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HYPER-REALITY: ALAN HOWARTH's Synthesized Scores and Specialized Sound Effects by Randall D. Larson Interviewed in March, 1989, just after finishing work on STAR TREK V: THE FINAL FRONTIER, Howarth described in detail his work in films up to that time. The interview became the basis for a narrative article published Soundtrack for June, 1991 - the complete Q/A interview that follows has not been previously published. In connection with the expanded release of the Carpenter/Howarth soundtrack to ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, soundtrackmag.com is pleased to present this interview for the first time. Q: Would you briefly describe your background in music and how you got involved in working on motion pictures? Alan Howarth: I've always been interested in music, ever since high school, playing in bands and stuff like that. My first instrument was the accordion, at age 5, a big popular instrument now. I wasn't too excited with polkas and German waltzes, so went on to the saxophone, and played saxophone from about 6th grade on, through marching band, and stuff like that, didn't really get into rock and roll until high school and the Beatles. I was one of those Beatle kids, then I started playing guitar and bass guitar, played in rock and roll bands in the Northeast Ohio region... Q: Is that where you grew up? Howarth: I was actually born in New Jersey, but about mid-High School, well, Freshman year High School, moved to Cleveland, Ohio, and that's where my general adolescence was spent. Q: What time period was that? Howarth: This would be, moving to Ohio, about 1961-1962. And continuing there until I moved to Los Angeles in 1979. Q: How did you hook up into motion pictures, on the musical end? Howarth: Through all my work as a musician, I got really involved in electronic instruments, and then through another Clevelander friend of mine who was working for a jazz band called Weather Report, I got a job touring with them as a keyboard technician, setting up the synthesizers every day. So that put me on a whirlwind world tour about 1977 to 1980. Near the end of that experience (they were based here in Los Angeles, I didn't really live here, just flew here, worked, and then went back home), I finally elected to move here. Right after I did that, their career took a side turn and they weren't touring a lot, so I was looking for other things to do. Through a friend of mine named Pax Lemmon, he was working in tape transfer at Paramount, where they were doing the first STAR TREK motion picture, and he heard that they were looking for someone who knew about synthesizers, so he gave my name to the supervising sound effects editor, who at the time was a fellow named Richard Anderson. I went down and literally made audition tapes, made the sound of the Enterprise engines, and what it would sound like to go to Warp 10, and some other things, and they went for it. So it was like, Boom! Out of the music business, into the film world. My only other previous experience with film was through my wife and her UCLA student film projects. I had scored her films and done sound effects for them, and I'd thought "this would be a really neat job" but I never really considered landing a job doing that. Q: What was your actual role in the first STAR TREK film? Howarth: Creating special sound effects. Making the sound of the Warp Drive, Enterprise engines, transporters, lasers, sci-fi devices. Q: Can you describe how some of those sounds were accomplished? Howarth: At the time, I started with an instrument called a Prophet 5, made by Sequential Circuits, which was the first polyphonic programmable synthesizer. Up until that point most of the people in the film business has been exposed to non-programmable instruments, so you could dial up a particular sound or effect on it, but to get the next effect you had to undo what you already did. So people were very inconsistent with the machines, if a guy came up with something wonderful you made sure you saved it to tape immediately, because you knew him coming back tomorrow and duplicating it would be very difficult without a lot of documentation. So these kinds of instruments made all those savings of the patches and the setting part of a computer program and made, like 60 pre-sets out of it. I was one of the first people to be heralding this sort of new technology at the time, which would be 1979-1980, in Hollywood film circles, and then also to land on STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, was also an ideal application. So they really liked my work, and the sound effects people that I worked with got me involved in numerous other projects that they worked on since, like RAIDERS and POLTERGEIST and the rest of the STAR TREK movies. Q: Has your role changed at all, from primarily doing the special effects or have you gotten into other areas within the STAR TREK films? Howarth: Mainly just making special sound effects, as sort of a specialist creating sounds electronically that just can not be recorded with microphones. Q: On the STAR TREK films, do you mostly work with the sound people or does the director get involved in that aspect? Howarth: Usually there's a sound effects spotting somewhere along the way, and at that point you