Oak Forest HS Digital Music Class Demonstrates Special Effects

Oak Forest High School Senior Cole Kister balances a microphone in one hand and a slinky in the other. At Oak Forest High School Music teacher Nick Rojek’s nod, he lets go of the slinky, which emits a loud and long eerie noise similar to the noise a laser would emit in a movie soundtrack. The same slinky, if dropped from a distance, will sound like an explosion.

This demonstration of the special effects that movies have in their soundtrack was a part of the iPad Digital Music Class presentation of “The Music and Special Effects of Star Wars,” held in OFHS’s lecture hall.

Rojek compared the music of the Star Wars movies and its composer John Williams to contemporary composer Hans Zimmer, who has composed music for many contemporary movies including the most recent one, Dunkirk. He said, “John Williams had a full-size orchestra with lots and lots of people. This costs a lot of money and some of the sound recordings didn’t even make it into the film. On the other hand, Hans Zimmer, records his soundtracks digitally first, and then adds layers of live instruments on top of the initial digital music. This makes Zimmer soundtracks less expensive to produce.”

The iPad Digital Music class demonstrated were how instruments were layered into a soundtrack and doubled for dramatic emphasis. OFHS Seniors Ben Francoeur played a cymbol and Cody Toppen played a bass drum, and both of those recordings were incorporated into the soundtrack that Mr. Rojek and the iPad Digital Music Class created for the demonstration to play underneath a 20 second clip from the original Star Wars film.

Another thing that Rojek discussed with the help of the iPad Digital Music class was the role of the foley in movie production. A foley is a person who creates the sound effects for a movie. While a movie is playing on a screen, a foley will create a sound to go along with the action in the movie using a variety of inventive items to create the sound. For example, steps in the snow are made by stepping with heavy boots onto play sand, which causes the crunch one expects to hear from snow. Laser sounds are created by dropping slinkies from certain heights and then playing with the tonal qualities of the recorded, as Rojek and Kister demonstrated during the presentation.

When all of the sound clips were played back from the demo, the resulting soundtrack sounded fuller and had explosions that were not there before, showing the audience some of the procedures that foleys and sound mixers used while making the soundtracks and the sound effects for the Star Wars films.

The event was the inagural event of Star Wars week, hosted by the OFHS Library and Librarians Cheryl Harris-Sumida and Eileen Niedoborski. Harris-Sumida and Niedoborski are hosting a series of Star Wars related events at the high school.