Star Trek Used Kissing Noises To Create The Sound Of A Classic Monster

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I recall watching a rerun of the "Star Trek" episode "Operation — Annihilate!" (April 13, 1967) as a child, and being tickled by the silliness of its central monster. The monsters were little, rubbery, veiny flesh-flaps that could fly through the air, and adhere onto the backs of their victims. The creatures then inject some of their own organic material into a host, causing the host to go insane. Indeed, the whole central concept of the monsters is straight out of H.P. Lovecraft. Kirk (William Shatner) and his crew eventually find that the monsters are the singular cells of a large, ineffable, hive-minded creature.

It's a scary concept, and one appropriate for a horror-adjacent series like "Star Trek," but the fear is undercut by how silly the monsters look. My sister and I felt they looked like rubber vomit, or artificial bacon. To this day, we still refer to the single-celled organisms from "Operation — Annihilate!" as flying space bacon. 

And the noises they make are certainly unique. The bacon-like cells make a noise that sounds like the midpoint between a squeak and a suck. They make their sucking chirrup as they fly through the air, giving them a nightmarish quality. According to a 2016 article posted on the Audible Blog, the creatures' noises were created by sound designer Doug Grindstaff by sampling and mixing hundreds of different human kissing noises. It seems that using kisses would have been considered a mite ribald in 1966, so Grindstaff never shared his secret with the show's producers. They only heard weird alien chitters, and didn't ask questions. Grindstaff eventually gave away all his secrets in the 2016 blog. Many of his "Star Trek" sound effects came from unconventional sources. 

"Star Trek" was full of noise. Show creator Gene Roddenberry, according to Grindstaff, hated silence, and was happy to fill the series with strange ambient noises. Not only does one constantly hear the hum of the Enterprise's engines in the background, but the ships bridge has all kinds of weird beeping and whirring, implying that machines are always at work. Grindstaff even once confronted Roddenberry about all the noise, feeling that it was a little too cartoonish. Roddenberry insisted on sound everywhere. Grindstaff recalls what he did, once, when Roddenberry asked for a sound effect for a vaccination scene: 

"I worked on one scene where [Dr. McCoy] is giving someone a shot. Gene says, 'Doug, I'm missing one thing. The doctor injects him and I don't hear the shot.' I said, 'You wouldn't hear a shot, Gene.' He said, 'No, no, this is Star Trek, we want a sound for it.' So I turned around to the mixing panel and I said, 'Do you guys have an air compressor?'And they did. I fired up the air compressor, squirted it for a long enough period by the mic, went upstairs, played with it a little bit, and then put it in the show. And Gene loved it. So, that's how Gene was. He didn't miss nothing!" 

In terms of creatures, though, Grindstaff also invented the iconic monster sound for the tribbles. Tribbles are, of course, featureless balls of fur that eat plentifully and reproduce wildly. They coo like doves. Grindstaff said he took a recording of a dove's coo, and then scrubbed the magnetic tape with steel wool to make it sound more alien. "Anything that I could do to make things work," he said. 

Author Jeff Bond, the writer of "The Music of Star Trek," also offered some commentary in the Audible blog entry, noting how important sound was on a show like "Star Trek." The series rarely shot on location, often having to recreate alien worlds and extraterrestrial vistas on small sound stages. Adding eerie alien hums to such cheap-looking scenes gave "Star Trek" infinitely more depth. And while sound designers like Grindstaff were vital for creating such sounds, many of the effects on "Star Trek" were stock sounds left over from older movies. Bond said:

"The recorded tones had to be manipulated by using tape techniques; speeding up, slowing down, adding reverb or echoes to the tones. Some of the familiar effects came from Paramount's own sound-effects library. The photon torpedo sound was originally created for the 'skeleton ray' in George Pal's 'War of the Worlds,' and some other 'Trek' sound effects can be heard in the low budget sci-fi movie 'The Space Children.'"

The original photon sound effect was achieved by stretching a large spring down the interior of a long tube, and then twanging it. The echoey metallic noise would then be electronically altered to sound more laser-like. It was an effect used for decades. Sadly, a lot of the original sound effects masters were thrown away back in the 1960s, with Grindstaff not feeling there was any reason to keep it around. Had he known "Star Trek" would still be going strong nearly 60 years later, he said he would have been a better archivist. "If I had only known, I would have kept stuff like you wouldn't believe!"