meet with the director and producers and you get their general overview of what they're looking for. They say "we want this sound to do that for us, and we want effects for this thing to do this for us," and they give you the general outline and guidance. They don't know how you're going to do it yet or what it's even going to sound like, but they give you the general aspects. Q: The sounds you've done for the STAR TREKs, are these totally synthesized or is there any usage of reprocessed actual sounds? Howarth: In the beginning it was totally electronic. I kept hearing from these people that they were looking for "organic sounds," which to them meant sounds that were real in life. So I did a certain amount of tape manipulation, speed-ups and slow-downs, and harmonizing on real sounds, as part of the early effects. Then technology took a turn and it became affordable to have keyboard instruments that could actually sample or record sounds into a computer memory, and give you manipulation of real sounds electronically. And that is the forte of what I do now, building these sort of sonic layer cakes out of sampled sounds. Pretty much the forte now is making these sandwiches of various organic effects and then sometimes an electronic thread woven through them. On STAR TREK 5, there's some shuttlecraft in there that we wanted to be purely synthesized, we didn't want any acoustic events in there, and so it's a sound that's been dialed up in oscillators and filters and stuff like that and doesn't really exist in reality. But you have to manipulate those sounds in a real way to make them convincing, so it really takes knowledge of the real world to make the stuff go. Q: You have to make that totally synthetic noise sound like what someone would expect a shuttle to sound like in that time period? Howarth: Exactly. The thing that we're all familiar with is the Doppler effect, when things approach you they go into a slight raise on pitch and as it goes away from you it has a slight descension in pitch, so we went into these little pitch bends, bend-up, bend-downs as things fly by. Actually, in the case of the shuttle, there is one organic effect, which is the sound of the Disneyland monorail. Because we wanted this sort of streamlined motor-by, and we had recordings from the monorail down in Anaheim, and just choosing the right length and maybe doing a little speed-up or slow-down on it, as what we call a "sweetener" to the synthesizer effect, gives it that much more realism for flying past us. The whole idea is, a little while ago we coined a phrase called "hyper-real," which means, to us: bigger than life. You still want it to sound like what you expect it to sound like, but you just want it to be bigger and more fantastic. Q: Do you ever find yourself in any conflict with the composer, in that eternal conflict between sound effect and music? Howarth: Always! Q: How do you deal with that? Howarth: First thing to do, is just get on the phone with the composer, and say "what are you doing?" It brings to mind some things on the third STAR TREK when I would have conversations with James Horner, and he knew that I would have sound effects in the area, and he didn't want to make a conflict out of it, he wanted us to be homogenous, so we sort of mapped out frequency ranges and said "the sound effect is going to be this rumbly sort of thing in the bass range, so maybe if you go with maybe just mid-range and upper strings, the two can then co-exist." So at those moments, when he knew the sound effect was going to be there, he avoided putting any big bass in the orchestration, and that way we leave sonic room for each other. That's the best way to solve it. Q: Have you found that kind of compatibility with all the various composers who have worked on STAR TREK? Howarth: Every show is different. I know we're talking with Jerry Goldsmith right now about some areas where there are sound effects in STAR TREK 5, and we want to try to say, "sound effects are going to be carried here up to this point, why don't you be light on the orchestration until we're done, and then go for it." Those kinds of communications need to be done, otherwise if you both go for the sound moment, something's going to give. Q: After the film's released have you ever found that some of your effects have been changed or put in different places by the editor or the director? Howarth: Only if the film is recut. It's a very expensive process after the movie's been finished to move anything. So it's usually not cost-effective to do it unless it's for a real important reason. Actually, I worked on a lower budget film called RETRIBUTION and I did both the music and the special sound effects, we had a lot of sort of psychic explosions and psychic phenomenon that was going on. I integrated sound effects in the music, so under one roof both sides were covered, and obviously those co-existed, and in fact when I did the mock-up for the sound track album, I just let the sound effects be in the music. In a lot of ways it's all the same to me. It comes out of the same machine. You're using musical instruments in a different way to create these sonic textures, and actually in some ways there's an argument for the fact that these sound effects are really music. Let's say that I've developed this weird