It takes only a few seconds of sound — a spaceship launching, the familiar clash of lightsabers — to know that you are positively not in Kansas anymore. These are the sounds of Star Wars — from a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, three-dimensional in a way that envelops you and that has changed the way movie soundtracks get assembled.
Now the most celebrated of these sounds have been collected for a new book-and-audio collection, The Sounds of Star Wars, written by J.W. Rinzler and including a foreword by the architect of that audioscape himself: renowned sound designer Ben Burtt.