to be believable. Another thing that you have to do when you’re creating ambiences, especially with creatures in the ambulance, like birds for example, you’ve got a lot of birds in a countryside. The typical cheap way to do that is to make a stereo bird track and mix all your birds in that track, but that sounds fake. So what we do is we put as many speakers as the story calls for around in the forest of the set where they would naturally be up in the trees, down in the brush, over behind some rock in different places.
You play different creatures from those different places. And suddenly when you play that back, there’s a realism that takes place because now instead of your ear being forced to listen to that stereo track and try to decipher that, which you can’t, it’s hearing the sound points come from all of these different places as they would in nature. And then your brain begins to create the spatialization and where they come from. It’s much more pleasing and satisfying to the guest, and it’s extremely believable when you do that. It’s more expensive, obviously, but that’s the difference. I mean, that’s that attention to detail that gives you an element of reality that is really, really very desirable.
Dan Heaton: I’m curious too, how challenging it is when you have an attraction like Pirates of the Caribbean, which has been described as a cocktail party. That idea when you have all the different pirates and some of them are talking and someone might be singing and everything. It’s a big question, but how does the sound for that? How do you plan that out for at interaction like that or space of birth or something with a lot of characters at one time?
Joe Herrington: Well, mostly what you’re really addressing there is a problem of you. You don’t have isolated scenes. Radiator Springs Racers was a good example of that. We just had this giant building and all the scenes were kind of in most of that building, and yet they had to play in the same place and not pollute each other. So it becomes a dance of choreography and spectral analysis.
In other words, understanding. Let me explain what I mean by that. In a forest, all the creatures live in their own little niche. This bird lives in this spectral range, this bird lives in this spectral range. And all of these creatures, these insects, whatever lives in that forest, has its own particular place to live. It’s very much like an orchestra. When a composer sits down and writes for an orchestra, he doesn’t expect the piccolo to do what the oboe is going to do.
He writes both of those pieces to tell a different story point. Well, all of these creatures in the forest are living in their own little niche. If we come in there with, let’s say a generator, a noise device or something that invades that niche, he should have got to leave or die because he can’t survive there. When you understand that, you realize we have to create our soundscapes in the same way things need to live in different spectral places, so they’re not all over each other.
One of the most difficult times I have with a soundtrack is when I get a composer who is used to being writing wall to wall, he doesn’t have any constraints, so he fills up the spectrum and I’ve got no place to play. So now early on, I get with the composer and we’re kind of joined at the hip early on because when we can say, okay, here’s what my plan is, this is what I plan to do here, so this is the spectral range that you have to work with.
So suddenly things work really well. You get a lot of clarity in things like that because he’s living in one place, I’m living in a different place, and my individual elements are living in different places. They’re not stepping on each other and his individual elements are living in different places. They’re not stepping on each other or stepping on me. Suddenly you have clarity in your soundtrack. You don’t have this mud that can very quickly happen when everybody is trying to have the same space to play with. And you utilize all of these tricks that plus choreography, the choreography in today’s multi-track machines or multi-track playback abilities, I can plan out a giant room of five or six scenes and make sure that things that would conflict happen at different times so that they don’t conflict.
So that’s a matter of many times getting with the composure, getting with the writer and saying, can you have this happen three seconds later? Stuff like that. And so when you do that, you don’t have a loud explosion stepping over an important dialogue line or something of that nature. It really helps a lot build the clarity of your individual scenes.
Dan Heaton: Yeah, I mean, I think about something like Indiana Jones for example, where so much is happening and you have the Indiana Jones talking to you, and then there’s fire, and then there’s music and everything, and then you have the sound of the vehicle. So how do you get all that together in any way for that or for something like it where those sounds can all live? You kind of just described it, but I’m curious when the thrills get added in and it’s even more fast paced, how does that work?
