What are your biggest inspirations on how a spaceship should sound in space?

Mine is probably the Battlestar Galactica remake, the 2004 one. That's probably my favourite sci-fi series, and I really love the sound design in that. That's got to be mine.

I think I'd say the more recent Star Trek films have some really wicked-sounding spaceship sounds. The third one, is it? Beyond. They do this chase through the city and the ship sounds are awesome. Yeah, they're nice.

For me, Star Wars was a big one. That was just ace. Ben Burtt is the sound designer on that, and he set the precedent for so many sci-fi sounds. A lightsaber, that was awesome. And that was him accidentally walking past a TV with a microphone into a recorder and getting the static, and the interaction of the tube in there combined with two old film projectors getting into sync when you switch them over. All the way to the lasers and then obviously to the TIE fighter. I think that was like a processed pig, I think.

The TIE fighter was an elephant, I think.

It was an elephant, yeah. And obviously all the stuff in there. And then more recently, in the Star Wars films, they kind of got inspiration from a lot of the combustion engines from trucks and stuff like that. So Star Wars is a big one for me. But I really liked Gravity, because that was a great reference of how do you do sound in space without doing the Hollywood rule of cool. And that was all the textile kind of stuff, you're touching stuff and the sound is transmitting through solids and through your suit. And that was awesome.

It's the same reason I like Battlestar. It's not Hollywood sci-fi, but there's still sound in space, but it's very appropriate to what you'd expect a slightly stylized but realistic version of that to sound like.