Ben BurttWALL.E, the triumphant tale of rusty waste disposal machine finding love in a post-apocalyptic world, has already enchanted a legion of cinemagoers with barely a word of dialogue being spoken. The job of  making the little tin fellah fall binoculars-over-tracks in love fell to sound effects maestro Ben Burtt. He’s the guy whose supplied the likes of the Indiana Jones and Star Wars franchises with that aural zing that makes them sing…

Did you know that the sound effect which accompanied the rolling boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark was created by FX maestro Ben Burtt recording his Honda Civic as it rolled down a gravel drive?

Or that the swish of the Star Wars light sabres was the noise of Ben’s broken TV set humming between channels coupled with the whirring of an old 35mm film projector.

The physics graduate turned Oscar-winning effects supremo also supplied the beeps and whistles for the truculent robot R2-D2 in the Star Wars series as well as the growls for Chewbacca (the whining of a walrus moaning because it’s pool has been closed for cleaning).

New York-born Ben landed his first gig as sound man for Star Wars after director George Lucas discovered that his first choice – Francis Ford Coppola’s preferred technician Walter Murch – was already booked.

Sounding out his contacts a the University of Southern California, they recommended Ben, who was then a lauded twenty-something physics graduate from Allegheny College in Pennsylvania who had already worked – uncredited - on the cult 1975 hit Death Race 2000.

"I began recording sounds and building up a library of noises for this film called Star Wars which hadn't gone into production yet," he recalls. "I was the sound designer, for want of a better term, making the sounds and being responsible for inventing what we heard."

Science fiction movies had tended to use electronic-sounding effects for futuristic devices but Ben sought a more natural sound, blending in "found sounds" to create the effects.

So a bear's growls provided the basis for Chewbacca's speech, to which were added the barks, growls, and whimpers of dogs and lions and the audio icing on the cake – the whimpering walrus.

Ben also concocted the buzzes and bleeps for R2D2 as well as the doom-laden rasp of Darth Vader (created by breathing heavily into an old Dacor scuba air regulator).

To create the TIE-Fighter engine, he combined an elephant's roar (slowed down considerably) with the sound of a car driving fast on a rain-slicked road.

The following year Ben’s trailblazing aural invention was rewarded with an Oscar – a Special Achievement Award for sound effects, for the "creation of the alien, creature and robot voices."

His spacey contributions to the "galaxy far, far away" launched his career as a prolific sound editor and sound designer at Lucasfilm, where he was on staff from 1975 until 1990.

WALL.EIn 1982, he picked up a best sound editing Oscar for ET: The Extra-terrestrial. Resourceful as ever, he used a recording of his wife, who was suffering from a minor cold at the time and was sleeping in bed, for the cute alien.

"The bulk of the vocals, the expressive vocals, are really sounds that are more like a toddler makes ... kind of the universal language of intonation," Ben explains.

Other inspired inventions included the crack of Indiana Jones’ whip in Raiders of the Lost Ark which supplemented the genuine sound with a “whoosh” derived from the noise of a Harrier jump jet.

His favourite sound is the famous "Arrow" sound from the 1938 yarn The Adventures of Robin Hood. He has used it in almost all of the Star Wars films, and almost every other film he has worked on.

He would go on to collect more plaudits with his sound work on the entire Star Wars series, including the prequels, as well as the Indiana Jones films and Steven Spielberg’s gritty drama Munich.

Then Wall.E rolled up. "I had just finished my 29-year, 10-month tour of duty with Star Wars and I thought, 'Well, at least I don't have to do any more robots.'

But when Pixar called, I could see this was something more like a Frank Capra romance with Buster Keaton thrown in. And you had the challenge of not only creating the sound for this fantasy world, but the even bigger task of creating principal characters built out of sound."

On a dustily deserted Earth,  Wall-E (Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class) is a mechanised garbage compactor who's developed a sweet-nature while dutifully processing man’s detritus into mountainous piles.

When a gleamingly white robot (Eve) lands for an environmental evaluation mission, the little chap is smitten and hitches a ride with her mother ship back home to a vast floating citadel in space.

Ben, who’d just provided the ethereal burr of a pulsating skull for Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, spent hours recording motors, tweaking vocal manipulations on his computer and "auditioning" hundreds of audio clips.

(he estimates that he created as many as 2,600 sound files for Wall.E as opposed to his usual 700 to 1,000 for a Star Wars instalment).

"We wanted to have this illusion that the voices for Wall-E and Eve and the other characters are part of their function," Ben says. "The idea is that there are little voice chips inside them creating their 'dialogue.'

It's audio puppeteering. Wall.E will look at something and there'll be a little click of his hands or squeak of his head, and that's all you need to give a sense of him."

Eventually, Ben settled on his own synthesized vocal for lovestruck refuse collector.

However, you can’t keep a good soundman down: Hal the cockroach’s voice was composed of sped-up raccoon noises while the sound of  his feet skittering along the floor was made by clicking handcuffs - recorded with the help of Ben's police officer neighbour.