Joe Herrington: Yeah, every show has its challenges. Indiana Jones was a different kind of a challenge because you own a vehicle. Anytime you’re on a vehicle and you’re moving, and especially in Indiana Jones, when you’re not only moving, but you’re being clashed about, you cannot be a critical listener, but you have to approach that with, okay, what is the important point in the story and what it has to be told first?
One of the things I recognized early on in Indiana Jones was that everybody in the country knows what it sounds like to ride in a vehicle. So we better get that right, because you can’t have a tire ski or an engine rev out of sync with the body motion or it’s going to be perceived as stupid on a subtle level. Your brain says something’s wrong, it doesn’t really know what it is, it just perceives it as fake.
That required a whole new kind of technology. When we created that, now when we did Indiana Jones, we had a test track out in Valencia, and we drove that vehicle around that test track, and of course they were just trying to run hours on it, so to prove that it would work. But I took advantage of that time and I realized that, well, let me back up. One of the ways that we have been doing soundtracks on vehicles was create a linear track, a linear track on a vehicle that changes.
Speed is worthless. And on a vehicle like Indiana Jones or Space Mountain or anything that moves like a roller coaster, cold vehicles, hot vehicles, heavy vehicles, light vehicles, they’re all going to get through a particular zone at a different time. You got to recognize that. And so I knew that in Indiana Jones, in order to get the kind of accuracy that I needed to make a vehicle believable, I had to have sync points every few seconds.
If I had a tire ski as I went around a corner, it better be in the right place where everybody’s going to in know it’s wrong. So that’s when I realized that sampler technology was the kind of technology I needed to do that because I can run the vehicle tells me precisely where it is all the time to the end. So to me, that’s like time code coming at me.
I can use, I did use a typical, it was an E three, and I loaded all of my sounds on that, and after Valencia I put little battery packs with LED lights on ’em on the ground, and I would drive around and I would hit a key just as I was at a particular place so that I could mark precisely where that already was. I did that and I would ride around again and see if it would fire the same place.
Sure enough, it was working flawlessly. I also knew that that E three that I’d strapped on that vehicle was not going to last more than a week because it’s got a moving disc inside and that vehicle is crashing around. So that was just kind of the first step that was to prove my point. Then I went to R&D and there was a young man over there working. His name was Jamie Robertson. I always considered him to be a genius. And I went to Jamie and I said, Jamie, here’s what I need to do. Do you think you can help me with this? And he said, I think I can build one of those. And he did it. So he built what’s called the LCU, the local control unit, and it controlled lights and sounds, and all the sound was stored on a flashcard.
I mean, you could throw that thing against the wall and it wouldn’t hiccup. It just kept on chugging. And so that became the sampler that went on the Indiana Jones vehicle. It went in the rear chassis. When I programmed that, I scrapped a keyboard to the front seat and I sat there and played all of those sound effects and the music in exactly where they belonged. Just like you would sitting in the studio and compose a piece of music and keep changing until you got it.
So that’s the way I did. That got the vehicle right. And of course, backing up from there, you have to have the speakers that those sounds are going to play back on in the right place. So I had do nwiring speakers underneath two in the front and two in the back. There were down FFI and two against the floorboard, and they were playing all of the undercarriage.
So they were convincing, they were very convincing as engines and squeals and things like that. Then the music speakers and the dialogue came out of the dashboard, so that hit your right in face. So what was working for us, there was something called signal to North. The vehicle itself has a tendency, any vehicle that has any speed at all has a tendency to kind of build a bubble around it. That bubble really makes it difficult for s from off board to get to the guest unless they’re fairly loud. So the idea, using that to my advantage, I had all the dialogue of music playing close to the guest blasting in their face so that those two elements were definitely heard because the signal was getting to the guest at a greater level than the noise could possibly get to the guest. So that worked there.
Then you contour your music and your dialogue and effects on the vehicle to let stronger more pronounced things like explosions and flares and things like that happen off board. So again, it’s a game of choreography. You’ve got a big explosion here, so you make sure you don’t have dialogue there or a big music moment there, and you let that play out that even at that Indiana Jones was extremely challenging because when we built that, the technology really wasn’t where it needed to be speaker wise. We blew up so many speakers in Indiana Jones, you cannot even believe it.