synthesized background sound effect, and the producers and the director say, "that's great, we don't need anything else," and they don't score that part and there's no music going on, in a lot of ways that sound effect is working as score. Q: It takes on the attributes of what a score does. Howarth: It's creating an atmosphere or mood, which is what score does. It's not just the crunching of the monster coming down, it's this ambience that you've done, and so it's sort of a grey area. The good news and the bad news is that music is copyrightable, but sound effects at this point are not. So if I had my druthers, I'd rather call those things music, because music has copyrights and royalties and attachments to it, whereas sound effects tend to go out and onto the open market. I know the people at Lucasfilm are very protective about anything they develop, because they know once it gets out in the real world it'll be copied a hundred times and it'll be in every other movie. And I know some other people who are the same way, so amongst the editors, there's friendly exchange of effects that you don't care about, but you have your certain things that you must protect. It's created a new era for sound effects, because twenty years ago sound effects were dog barks and car-by's. Now, for somebody to sit in a studio for fifteen or eighteen hours and design on musical instruments this effect and really have this thing that becomes a signature for whatever it is we're seeing, it is really in a lot of ways, working as music. Q: How would you then protect something that you've created? Howarth: I've kind of fudged it a couple times. Let's say, in a commercial or something like that that I've worked on, if I've developed a logo which is a sound effect, it's not really music, I will still call it music, like make a whole note, and say, "it's all sustained right here, here's this whole note, and that's my music." Especially in the case of something like that, where it's for a corporation or something like that, they'll pretty much cover for you, they don't want somebody else using it. But some of the stuff you just can't help, if it gets out there. If it's in the clear, it can be had. Q: Do you consider yourself a composer or a sound designer, or do you even make the distinction? Howarth: I don't thing there's a clear delineation. A lot of times when people say "what do you do," I say I'm a composer/sound designer. meaning that I compose with sound. I can certainly, we do all the musical manipulations of themes and stuff like that, but many times I'll go for the sonic textural treatment of things moreso than the many-note treatment. Q: Do you prefer any area of this more than another, such as composition as opposed to sound design? Howarth: I think I prefer composition only because, as the composer, you're a department head, and you have a lot of control. When you're creating sound effects for a show, it takes a very special show to make it a big challenge, it takes a STAR TREK or a POLTERGEIST or a RAIDERS. Other times, a show doesn't warrant a big special sound effects treatment, it may have one or two special characters or a couple devices, but it's not a big heavy involvement, you make a couple things and the rest of it is sort of traditional footsteps and talking. Q: What kind of approach did you take on the music and effects for RETRIBUTION? Howarth: It was quite a challenge. The opening of the movie is 100% music for the first eight minutes, with no sound effects and no dialog. The music through this 8-minute set-up of the situation has to get you started and get you into the mood of the whole movie. And that became sort of an island all by itself, because it was such a huge composition. I mean, by the time you're done with it you had had enough of music, at least you needed a couple of minutes off, to take a break. The only other thing that'll happen, and this goes true for anything, is too much of something tends to just go away, you have to selectively pick the moments when you put music in, because if music is going all the time, you tend to not pay attention to it after a while. So I think the tasteful placement of music and sound effects is also important. So I looked at those overviews as I scored it, and in this case I think I felt more like the composer who was looking to sound effects as additional instrumental timbres or pallets to choose from, because when I was putting in explosions for psychic phenomenon, I was scoring the tempo of the music so they would hit on the beat, so in a lot of ways like the 1812 Overture or something, ba-da-da-da-dum-psshhhkkk, it'd be right there. So going for this integration package, but it takes a director to give you the free hand to do that. Q: Most of the films you've been involved with, in one aspect is because they need the kind of sounds you excel at, have been science fiction and horror films... Howarth: I think, at this point, people love to pigeon hole you, and I guess if I was to allow a pigeon hole, science fiction and horror is where my forte is, at this point. The movies I've worked on are those kinds of things. Q: Would you like to do anything out of that genre, either in sound design or as a composer? Howarth: Always. I just recently did a documentary called FATAL PASSION, which is sort of