Edit: additional wikipedia searching reveals this unsourced fact
"A variation of the end of their track "Spaced" from the Wild Sanctuary album became the inspiration for dual gliding synthesizer soundtrack for the copied THX Sound Logo in movie theaters, also for which neither Beaver or Krause were compensated."
Makes you wonder how things would have played out if Dr Dre's Lolo sampled Iannis Xenakis instead of THX's sound. Would placing the sample at the beginning of a record the way Deep Note is placed in a movie have been a violation of THX's trademark?
There's another song of his, Concret PH, that is absolutely mind-blowing on a hi-fi system or with high end headphones. On lo-fi equipment its kind of staticy, but on good equipment it's like sitting in a room with thousands of thin walled crystal wine glasses shattering around you.
I appreciate the level of detail the author goes to in describing the creation process. Very informative. I did this myself once, but using a patch I made in Max/MSP for drawing and listening to line segments on a pitch vs time plane. For this particular use case, I generated the input score with a Python script rather than drawing them manually. I found that detuning the sustained tones made the biggest difference in matching the original sound, which the article author mentions. Here's a video of my patch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xl4C4zsy9LY
I've gotta say, making a sound like this is one of the very obvious things to do with any synthesizer that has more than one oscillator (which is most of them) and which allows pitch modulation (again, most of them). I made it by accident some 20 years ago when I was learning to program my first analog synth and didn't know about the similarity to the THX sound until someone pointed it out to me (I grew up outside the US and had never been to an Imax presentation at that time).
The only part of this "deep note" that I like is the very end; top of the crescendo. The first part has always creeped me out worse than watching Hostel for the first time.
Without the first part, a whole orchestra's worth of sawtooth oscillators playing octaves is pretty boring. The effect of the beginning is to build tension, which is released at the point when all the oscillators converge on the single note.
Tension and release is the basis for most (if not all) music. Whether its in the form of a V7->I cadence, which builds tension harmonically with a tritone that "wants" to resolve to the root. Or the "riser" before the drop in electronic music, just a single note with it's pitch going up and up and up or a filter sweeping through white noise up and up and up with drums doing more and more subdivisions until a second of silence and then boom...the main theme. In and of itself it may be interesting but only within the context of it being the release of tension built up previously does it have that profound effect.
3:10 at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2xKO3KAtDZ0
Edit: additional wikipedia searching reveals this unsourced fact
"A variation of the end of their track "Spaced" from the Wild Sanctuary album became the inspiration for dual gliding synthesizer soundtrack for the copied THX Sound Logo in movie theaters, also for which neither Beaver or Krause were compensated."
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beaver_%26_Krause)