Things that you wouldn’t believe that you could tear up. We just turned them into paper mache because we were trying to drive things so incredibly hard. We were ahead of where technology was today. That’s a different story. When I did TRON in Shanghai, I was playing in incredibly loud stuff that would make the stuff that Indiana Jones seemed like a cakewalk.
But even at that, you’re traveling very, very fast. Because you are that bubble that prevents sound from penetrating and getting to the gas is even more dense. So we would have these gates and the guests would go through these gates and they were supposed to be a particular tron sound that told them that they were counting up or counting down. It was a very important story be you’ve got to understand these things. Were playing back at about 120 decibels that is seriously locked. I mean, if you were standing there, that sends your hair off. Not really, but you know what I’m talking about. Yeah, but it’s incredibly loud stuff. So I went zooming through there on a timing track on one of those vehicles, and I didn’t even hear this thing, but I knew it fired, but I didn’t even hear it.
Although this can’t possibly be well after a little bit more experimentation, I went off and split on the side of the track and then took a camera and videoed where the vehicle was when it went by that. And it turned out that the vehicle was just a little bit out of the zone of coverage for that particular speaker. It’s a very male coverage. So what’s happening is, let’s say the speaker is sitting close to the track, but it’s got a 30-degree pattern and that 30-degree pattern is shooting across the track. Well, that gas passes through that pattern in less than a second.
So I was in and out of that pattern and the sound was like a second later, and I never heard it because I’m completely out of the pattern and I’m gone and further down the track. What we tried to do and what we ended up doing was moving all of those speakers so that the pattern was shooting more up track.
So the guests were in that pattern for a longer period of time. And so when that sound went off, they were actually able to hear it, and we were able to get our timing very precise so that when it went off, everybody in the vehicle heard it. So it’s stuff like that when you’re dealing with onboard audio, you’ve got to play all those kinds of games, and you’ve got to realize that there’s that bubble around that vehicle, and it’s really hard for anything off board to get into it. And when you want something to play into that bubble, you’ve got to choreograph that and set everything up so that when it’s time for that to play, that’s what plays, and it’s gotten no competition.
Dan Heaton: It’s crazy that thought of TRON, it’s almost like you’re like a sports player, you’re trying to lead a pass and somehow hit this vehicle moving really quickly. I mean, I know that’s about the crudest way I could explain it, but it’s so complicated and it’s still given the technology. I’m curious too about something like TRON, because I know the film, especially the more recent film, has a lot of sound effects that already are there, but I know for a theme park it’s different. Do you use any of that original audio for that? Or do you end up creating new things that kind of have a similar vibe?
Joe Herrington: Well, what a perceptive question. The reason I say that is because even people in my business don’t realize that you just don’t automatically use effects made for a film in an attraction. The effects made for a film are made for the two-dimensional world, and we live exclusively in the three-dimensional world. So the effects have to be used in a different way.
So yes, we would get assets from the studios as guide tracks, as reference tracks, and then we will create things that are in the same family so that the general public says, oh, that’s the TRON bike. Well see. I would completely redid the TRON bike. If you look at the TRON bike for example, it’s a good example of what you just said in TRON. Every time you see that bike, that sound lasts for at the outside two and a half seconds.
It’s always, it’s that kind of stuff. Well, in the attraction, you’re sitting on top of that thing and it’s got to last for the whole attraction. So how do you do that? And so I got a Dati motorcycle, went down to a test facility that had a dynamo and put that motorcycle on that dynamo, and we just put it through its paces. Then once we had that Dati, that nasty sound, some people might not want to say it’s a nasty sound, but I mean it’s a very unique, aggressive kind of sound that you can do an awful lot with. And then we began to process that sound and get our typical TRON character out of it. But now you can sit on that thing and ride it through the whole attraction in the guy next to you. You can believe that that’s him too.