horror but it was documentary, it was a little twist. That was an exercise in minimalist scoring, because a documentary can't handle lush orchestrations and big stuff, you kind of have to very skillfully tiptoe around through these soundbytes of people making testimony and stuff like that, and making little reenactments or little clues as they're unfolding the story. It was definitely a lesson in another way to score. Q: How did you get involved in working with John Carpenter on the HALLOWEEN movies? Howarth: The first encounter I had with John Carpenter was when I was hired to do special sound effects for ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. I had started on the show and the editor was a fellow named Todd Ramsay, who was also the editor from STAR TREK I. John was looking for some new people to do his music with, and my name was brought up, and we met and we're like the same age, and he's also from the Midwest -- he's from Kentucky -- and we related right away. We knew each other's backgrounds, sort of, without knowing it, because we both lived in the same geographic region and lived through the same time period. And we've gotten along great since. It's been basically a partnership we formed, although initially John was the composer, because he was the director and everything, but he's allowed me to grow and become the other part of the system. Q: How do you generally work with him when you're working on a score? Howarth: It's less laborious because the director is in the studio with me. The nice part about it is, when we're finished with a particular music piece and John says we're done - we're really done. He's approved it, and he's the last authority. When you do it for another team of directors/producers, you can think it's done, you can show it to them, and they can go "Ok, but here's what you've got to do, and change this and change that..." So I find myself sometimes getting caught up in fixes in other situations but with John it's always pretty direct. He also plays, so the two of us sit in the studio with a videotape of the film and because he knows the film so well, he can basically improvise things right to picture, and I'll record those performances into the sequencers and edit and massage and do the cutting and pasting and kind of work on an arrangement, just in software, until we're happy with it, and then many times I'll go back and I'll embellish the tracks he's done, or sometimes, based on his schedule, he'll say "why don't you do this one by yourself, because I've got to go approve opticals for the next three days," so he's given the confidence for me to be one of the composers and go by myself or work together, based on his timetable. But he really enjoys scoring his films, for him that's sort of like a vacation, he's been on this project for a year, he's sweated through the script, he's sweated through the casting and the shooting and the editing, and now finally he wants to kick back, and just come into the music studio and turn off the rest of the world, and put on his composer hat and say "look, I don't have any other responsibilities but to the music right now, go away!" Q: Is there a particular kind of musical approach that can be defined or explained when you and he are working on a horror film? Howarth: Every film's different. Sometimes there are things that we've done in the past that he'll say "remember what we did in this scene over there? I want something like that." And that's enough to at least start, to say, "okay, you want a repeating bass thing that goes bom-bom...bom-bom..., or it's a string thing or it starts out quiet and has percussion in it or some formulas that seen to recur as you go through the films, or, in the case of THEY LIVE, because of the setting of the movie, dealing with homeless people, we elected to go for almost a blues score, which was a departure for both of us, we knew blues but at the same time, to try to score with blues, was a challenge. Q: How did you make that work (THEY LIVE), as far as taking that kind of style and using that to make do as film music would have to do to emphasize these various things? Howarth: Well, simultaneously to getting started on THEY LIVE I also acquired a new musical instrument called a Synclavier, and the sonic capabilities of that instrument are just to the Nth degree, it sounds as good as it's going to sound. Playing back sampled sounds from the Synclavier gave us ultra-realism; slide guitars, saxophones, acoustic basses, and nice well-recorded instrumental sounds were all available to us in such a way that we could multi-track until we just worked it out. The thing with John, because he's so visual, if he can watch the movie and listen to the score, he knows everything he needs to know. Q: Any particular challenges that the movies you've worked with him on have presented? Howarth: There was a certain sort of sonic challenge in THEY LIVE. For the whole alien element, we developed some sounds, signature music that you always heard whenever they were around. There were some other sort of TWILIGHT ZONE/sci-fi sound effects that we also included directly in with the music as we went, and we hadn't done that before. In fact a couple of them made it to the soundtrack album, it was very interesting. At the same time, this is the first