Talk:SoundDroid

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Possible source: interviews with members of the SoundDroid team

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Hi. My name is Matteo Milani, and I'm a sound designer. I have a conflict of interest to disclose: I'm the author of DROIDS, a book about SoundDroid that I self-published in 2026 and which is available for free download. For this reason, I won't edit this article, and I'll leave it up to you to decide whether or not to use it.

The book compiles interviews and accounts from various people involved in the project, including James A. Moorer, Michael Rubin, Tomlinson Holman, Jeffrey Borish (now Barish), and John Strawn. While rereading the article, I noticed a few points where these accounts, or the technical sources from that time, might be helpful.

Deep Note. The article states that this was the sound played when the SoundDroid was turned on. When I asked him about it, Moorer replied that it wasn't the startup sound. It was a program that loaded into the ASP and, once launched, synthesized the sound in real time; he was the one who named it "Deep Note". Droidmaker describes it differently, so perhaps the sentence should be attributed or reworded.

The arrows in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. According to Moorer, the arrows weren't created using just the Doppler effect. First, they were synthesized using linear prediction, based on a 100-ms fragment of a recording, and then the sound was processed through the Doppler program. The work is also described in a technical article, which is probably a better source than my book: Moorer, Abbott, Nye, Borish, Snell, "The Digital Audio Processing Station: A New Concept in Audio Post-Production", Journal of the Audio Engineering Society 34(6), 1986, pp. 454–463.

Amadeus. There is currently no citation for the noise reduction on Amadeus. The article on SoundDroid published in Recording Engineer/Producer in October 1985 discusses this, and Moorer also mentions it in my interview.

Stevie Wonder and Michael Jackson. In the book, Rubin and Peter Nye recall SoundDroid demonstrations given to the two of them (Jackson was there with Lucas and Coppola). I haven't found anything about the deposits mentioned in the article: I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just pointing out that it isn't in my sources.

You can read and download the book for free here: https://unidentifiedsoundobject.com/droids. The interviews with Moorer are in Chapter 4. I know that a self-published book isn't always considered a reliable source, so you can decide for yourselves. Where an independent source exists, such as the JAES article, I think it's best to cite that one. I'm happy to answer any questions you may have.

Thanks, Matmi (talk) 14:21, 10 November 2026 (UTC)Reply