Every visual image evokes an appropriate sound in the mind of the viewer. That sound may be a dripping faucet, a swinging big band, or dead silence. It can be deliberately manipulated to highlight or intensify a visual image. It frequently straddles the border between music and sound effects.

When it comes to designing sound effects, Alan Howarth is one of the elite. As digital sound .technology was beginning to come into its own, Howarth, with his synthesizer skills helped to pioneer a new era in sound effects design for motion
pictures. On his first feature assignment, STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE, he created the sounds of the Enterprise accelerating to Warp 7. Since then he has worked on every STAR TREK feature through STAR TREK VI: THE UNDISCOVERED COUNTRY. Other credits include POLTERGEIST, STARGATE, ROBOCOP, BUCKAROO BANZAI, THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER, THE LITTLE MERMAID, ABC's DINOSAURS and many more.

Accomplished in musical composition as well as sound design, Alan Howarth has collaborated with director John Carpenter on the films HALLOWEEN, ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, CHRISTINE and THEY LIVE. He has also written and performed the scores for THE LOST EMPIRE, RETRIBUTION and all of the HALLOWEEN sequels.

His love of music brought Alan into the realm of sound effects design, With the advent of the synthesizer. Alan started with a synth shop in Cleveland, Ohio. From 1977 to 1979 he served as a technician for the jazz fusion band WEATHER REPORT, specifically hired to take care of the band's elaborate keyboards. As the group decided to do less touring and more studio work, Howarth gleaned an incredible amount of synthesizer expertise.

Soon after moving to Los Angeles in 1979, Alan was hired to help produce sound effects for STAR TREK: THE MOTION PICTURE. The trick, as Alan points out was to come up with sounds that didn't resemble musical notes. "The goal was to make sounds, the challenge was to make them non-musical. I needed to create a full library of sounds that represented the Enterprises engine and bridge sounds. A certain initial wave of things I gave the producers sounded like the score, but they wanted organic sound effects."

To achieve this, Alan began manipulating original sounds until they resembled something entirely different. "It's more expedient to manipulate real sounds than to figure out how to create a fake sound. Let's say, I sample an explosion. If you play it at the pitch it's in, it sounds like an explosion. But if you play a chord of the explosion that's two octaves below, it's eight times bigger. The multiplication of musical sound is one of the techniques of 'bigger than life' sound effects. For the most part, it involves extensive sampling and layering of real sound. or you can employ multiple combinations of sounds and manipulate them into new hybrids."

For STAR TREK VI, Howarth needed to create effects to simulate the sounds of the Enterprise, the Klingon starships Kronos One & The Bird of Prey, the Klingon and Federation transporter beams and sub-space shock waves. A tricky element was having 50,000 Klingons yelling Kirk's name in unison during his trial for assassinating the Klingon ambassador. Howarth recorded 25 actors, all shouting
"Kirk!" simultaneously. 60 takes of the recording were layered, each of which had the actors shouting at various different pitches.

"I sampled them in so that for every key on the keyboard there was a new take of 25 guys. Each one was totally different pitch-wise and duration-wise. So, as I pressed down on a key, I had 25 guys, four keys, 100 and so on. As I pressed down a keyboards worth of 'Kirks,' I got an auditoriums worth."

Though he can create just about any sound on his Synclavier, many of the effects Alan manipulates are organic in nature. These kinds of "organic" sounds can provide invaluable support for a special visual effect. A convincing sound effect can not only provide realism, but can also help to sell a visual. If the matte lines show in a particular scene and there is neither time nor money to re-shoot, a good sound effect can usually camouflage the situation.

The separation of sound to re-create a realistic 3-D listening experience is something Alan hopes to see more of in the future, especially with the advent of Dolby SR-D, Dolby laboratory's version of six-channel digital sound. On another revolutionary front, Howarth has worked extensively with Bedini Audio Spatial Environment technology, a 3-D audio process known as BASE which he used on THE HUNT FOR RED OCTOBER. According to Howarth, BASE technology springs from biphonics, the study of how the human head hears space and location. Using mics based on models of human heads, researchers discovered that sound recorded from them comes across as exceptionally natural. It gives the "you-are-there" feel, says Howarth.

Alan currently works out of Dimension Audio in North Hollywood, where he continues to produce sound effects and music for various film projects as well as producing albums for many recording artists.