What Does a Robot With a Soul Sound Like?
The Wild Robot’s sound designer breaks it down.
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The movie The Wild Robot features a robot with a quality that, in a different context, would put the audience on alert: an operating system that can convincingly mimic falling in love. The story launches with an accident. Roz, a helper unit, lands on an uninhabited island when a Universal Dynamics cargo ship carrying crates of fellow robots crashes. While running away from a bear, she crushes a goose nest and kills all the birds except one. Raising the gosling, Brightbill, becomes her task, and so Roz has to learn to be a mother. The movie is technically classified as sci-fi, but this is not Her or Westworld. It’s an animated film based on a children’s book, which means the storyline of a robot developing a soul lands softly.
This year, The Wild Robot was nominated for an Oscar in sound design, maybe because the movie managed Roz’s growing emotions in such a novel and delicate way. In this episode of Radio Atlantic, we talk with Randy Thom, the director of sound design at Skywalker Sound and the supervising sound designer on The Wild Robot, about how he and his team helped to create the sound of Roz’s voice and movements. Thom explains how he manipulated the voice of Lupita Nyong’o, who voiced the robot, so she slowly sounded less robotic and more maternal. And how he invented a way to literally breathe life into Roz.
The following is a transcript of the episode:
Hanna Rosin: Hey. It’s Hanna, again. So last year, we did an episode with the sound designer behind The Zone of Interest, which ended up winning the Oscar for Best Sound. We thought we’d do a similar episode with one of this year’s nominated films, which is the bonus episode you’re about to hear. Enjoy.
Roz: Hello. Bonjour. Guten Tag. Jambo. Hola. Congratulations on your purchase of a Universal Dynamics robot.
Rosin: That is the voice of Roz from the animated film The Wild Robot, up for three Oscars this weekend, including for Best Sound.
Roz, who’s voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, is a helper robot: a kind of turbocharged Siri who gets stranded on a deserted island and learns to communicate with the animals that live there.
She also finds a goose egg—the only one left after she accidentally destroyed its nest—and she decides that her task is to raise this gosling and basically become its mom. But that means she has to do all the parts of becoming a mom.
Fink: But she remembers one thing: you. And when she finally sees you, she feels—
Roz: Crushing obligation.
Fink: —very lucky to be a mother.
Brightbill: Mama.
Rosin: This all created an interesting challenge for the movie’s sound-design team, which is: What should this robot sound like? And what should it sound like if it has a soul?
Roz: How do you know if you love something, someone?
Fink: If you do, you should probably tell them.
Roz: What if it is too late?
[Music]
Rosin: This is Radio Atlantic. I’m Hanna Rosin.
Today we’re talking about how a movie handles our complicated feelings about robots, with the guy who had to figure that out in sound—
Randy Thom: My name is Randy Thom.
Rosin: —and who did it well enough to get an Oscar nomination.
Thom: And I’m the supervising sound designer on The Wild Robot.
Rosin: There is a long history of robots in film, from him:
C-3PO: Here he comes.
[Sounds from Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope]
Rosin: To him:
Wall-E: Wall-E.
Eve: Wall-E.
Wall-E: Ohhh.
Rosin: To Her:
Samantha: Hello? I’m here.
Theodore: What do I call you? Do you have a name?
Samantha: Yes. Samantha.
[Music]
Rosin: And Randy and The Wild Robot filmmakers knew they had to include some element of that classic robot feel for Roz’s voice, like a little bit of monotone:
Thom: If I were to say, Let me adjust this microphone, and then we decide we want to flatten it, it would be: Let me adjust this microphone. (Voice distorts mechanically.)
Rosin: Ah. That was pretty good.
Thom: So it’s all kind of one note.
Rosin: And then some extra processing in the voice.
Thom: As good an example as any would be C-3PO.
Owen Lars: Can you speak Bocce?
C-3PO: Of course I can, sir. It’s like a second language to me. I’m—
Lars: All right. Shut up. I’ll take this one.
C-3PO: Shutting up, sir.
Thom: His voice, when C-3PO was speaking English, was processed quite noticeably in terms of restricting its bandwidth, so it sounds a little bit like you’re hearing it over a telephone. It doesn’t have many low frequencies in it or extremely high frequencies.
C-3PO: What makes you think there are settlements over there?
[R2-D2 beeps]
C-3PO: Don’t get technical with me.
[R2-D2 beeps]
Thom: There’s this thing called “audio phasing,” where a signal, a sound gets combined with itself but slightly out of sync with itself, and it makes this kind of swishing sound. And so a little bit of that is typically added to a voice to make it sound a little more like a robot.
C-3PO: I’ve just about had enough of you. Go that way. You’ll be malfunctioning within a day, you near-sighted scrap pile.