And one zooms in to crash against you. You can articulate that to do what you want to do because you made it yourself. You made it to fit the story beat, and you didn’t try to do something that was somewhere else. Another example of that same kind of thing would be when we did Pandora in Walt Disney World, they wanted to use all of the sound effects from the film of all the forest creatures and things like that. Well, what people don’t realize is when these creatures are seen on the screen, that’s kind of their big moment.
That’s their arm moment. So every sound that you hear that these creatures are making, it’s their arm moment. So you take all those creatures with all their on moments and you try to populate an ambiance with that. You’ve got a bunch of creatures that are saying, look at me, look at me, look at me. And it doesn’t work. That’s not the way the real world works, so you have to go back and mimic these. So we remade almost all of those creatures to be believable in the soundscapes that they played back in. Now, I think I sounded veered away from your question, I think I’m not sure.
Dan Heaton: Oh, no, it’s great. I love Pandora. So that’s really interesting to me to hear about how that works because I feel like the sound in that land, just the ambient sound is so fascinating to me and how that even works. So I would love to know too, kind of on a related note area music I feel like is so important to a Disney park, like how with Pandora for example, or something else that really sets the stage. And then there’s these transitions where you’re going from land to land and things have to be different. And I believe you’ve had some involvement in that. How do you set up, like you mentioned ambient sounds and such that don’t, again, that allow each area to live on their own and have their own feeling, especially when they’re so close together?
Joe Herrington: Well, no, I do have a lot to do with that as part of what I do is creating that stuff, those soundtracks that go into those areas, I work with the composers and give them the parameters to work within. So really it starts off by, there’s an old method that we’ve been for years since 1955, we’ve been playing playlists, we’ve been playing a music, then next cue, then the next cue and the next.
For a decade, I’ve been trying to get away from that. And I’ve finally been able to do that, and I’ll explain that in a minute. But back to the original point of the question is creating the zone, the first thing you need to do is you have to create an area. We have no dead zones within the desired place that the music is going to play. In other words, you don’t want your speakers too far apart.
You don’t want ’em too close together. You’ll have hot spots that you’ve got to deal with. You want to have even coverage wherever a guest is walking. A crude example of that is overhead ceiling jams and attraction. If you’ve got a 10-foot ceiling in a room and you put speaker cans too far apart in there, your guests are going to go, let’s say each of those speaker cans has a 90 degree pattern.
Well, that 90 degree pattern, if they’re too far apart and those patterns cross down around your waist or your knees, then the gas is going to go in the music out, the music, in the music. It’s going to go up and down and up and down, up and down. That’s not to say you can’t hear it, you can hear it, but it’s going up and down and being perceived. Your brain is going to say, what in the world is wrong with this?
The same thing’s true when you’re going through a land. You don’t want to go from a set of close speakers to some that are too far apart and you end up having these dips between the speakers. You want even coverage wherever they are. So that’s step one. Step two is determining where your zones are, where your buffer zones are, and where two zones, two particular lands might clash.
You create a buffer zone there so that they can’t clash. The guest doesn’t perceive that because the noise floor, just the crowd noise floor in a park is, it’s going to be 75, 76 people just making noise. And we generally run our background music at about that same level. So it’s perceived. See, background music has a couple of different applications. One is to take you to a place to make you believe that you’re there. Another, especially in a restaurant environment, is to create a bubble of privacy.
So you can have a conversation that goes back to that signal of noise thing, that there’s an overall noise floor, that music playing, and you can have a family conversation that’s beneath that and the family next to you can’t hear your conversation. So that comes into play as well. You establish what these zones are and what your story is that you’re trying to tell. Now in many cases, you can tie two areas together in secrets and so that they play in harmony with each other, but in most cases you can’t do that. And so you have to create these buffer zones. The other thing that we do is we are very, very careful about how we prepare our background music tracks. The composers sometimes drag when they realize what we do to their music, because normally they’ll write music with a lot of dynamics.
