An interview with James A. Moorer

This one sent in via fabio. You can find the full interview on Unidentified Sound Object. The below in quotes is some background info on James A. Moorer followed by a snip on how he used ASP for synthesis on Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Doom. Note the following is only an excerpt for the archives should the interview disappear. If you want to cut to the chase, just click through the above link for the full interview.

Image via James A. Moorer's personal website.

Background info for the interview.
"Matteo Milani had the pleasure of interviewing James A. Moorer, an internationally-known figure in digital audio and computer music, with over 40 technical publications and four patents to his credit. He personally designed and wrote much of the advanced DSP algorithms for the Sonic Solutions "NoNOISE" process which is used to restore vintage recordings for CD remastering.
Between 1980 and 1987, while Vice-President of Research and Development at Lucasfilm's The Droid Works, he designed the Audio Signal Processor (ASP) which was used in the production of sound tracks for Return of the Jedi, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and others.
Between 1977 and 1979, he was a researcher and the Scientific Advisor to IRCAM in Paris.
In the mid-seventies he was Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. He received his PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University in 1975.
In 1991, he won the Audio Engineering Society Silver award for lifetime achievement. In 1996, he won an Emmy Award for Technical Achievement with his partners, Robert J. Doris and Mary C. Sauer for Sonic Solutions "NoNOISE" for Noise Reduction on Television Broadcast Sound Tracks. In 1999, he won an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scientific and Engineering Award for his pioneering work in the design of digital signal processing and its application to audio editing for film. He is currently working at Adobe Systems as Senior Computer Scientist in the DVD team."

snip from the interview:
"MM: Can you talk about the synthesized arrows in Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Doom?

JM: This was done by linear prediction. Ben had recorded the sounds of arrows going by, but they were too fast. I took 100 ms from the middle of one of those sounds and created a filter of order 150 from it. When driven by white noise, it made the same noise as the arrow, but continuing forever. He then put that sound in the doppler program to produce the sounds of the arrows flying by.

In addition to being a numbers prodigy, ASP is quite garrulous. It can synthesize speech, the sounds of musical instruments, and even special effects by the same mathematical techniques. In Indiana Jones, for example, there is a hang-onto-your-seat scene in which Jones and his pals, while dangling precariously from a rope bridge slung across a deep chasm, come under attack by a band of archers. Lucasfilm technicians had recorded the sound of a flying arrow in a studio, but they discovered that the whistling noise did not last long enough to match the flight of the arrow on the film.
ASP came to the rescue. Moorer copied 25 milliseconds from the middle of the one-and-a-half-second recording and spliced the duplicate sounds to both ends, all electronically. Then he manipulated the arrow's noise so that it faded as the missile moved from left to right across the screen. To ensure total accuracy, Moorer even used ASP to include a Doppler shift - the change in pitch from high to low heard when an object sweeps rapidly past. Thus, as the arrow flies by actor Harrison Ford's head the audience hears a subtle change of frequency in its noise. In this way the sound track dramatically increases the audience's sense of the hero's peril.
[excerpt from Discover Magazine, August 1984]"

Update via SteveL in the comments: "I had the pleasure of working with Andy Moorer while I was as a junior sales and QA engineer at Sonic Solutions from 1993-1996 during their peak years in the audio editing market. Andy is truly one of the legends of electronic music, a smart businessperson, and all around great guy. His development of NoNoise was groundbreaking at the time, and we also developed a fiber optic shared audio networking platform that was many years ahead of its time with features like bandwidth reservation. I will never forget figuring out that he was one of the people behind FM Synthesis- I told him I was fond of those old Yamaha TX-81Zs and he said 'I think I have a copy of the patent in my drawer'"