Rosin: By the way, Randy would know all of this because—
Thom: I’m the director of sound design at Skywalker Sound. Are you looking for that kind of title?
[Star Wars theme song]
Rosin: I mean, if you had that title, would you ever introduce yourself in any other way?
Anyway, back to Roz and The Wild Robot.
Thom: One of the things that Gary Rizzo, the dialogue mixer on the film, did, I think, to very useful effect was to dial up a reverberation algorithm that makes it sound like her voice is inside a metal container.
Roz: Congratulations on your purchase of a Universal Dynamics robot. I am Rozzum 7134.
Thom: And the effect of it, if you use that kind of processing subtly enough—
Roz: Congratulations on your purchase of a Universal Dynamics robot.
Thom: —is that it feels like you’re hearing her metallic body resonate when she speaks.
Rosin: Whoa.
Roz: I am Rozzum 7134. A Rozzum always completes its task. Just ask.
Thom: We did initially think that there might be quite a bit of robotizing of Lupita’s voice. But the more we tried that, the more we realized that we really need this character to express emotion, because what’s kind of going on in the story is that this robot develops a soul.
Rummage: Can you explain again what we are doing?
Roz: I don’t know! I’m just making stuff up! I don’t know what I’m doing. And I have to! I have to because he’s relying on me!
Thom: And so what you hear in the film is something that does sound very much like a robot for the first six or eight things that she utters.
Roz: Was this task accomplished to your satisfaction?
Brightbill: (Screams.)
Thom: But then, fairly quickly, we dial out the processing, and so that what you’re left with is Lupita’s performance as a robot.
Roz: They cut my power, but I still heard you because I was listening with a different part of myself.
Rosin: Now, of course, Roz is not the only robot. You voiced a robot in Wild Robot. You play essentially the equivalent of a Stormtrooper—like, the bad-muscle robot.
Thom: That’s right.
Rosin: How did you think about those robots differently?
Thom: Well, this is a case where my big, bassy voice was useful. These are very large, you know, military robots. And so I just tried to manifest that as well as I could.
VONTRA: Your target is Rozzum 7134.
RECO: Deploy.
Thom: But even my voice needed to be augmented to make it sound even bigger. And so I pitched my voice down almost an octave—
RECO: You do not belong here. This is a wilderness.
Thom: —and put some of that kind of metallic reverberation on it.
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
RECO: You do not belong here. This is a wilderness.
Thom: And I just needed to perform it in as, kind of, aggressive and intimidating a way as I could muster.
Rosin: Okay. Give us one line. I’m trying to imagine your voice an octave deeper than I’m listening to.
Thom: (Laughs.) Yeah. I won’t be able to simulate that part of it. “This is a wilderness. You do not belong here.”
Rosin: (Laughs.) That was excellent.
Thom: (Laughs.)
Rosin: That was excellent.
Thom: Well, thank you.
Roz: I’m already home. Thank you.
RECO: You do not belong here. This is a wilderness.
Roz: And I am a wild robot.
[Music]
Rosin: When we come back: Randy has a breakthrough.
Thom: Damn! That’s going to work.
Rosin: That’s coming up.
[Break]
Rosin: So one thing Randy Thom had to figure out is what Roz’s voice would sound like. But he also had to figure out how Roz would sound when she moved: like, when she’d twisted her body or extended her arm, and when she walked around.
Thom: The tradition for doing robot movement sounds for movies is to use recordings of servo motors.
[Sounds of servo motors]
Thom: A servo motor is a kind of electric motor that’s often used in robots. And the sound that it makes—when the robot walks—is sort of … (Mimics sound.)
[Sounds of servo motors]
Thom: Sounds like that were used in the Star Wars films. R2-D2 really rolls, rather than walks, but C-3PO is anthropomorphic, has arms and legs. And you hear servo motors when C-3PO walks.
[Music]
C-3PO: He tricked me into going this way. But he’ll do no better.
Thom: So that approach had been done well. But at this point, it seemed like a bit of a cliche, and so I wanted to stay away from it for that reason. But probably the more important reason I wanted to not use servo motors is that Roz is supposed to be very high-tech, so she had to sound elegant and smooth and subtle when she moved.
Roz: Rozzums are programmed for instant physical mimicry.
Thom: So I started listening to pneumatic systems. And in a pneumatic system, air under pressure is used to propel certain kinds of things. And as I listened to those, I was thinking, Wow. Yeah. That’s going to work. Something like that’s going to work.
[Sounds from The Wild Robot]
Rosin: And what does a pneumatic system sound like? I actually tried to YouTube yesterday “pneumatic systems,” and mostly what you see is video images. But I couldn’t find one that had any kind of elegant sound.
Thom: Well, they’re often something like … (Mimics sound.) That sort of thing.
[Sounds from The Wild Robot]
Rosin: Oh. That’s what a pneumatic system is. It’s, like, a tube going through a thing, is how we associate it.