time we went through and actually scored all the source cues. All the little TV snippets that are happening innocuously in the background. For one reason or another, we actually wrote special pieces for all those little things. Usually some editor would just go to a source music library and look for music from records, or from wherever, that music's going to be put in there, because its not important things,. But that's some of John's sense of humor to, going ahead and making up car commercials and beer commercials that's running along with what's going on. Q: Even though Carpenter's films, especially the HALLOWEEN movies, have a very definite theme, there's more of an ambience that you guys seem to be going for. Howarth: We discovered that in our first score together, which was ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK. We had these sort of sequenced moods that we could generate, and that didn't necessarily have any melodic structure, but more were like a rhythmic structure with repeating bass and percussion things and there was very little sort-of lead instrument. We let the movie be the lead instrument and we found that these other things nested nicely in the background. Interestingly enough, I know that the music from ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK gets used all the time on soap operas, for the bad guys! SANTA BARBARA and GENERAL HOSPITAL are notorious, when we get the ASCAP statements I find out where all this stuff went to, and it turns up in all kinds of places. It sort of became the definitive modern bad-guy music for a while. I scored HALLOWEEN IV by myself because John was finishing up on THEY LIVE, so I went right from THEY LIVE into HALLOWEEN IV, and the producers wanted me to use John's original HALLOWEEN theme because they were trying to make it a sequel, but at the same time they wanted me to give it as much separation, and technically I was capable of doing much more than we'd ever done before, again, because of these new instruments. So it was a lot of fun doing HALLOWEEN IV, to still make it HALLOWEEN but still give it Alan Howarth as well as John Carpenter. Q: Were there any particular challenges in sound design there that you had to overcome on the STAR TREK films? Howarth: On STAR TREK IV: THE VOYAGE HOME, I started on whale effects almost a year and a half before the movie was shot, with [director] Leonard Nimoy and [exec producer] Ralph Winter and the composer Leonard Rosenman coming over here to my studio. On 24-tracks, we built up what he called "gibberish" and made up all these different portions of whale songs, which was to be the broadcast that Uhura was listening to when the big probe was coming from deep space. The idea was that we were going to make it multi-layered and then strip away various tracks and eventually Uhura would analyze it down to a whale song. Well that particular sound design lasted all the way up until it was time to cut the movie, they actually used it on the set for actors to react to and stuff like that, and then, unfortunately for the effect, it had now outlived its lifetime -- they were tired of it. So it was back to the drawing board again, and finally what they settled on and what's in the movie is some very simple whale songs processed electronically through harmonizers and stuff like that. Whereas originally he spec'd it out as something very complicated, after dealing with something complicated he realized that's not what he wanted. So sometimes with music- or sound effects - the interaction with the creators, the directors and the producers, they may be asking for something and when you finally give them what they ask for they realize that's not what they wanted. Q: Outside of HALLOWEEN IV and RETRIBUTION, what are some of the other genre films that you've composed yourself? Howarth: Actually I did one for Jim Wynorski called THE LOST EMPIRE, sort of this campy cult movie being run on cable. I did one for Sherman Hemsley called BENNIE AND BUFORD which eventually came out as something else, I don't even know what the regular name was, then RETRIBUTION, all the John Carpenter things since ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, and this television show I just recently did called FATAL PASSION, that was the documentary. Ad a show called BROTHERS IN ARMS, which was just released in Europe. Q: Is that also a documentary or a drama? Howarth: It's a feature film, the director was George Bloom, a friend of mine from MTV fame. It was his first feature, and I'd worked with him on a number of MTV things. So when he got his first directorial, he brought me in as the composer... Q: As a sound designer, if you have to create an "ultimate horror sound," I wonder if you can describe in words how you might do that, or what you're looking for in that? Howarth: If you're talking about the ultimate horror sound, it sounds to me like a thing we call "stingers," which are sounds that you use at the moment of surprise. Carpenter's famous for that kind of stuff, in fact a lot of times we'll score the show and then I'll make him what's called a grab bag of stingers, just all these horrible sounds with sharp attacks, that go "eeaaahhhh," and then he can go and cut those in just in the moments he needs to sweeten the score. Things like that are usually