If you look at that dynamics on a meter, you’ll see lots of fluctuations. But by the time we get through processing it for a background music track, they look like a straight line. There is no dynamics whatsoever to be had, but it’s done artistically so that the guests don’t know that the dynamics are sucked out. But what it does is when you go into loud areas and soft areas, the music doesn’t go away and come back and go away and come back.
It’s always steady; it’s always there. It’s so irritating to go into a competitor’s park and be listening to a piece of music and then suddenly it’s just gone. But then they don’t do any of this compression processing at all. They just take it right off the disc and play it like it’s, and so naturally normal music has dynamics. It’s supposed to have dynamics, but in a theme park, attraction dynamics kill you.
In the case of background music, what I’ve been leaning towards mostly, and finally I was able to convince the powers that that mostly the music guys of this process was when we did Shanghai. And it was extremely effective. We used it in Tomorrowland and we used it in Adventure Isle. And the idea is to create a giant bed, and the bed is a piece of music that just doesn’t really go anywhere.
There’s no melody there, it’s just chord progressions and things. But then within this bed, actually living on top of this bed, all your melody lines and your accent pieces and all that kind of stuff. So over here at a particular, let’s say at the entry to a particular attraction, you want that to be hyped up. You want that to be making a statement. So you create this bed and you create these islands that live on top of that bed, but everything is playing in sync.
So as you walk from one island to the other island, the music just naturally changes and takes on the identity of this particular place or the identity of that particular place. But it all feels like the same place we’re using that technology in the new Marvel land at Disneyland. Well, at DCA, you’re going to see the very same thing. There’s an overall bed that plays everywhere, and the composer is writing all these little islands in the particular places where story beats are important, and they play on top of that, and they play ’em sing. Then on top of that, who writes the music and chapters so that because entertainment comes in with their live shows all the time. And so entertainment knows that at 7:03, this chapter is going to end. So we’re keyed up. We’re going to run an entertainment show at 7:03.
So it’s not like it used to be where they were just covering a step all over the background music. Now the background music comes to a completion. They start their show, and when they are about to end their show, they send a flag to us and it says, we’re about to end our show. So we’re keyed up, and as soon as they end, we start the next chapter and it picks up right where it left off. And to the guest, it’s a seamless transition. That seems to work very well. We did a similar thing for Adventure Isle, but we utilized, that’s mostly sound effect now for Adventure Isle in Shanghai.
We created a culture; we created a language and we created a music and a history for those people. So one of the things that we did is we found a young composer here in town, Chuck Jonkey, who his whole life, he travels around the world recording natives, their instrumentation, their musicology, and he composes to what they do, and his stuff is extremely authentic.
So we used Chuck to create the musical language of this new people that we invented. Then on top of that, we created all of his music plays pretty heavily in the village. But as you go further away from the village, we had him write the music in such a way that we could peel it off. And so let’s back up and go, let’s go completely away from the village. You’re now at the edge of the land. You come into the land and all you hear are the jungle creatures and jungle birds and ambiences and things like that.
As you get a little bit closer into the next zone, you begin to hear things and you think to yourself, is that music? I’m not sure what that is. Is that the wind? What is that? And then as you get a little closer, that begins to take on a rhythm and a structure. So the closer you get to the village, the more it becomes like music. And so by the time you get to the village, it’s in fact music.
So that’s a beautiful scenario of how this multi-track system allows us to create this humongous palette for the guests to walk through. And as they approach the village, they’re approaching music as they leave it, they’re going back into forest, and it’s not just turning stuff down. It’s like it’s thinning out the music so that it’s written to be done next for that to happen to.
Dan Heaton: It’s brilliant. The whole thing is just, I knew it was complicated, but I mean, it’s really exciting to me too, to hear about what you said about Marvel and just even Adventure Isle, which I haven’t been able to get to yet out in Shanghai. And now of course not open. But eventually, hopefully we get there. That’s great. That’s so complicated. I just have one more big question for you, Joe, and I’m curious for you, as you look back on your career, which I know is still going. What’s something either a project or just something you’ve accomplished that you’re just really proud of that you’ve worked with?
