Name: How Walter Murch Worldized Film Sound
Uploaded: 2026-02-03T17:22:11.000Z
Duration: 5 min 36 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Okay, so I'm in the stairwell of my apartment building right now to show you what the reverb of a space like this does to a human voice.

You can hear the reflections of my words bounce around the walls in here and mingle together to create this complex echo that conveys information about the space I'm in.

The only thing, though, is that I'm not in a stairwell.

I'm in my office where I normally record these voiceovers, sitting pretty close to the microphone.

In digital editing, all you need to do to add reverb to an audio file is drag and drop.

There are countless presets for different spaces.

A couple of clicks and you're good to go.

Take for example, I don't know, a school dance in a gymnasium.

Just add some crowd sound effects and some band music, apply the appropriate reverb and voila.

Digital software makes a lot of things easier.

Unfortunately, the film you're looking at right now, George Lucas, American Graffiti, was made way before these tools were invented.

So how do you capture the acoustic spirit of a place without the software to simulate it?

Well, you could record the band playing in the gym itself as you're shooting, but

that's going to make syncing all the different shots.

You could filter the track to muffle it a bit and add some echo, as it had been done up to that point.

But that's just not going to have the realistic quality you're looking for.

Any kind of reverberation or atmosphere around a voice or a sound effect, which tells you something about the space that you're in.

That's Walter Murch, legendary film and sound editor, who has worked on some of the best movies of all time, including American Graffiti and the Godfather.

In the early 70s, Murch invented a technique called worldizing that solved the problem of realistic reverb.

And you can hear it in this scene when the orchestra that is at the wedding is playing the music.

It's being broadcast to the set through speakers and it has this wonderful sound, the way weddings really sound.

I then got hold of the actual original recordings of that music, did a kind of blending the captured playback sound with the actual sound.

It's an ingenious solution to the problem.

Murch records the recording in the space it's actually meant to be playing, capturing the exact acoustic qualities of that location.

Then he syncs the original recording with that to create this Frankenstein's monster That has both the full body of the original music and the signature of that outdoor area.

And in addition to the naturalism it creates, this technique gives the sound editor amazing control over something like a sonic depth of field.

By adjusting the levels on the sync tracks, you can essentially bring the sound backward or forward in the mix.

When people are dancing and the camera is up close, you want to feel the music, so the editor can favor the clean recording.

But when you have dialogue, on the other hand, you can fade in more of the worldized recording, which softens the edges on the audio and allows speech to punch through clearly without you having to bring down the music's volume drastically low.

Murch devised this process on George Lucas first feature film, THX 1138, a masterpiece of impressionistic sound design.

He had to find a way to make Lucas futuristic underworld sound like, well, a futuristic underworld.

We've got a malfunctioning officer in corridor 7A.

Like all good inventions, worldizing emerged from necessity and experimentation.

The Godfather was the beneficiary of what Murch came up with on thx.

So was American Graffiti, which leaned heavily on worldizing to place its extensive radio soundtrack in the cars and on the streets and in the school gymnasium.

In Apocalypse now, many of the sounds coming from megaphones, loudspeakers, and helicopter radios are worldized.

In all these cases, the result is an extraordinary match between picture and sound.

And the result of that is a deeper immersion in the story.

You know, I love this about the craft of movies, how a problem that needs to be solved can result in a technique that influences the sound and feel of the whole medium.

Who knows, Maybe you'll change film history.

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