layers of sound. I'll certainly always put some sound effects in that, I have some wonderful sound effects I made with dry ice and metal pans, and then I have some other scraping things, and sort of bending metal and then all the fantasy sounds you can generate with the synthesizers themselves, and then usually there's some bass drum or snare right on the attack to give it the extra smack to make it jump. That's sort of my general kit for the assembly of horror sounds. The selection of the sound is always the application -- where are we going with it? Q: About how long does it take to put those various layers together? Howarth: Usually to score a film it takes anywhere between eight and ten weeks. Which, to anybody on TV is like eternity! When I have to score a TV show sometimes I have to turn it around in a week, although that's for like a half-hour or an hour, for a 2-hour movie, a lot of times, you can get almost the same kind of time, you have maybe six weeks. Q: Any other comments regarding your work in both sound and music in films? Howarth: Actually, it's kind of an interesting story when I worked on POLTERGEIST, it was my job to create the sound effects for the little girl, Carol Anne's voice when she was lost in another dimension. What Spielberg had said to me was, "Okay, Alan, here's this scene, and she's not in the room, she's lost in another dimension. We don't see her and the only way the character participates in the scene is with sound." He said, "make it sound like Earth to Venus." Which, who knows what that means?! That's Spielberg talking, and you take that as the profound word of the Supreme Being, and you go, "all right, 'Earth to Venus,' here we go." I went through a number of experiments trying different kinds of reverberations, and speed-ups and slow-downs and bending and stuff like that, and then, just as a totally side, who knows where it came from, I was listening to a rock station that was playing an old Led Zeppelin tune called "Whole Lotta Love," and in the bridge of that song there's a point where Robert Plant is doing all this screaming, and there was a technical flaw in the mastering of that record and they had a thing called "print-through," which means you sort of hear the sound before you're supposed to hear it, it kind of bled through to an earlier part of the track, I heard that and I said "that's great, it sounds like he's a million miles away! Ah, great! That's what I'll do for this thing!" So then I experimented with this sort of print-through effect with the little girl's voice and then I gave it my own embellishments by turning the print-through backwards, and things like that, so I actually got sort of a Doppler effect on the girl's voice, where it approached you from a great distance, and you felt it kind of going ...m m mmmmmmmmmmMMMOMMY and then it rang out, in other channels, into the sides and into the back of the room and with more dimension, so it had dimension in front of it and in back of it, and he loved it, that became the effect. In fact, it was interesting to have to go back, once I had developed the sound, or the method in which to create this sound effect on the girl's voice, I then had to do it in German and French and Spanish and Japanese, to match it, because they were going to do all the foreign versions of that film. Q: What kind of sounds did you do for RAIDERS OF THE LOST ARK, since that was a very realistic film as opposed to these very outlandish science fiction or horror films? Howarth: Actually, one sound for RAIDERS that was interesting, when they're in the Well of Souls with all the snakes, and Indie knocks over the big statue, I worked on creating the break up of the statue itself. We literally got bricks and stones and we were smashing them on the studio floor here, and then taking those tapes and slowing them down and harmonizing them and pitching them around to make this big thing break up and fall over and hit these other bricks, and then, right after that, she goes into all those skeletons, and I created the sort of horror effect that went along with that by multi-tracking my voice and my wife's voice and a neighbor's voice and going through this layering of all these screams, which them became a sound effect that plays in the film. Q: Do you ever work with the guys who do the foley for these, as far as them doing the more realistic effects? Howarth: Usually what'll happen is, the foley guys will be at those spotting sessions I mentioned, when the director lays out what he wants, sort of like his specifications for the film, and sometimes there'll be something which needs to be foleyed and then what we call processed, so the foley people will record it in a traditional way and try to get the best sync and the best sound they can make acoustically, and then I will take those recordings and them process them through the electronics here to give it just a little bit of differentness or non-reality or whatever it might be. Q: I'll bet half the time people don't even notice that. It's kind of an unsung aspect of special effects. Howarth: I've always felt the best soundtrack is one you don't notice. Because then it was done perfectly, you were manipulated so well that you didn't know you were being manipulated.
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