This blog has been quiet for a long time, and it seems right to wake it up with this news. Some of you may remember the interviews about the Lucasfilm SoundDroid that appeared here. That small project has grown into a book.
DROIDS: How a Team at Lucasfilm Invented the Digital Audio Workstation tells how a small team at Lucasfilm built the Audio Signal Processor (ASP) and the SoundDroid between 1980 and 1986. Only one SoundDroid was ever built and it was never sold, yet its ideas (sound as an editable waveform on screen, non-destructive editing on disk, a signal processor you could reprogram) arrived years before the tools we now take for granted.
The book lets the people who were there speak first: conversations with James A. Moorer, Tomlinson Holman and M.H. Rubin; a foreword by Gary Rydstrom; first-person accounts written for this edition by John Snell, Curtis Abbott, Bernard Mont-Reynaud, Marie-Dominique Baudot, Jeffrey Borish and John Strawn; and an epilogue by Carla Scaletti.
DROIDS will be released on Saturday 31 October 2026, the 41st anniversary of the SoundDroid's presentation at the SMPTE conference in Los Angeles. It is free, as PDF and ePub, under a Creative Commons licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). It will be available on the book’s official page: unidentifiedsoundobject.com/droids.
My thanks go to everyone who shared their memories, documents and corrections over these years. This book exists because of them.
Matteo Milani
