It turned out that Spivack had a real talent for making home grown sound effects and as a foley artist was decades ahead of his time. But theorizing that dinosaurs might make some sort of hissing sound, Spivack made those noises himself and recorded them. The curator pointedly told Spivack he was on fool’s errand and not to waste his time. When Spivack wrote the curator at the Lincoln Park Zoo in Chicago and asked him what kinds of sounds a dinosaur might make, the response he received was less than helpful. Trying to recreate the sounds of the various dinosaurs also proved to be problematic. And that’s how King Kong ended up getting his distinctive voice. Next he lowered it by an octave and looped it together several times to get the length he wanted. He ended up slowing down one particular lion’s roar and playing it backwards. With no other options, Spivack took these recordings back to the studio and began to play with them. His microphone captured a lot violent reactions, but they still didn’t seem usable. In an attempt to get something he could use, Spivack visited the big cat house and asked the handlers to deliberately take away food from the lions and tigers at feeding time.

On screen, Kong was seen to roar up to 30 seconds at a stretch. Even an elephant trumpeting only lasted eight or nine seconds.

There, he was disappointed to find out that all the known animal roars would instantly be recognizable.

With no idea of how to add proper sounds to this most unusual film, he headed down to the Los Angeles zoo to record animal noises. As a comparison, when they made Hello Dolly some 35 years later, that film contained stereo sound and no fewer than 77 separate audio tracks.Īt the time, the head of RKO’s sound effects department was a 31 year old man named Murray Spivack. Sophisticated editing, timing, and multi-layering was pretty much unheard of. The standard was for feature films to only consist of three tracks: one for dialogue, one for music, and one for any additional sounds. As such, movie sound technology was still in its infancy. Also keep in mind that sound films were less than four years old at the time “King Kong” was made. After all, no one at the time had any idea of what a dinosaur or giant ape was supposed to sound like. And boy, did it get it.Īmong the many challenges Kong faced was how to add sound effects. But the film still needed a little help in post. A rough cut of the film had been assembled and Merian Cooper was trying to decide what scenes stayed and which ones would go. As we saw in our previous post, in late 1932, the production of “King Kong” was nearing the finish line.

King kong sound effects