Sound effects guru Ben Burtt has more than outdone himself on WALL-E. Leave aside the film's publicity materials which tout the thousands of sound cues prepared by Burtt and his crew for the film. The proof is actually in the pudding, as they say, and this film sounds more than puddy good. It's audio design is phenomenal.

Burtt has a great time talking about the real-world sources of his inspiration. In addition to some details he's spilled in the film's promotional materials, Burtt recently shared additional favorites during a press conference in L.A. I've compiled a list of things to keep your ears peeled for when you experience WALL-E.

1. Burtt's own voice as WALL-E. Burtt talked about the fun of "experimenting on myself, sort of like the mad scientist in his lab." Fine-tuning that effect itself took months, he said. To get WALL-E's voice, the first step was to "deconstruct the sound into its component parts," in much the same way that pictures can be deconstructed to the level of individual pixels. "I could perform it on a light tablet," Burtt says, "such that you could change pitch by moving the pen; the pressure of the pen would stretch or sustain syllables." The effect was made complete by incorporating the process glitches to convey the effect of a real "voice box."
2. WALL-E's treads, when whirring slowly, come from a sound he heard in the John Wayne film Island in the Sky. "It was a guy turning a little generator: a soldier, to generate power. I said, 'I like that generator sound. That's cool. Where can I get one?' And I found one on E-Bay, and bought it!" Burtt laughs. "It came in its original 1949 box."
3. "When WALL-E's going fast," Burtt adds, "I needed something more high-pitched and energetic, and once again I went back to my memory of things. I had recorded bi-planes a long time ago for Raiders of the Lost Ark. And the 1930s bi-planes had what's called an inertia starter. ... It's a wonderful whirring sound. ... I couldn't bring a bi-plane into the studio, but on E-Bay I found an inertia starter!"
4. By contrast, EVE's more musical, advanced levitating force-field sounds are achieved with the use of synthesizers.
5. "I worked on the first Alien movie, in fact," says Burtt. When mixing Sigourney Weaver's voice for the ship's computer in WALL-E, an ironic connection, he put the audio through an "echo chamber" which produced a voice that was "omnipotent; it comes from everywhere."
6. The sound made by the "vacu-bot," a malfunctioning automated vaccum cleaner, Burtt demonstrated by twiddling his lips with his finger: the kind of thing "you did in third grade and got in trouble." The vacu-bot's sneeze was also actually Burtt's own, too.
7. Certain of WALL-E's eye movements are a Nikon camera shutter click.
8. WALL-E's arm movements are adapted from the "azimuth motor" on a tank's cannon.
9. The ship's auto pilot, Auto, speaks with the assistance of Apple's MacIn Talk. It started with "a typing sound," and then Burtt got a copy of MacIn Talk, and managed to get it to "follow" a recorded performance of his own voice.
10. For sounds made by WALL-E's cockroach chum, Burtt recorded audio while he took apart and reassembled a pair of police handcuffs.

Seriously... study what Burtt has done with audio over his career (and in WALL-E in particular), and you'll never listen to movies in quite the same way again.