Joe Herrington: That’s a very hard question because you have different projects are favorite for different reasons. For some of the projects, I got to do some really, really fun things for American Journeys. I spent a week in the North Sea on the Saratoga Aircraft carrier recording F14s, but that was a pretty high point in my career. And then a week after that, I spent on the Durango Silverton train recording that train. And so those are fun, wonderful things to do, and they might lend you to believe that those are probably your favorite.
But my favorites tend to be the ones that are really more true to story. I say that because we’re in an age where technology is really threatening to trump story in so many things. Very often this technology will come along and they can’t wait to write any fraction around it. I work very closely with Kevin Rafferty, and if you’re a Disney guru, Kevin Rafferty, he’s the best writers and creative people that we have.
We’re so much better off for having that young man with us. He’s 41 years for the company now. We’ve worked so long together, but we’re both powerful believers in story first. And so two of the shows that I’ve done with Kevin, the first were Radiator Springs Racers, and the second was the show that I’m opening in Florida next week, which is Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway.
Both of those are done with Kevin. Both of those have powerful, powerful stories. You can go back to after all the years of Radiation Springs Racers, you could go back and look at the original storyboards and say, that’s what we did. That’s exactly what we built, because that’s what Kevin writes. He knows what he wants when he goes into it and he gets the team surrounding him that believes in his story and is willing to pour their heart into that story.
That’s the story you tell. And so for that reason, those had such fun to do. Mickey and Minnie’s Runaway Railway is the same way. He had a vision, he conveyed that vision to the rest of us. We all use our skills to tell our aspect of that story. And it has come together in probably one of the most delightful experiences that our guests will ever have for a number of res number one, it’s, it feels with all the characters that are near and dear to our heart, I mean, it’s Mickey and Minnie and Donald and Goofy and Pluto.
It’s those characters that we love and it’s their first attraction. You can believe that. But they’re beloved characters and they’re put together in a delightful story that everybody gets. And it was such fun to do and it’s leading it technology, but in no, not one instance did Kevin allow the technology to trump the story if the technology did not advance the story, it did not into the attraction. Working like that is just an awful lot of fun. And those attractions come up to the top of my list as being the most rewarding because they’re done. Right.
Dan Heaton: That’s great to hear, especially about Runaway Railway because I’m really excited to ride it and especially after hearing you talk about it. That just sounds great. So this has been amazing, Joe, and I know beyond what you do at Imagineering, I know you’re involved in a lot of other things outside of it, so what else do you do? I know you do a lot of other things on the side that sound really fun.
Joe Herrington: Well, I’m a professional western storyteller and I travel around the world telling Western stories, and I’m one of the top cowboy poets in the country. So I do those things and that’s very rewarding to travel around. And actually, I got, Marty Sklar was very instrumental in making sure that I got the company involved in that. He saw great value in my storytelling within the company, and he wanted me to stay involved in that. I was very encouraged by the fact that he was so much behind that.
So it really got to the point where if I had a storytelling gigs somewhere, the company never batted an eye, they would let me go.So I travel around the country doing that and I really, really enjoy that. And I think it’s so true to what we all do at Disney storytelling is the, it’s the way humans are wired to communicate. It’s the very best way to teach, to evoke emotion and persuade.
And to be able to do that and to sit in front or stand in front of a bunch of people and tell them a story and have them completely absorb and letting their imagination paint the sets and dress the landscape and see them being absorbed in that story is extremely rewarding. We see it all the time at Disney, but to be able to go out and do it on our own is a lot of fun.
Dan Heaton: That sounds exciting. I am glad that you’ve had the ability to do that. Like you mentioned, it definitely connects to what Disney does with storytelling, and this has been great. I feel like I’ve learned a lot and you’ve had a lot of great background and cool stories, so thanks so much for talking with me.
Joe Herrington: Well, absolutely. We kind of just scratched the surface, but you bet.
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