Thom: Yeah. If you can imagine a kind of cylinder being pushed through a tube—
Rosin: Yeah. Okay.
Thom: —that has air in it, and what you’re hearing is the air escaping around the edges of the cylinder inside the tube, it’s like that.
[Sounds from The Wild Robot]
Thom: The more I listened to those sounds and edited them to be in sync with Roz’s movements on the screen, the more it occurred to me that they were a little like breathing. So I decided to try actual breath sounds—inhales and exhales—not for Roz breathing, because she doesn’t breathe, but for her movement sounds, for her walking. So every time she would take a step, you would hear this … (Mimics sound.) That sort of thing.
[Sounds from The Wild Robot]
Thom: And so I performed some of the breaths.
Rosin: Were they slow, like meditation-yoga-class breaths? Or what kind of breaths?
Thom: Well, it depends a little on what she’s doing. There’s one moment early in the film where she reaches into a cave that a bear—who’s voiced by Mark Hamill of Star Wars, by the way.
Rosin: Mm-hmm.
Thom: She reaches into this cave, and her arm has to extend quite a distance.
[Sounds from The Wild Robot]
Thom: I had to do a fairly long breath for that arm movement, so it was like … (Mimics sound.) And I have to be careful that I don’t pass out from doing that too much. (Laughs.)
Rosin: Right. (Laughs.)
[Sounds from The Wild Robot]
Thom: But the trick, of course, is to do it subtly enough so that it doesn’t literally sound like breathing. And so we don’t want the audience to think, We’re hearing her breathing as she’s walking. It has to be quiet enough so that it’s mostly subliminal.
[Sounds from The Wild Robot]
Rosin: You know what’s philosophically—as you’re talking, the symbolism of this, of breathing life into the robot, is very interesting, you know?
Thom: Yeah. That’s the little light bulb that got turned on in my head once I started listening to these breath sounds. So for me, it was probably the most fun activity that I had working on the film, figuring out a new kind of paradigm for robot movement.
[Music]
Rosin: In his past work, Randy has figured out sounds for much bigger—and less, shall we say, aerodynamic—kinds of robots, like The Iron Giant.
Thom: Well, I did use some servo sounds for the movement of The Iron Giant, which is an animated film.
Hogarth Hughes: See this? This is called a rock. Rock.
Iron Giant: Rock.
Thom: But I also used some hydraulic sounds for that giant robot.
Hughes: Yes.
Iron Giant: Rock?
Hughes: No, no. That is a tree.
Rosin: Early in his career, Randy also helped to come up with the sound for an even bigger kind of robot, which he found in recordings of a huge metal shear—think: like, a metal guillotine.
Thom: And it made this really great multisyllabic, syncopated sound, so it made this sort of … (Mimics sound.) And that’s the sound that the Imperial Walkers make in The Empire Strikes Back.
[Sounds from Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back]
Person 1: Echo station 3TA, we have spotted Imperial Walkers.
Person 2: Imperial Walkers on the north bridge.
Rosin: So you’re moving essentially from something that is metallic, to something that is a little more organic, to something that feels fairly humanlike. That does feel like an evolution.
Thom: Yeah, I think it is.
Rosin: Do you have a sense now, after working on Wild Robot, what an ideal robot would sound like? Like, do you think we could ever go back to the days when robots sounded metallic? Or are we just living in a world where our expectation is that robots have a humanish feel of some kind?
Thom: I don’t think we’re there yet. It depends, in movies, of course—so if you see a robot in Her—
Samantha: Was that funny?
Theodore: Yeah.
Samantha: Oh, good. I’m funny.
Thom: —then you certainly don’t expect to hear, you know, servo motors.
[Sounds of servo motors]
Thom: But if there’s a kind of retro look to the robot, then I can certainly imagine a movie being made next year where it would be appropriate to go back to servo motors.
Rosin: Right. So we’re not firmly in the era of the humanoid robot. Who knows how it could go?
Thom: Yeah.
Rosin: We could start having nostalgia for the robot robot as we knew it.
Thom: I’m sure we will.
Rosin: Yeah. One day.
[Sounds from Star Wars: Episode V—The Empire Strikes Back]
C-3PO: And you’re having delusions of grandeur.
[R2-D2 beeps]
Rosin: Well, thank you so much for joining us and for explaining this so patiently. I really appreciate it.
Thom: Oh, it was my pleasure. Nice to talk with you.
[Music]
Rosin: This episode of Radio Atlantic was produced by Jinae West and edited by Claudine Ebeid. It was engineered by Rob Smierciak and fact-checked by Genevieve Finn. Claudine Ebeid is the executive producer of Atlantic audio, and Andrea Valdez is our managing editor.
I’m Hanna Rosin. Thanks for listening.
