Star Wars VII contains the most magnificence dream sequence. When Rey lays her hand on a lightsaber for the first time, the world dissolves as a cacophony of audio hallucinations plague her. It's a short sequence - lasting just under a minute - but the sound design is beautiful.

After seeing the fabulous Path of a Lightsaber video I thought I'd have a go at deconstructing all the voices which went into creating such a mesmerising piece.

I've isolated, as far as I can, all the different people - ducking out the background noise and boosting the spoken words where possible.

The original surround-sound audio is presented here in stereo - it's well worth listening to with a set of headphones to aid clarity.

Plenty of Obi-Wan - both Ewan McGregor and a digitally reconstructed Alec Guinness? Quite a lot of Yoda too. I didn't hear any Jake Lloyd or Hayden Christensen - which is a shame - although we do get some of Vader's heavy breathing. Listening back I also expected to find some of the villains in there. Unless my ears deceive me, there's no Kylo, Palpatine, or Snoke. A curious ommission, I thought.

I used Audacity to clear up the audio, isolating the sounds from each channel where possible.

As you can see, there's a lot of stuff happening in the surround channels, which makes that part of the film incredibly immersive. It's interesting to see just how each element is placed in the sound field to build up a coherent landscape of voices coming at you from all directions. When paired with the tremendous special effects, it produces one of the stand-out scenes of the movie.

Later on this month, I hope to show you how the movie cheats with its 3D effects to give an enhanced feeling of depth.

Thanks for listening!

Suppose you want to create a surround sound file using Audacity. The app is a little obtuse, so this may clear up some confusion.

When exporting, Audacity defaults to mixing down to stereo. You must adjust these settings: Edit → Preferences → Import/Export → Use Custom Mix

Lay out your audio. Keep each track as mono. You can have as many tracks as you like and then downmix them later.

File → Export If you choose a surround compatible format, like .ogg, you will be able to assign each track (on the left) to an output channel on the right.

The channels don't have names - which is really unhelpful. Here's how they map according to the OGG Specification.

1 Left
2 Centre
3 Right
4 Surround Left
5 Surround Right

If you want to test it for yourself, here's a simple multitrack ogg.