"The background sound of the ships have done almost as much to build their respective worlds as the sets themselves, even if you don’t normally notice them. Since we don’t actually know what a warp drive would sound like, these hums and drones are created by sound effects editors who take tones from a number of sources to create some of the most recognizable spaceship sounds around...
Lago recently worked on the CW show The 100, which features a century-old space station called The Ark, a vessel which had been cobbled together by an ancient United Nations, but is, during the time of the show’s story, beginning to fall apart. In creating the ambient sounds for The Ark, the age and impending failure of the station needed to subtly come across in the sounds of the location. For The 100,Lago would sometimes just create sounds from things around the house. “I’d just set some microphones on the ground and drag something slowly. I’d tie a bunch of my kids’ toys together and drag them slowly, and get a nice little recording of some weird sound, and use those pieces in there,” he says...
“One thing I did for The 100, I was shopping at a Fresh and Easy, and they had this freezer that made this incredible, “OOOOMMMMM,” says Lago. “ So I just stuck my recorder in there and closed it, and just stood outside of the freezer for a minute or so. Then I took that recording, and cleaned it up, and it was kind of elegant.” But a smooth elegant hum wasn’t right for all of the parts of the ratchety, old ark, so Lago used it specifically for the upscale chambers of The Ark’s ruling class, creating a distinctly different atmosphere than in other parts of the ship, while still having it feel like a natural extension of the overall space."
It's true though, thinking about it - the calm background buzz of the Star Trek ships that lets you know it's a normalized living space; the antiseptic and sharp quality of the Death Star that makes it military and functional; the beep-whizz of the TARDIS that makes it more of a vehicle for transport and a character than an inanimate building. The sound is sort of part of thinking about what a space ship would be for and what the human experience of it would be.
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