J. Macdonald; Innovator in Sound Effects

James Macdonald, for 40 years the Disney organization’s one-man band of sound effects who also became the voice of Mickey Mouse when Walt Disney no longer had time to breathe life into his creation, has died.

Macdonald blew through gas lamp chambers to emulate the roaring of bears, made galloping hoofbeats with coconut half-shells and fashioned a note on a mouth harp that sounded like an arrow hitting a target. He was 84 and died Friday at his home in Glendale of heart failure.

His 1,000 “instruments,” many of them handmade, became gurgling waterfalls, calliopes and the yodeling of the seven dwarfs in “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.”

Little known outside the animation industry, Macdonald to his colleagues represented the epitome of entertainment sound, a onetime drummer in a cruise ship band who had intended to become an engineer but instead became a nabob of noise.

His ability to create or imitate any sound he had ever heard led him to a career at the Disney studios, where he first visited in 1934 with his band to record a Mickey Mouse soundtrack.

His first major credit was in “Snow White,” which required years of preparation before its release in 1937.

He not only yodeled for the dwarfs, gurgled for the waterfalls and whistled for the calliope, but sneezed for “Sneezy.”

He next was a timpanist in “Fantasia.” In 1946, when Walt Disney was too preoccupied with production to record the soundtrack for “Mickey and the Beanstalk,” he became the voice of the squeaky mouse. His was the falsetto sound of Mickey until he retired in 1976. Even after retirement, Macdonald continued his imitations, particularly as Evinrude, the dragonfly in “The Rescuers.” He also worked and was seen on film in “The Monster Sound Show” at Disney World in Florida.

Macdonald credited his engineering studies--through a correspondence course--for much of his success, citing in particular the time that he used clusters of duralumin to simulate the tones of the Western chromatic scale. This was to reflect the sound a spider makes when spinning a web.

He once was asked if the spinning of a web could really make a sound. “When Walt Disney said it could, you made it have a sound,” was the reply.

He used such mundane hardware as a wooden berry basket that he crumbled to get the effect of falling timber, springs in a box mounted on roller-skate wheels (a railroad car) and dried peas in a wooden keg (rain).

If he was not inventing the machinery he needed for his novel noises, he found it in strange places--he once blew through a condom to provide the buzzing of bees.

Not all his engineering worked as planned.

Macdonald once tried to create a series of creaks for a film called “The Old Mill.” What he got was a perfect foghorn.

“That’s the way things happen,” he said. “I discover them en route to something else.”

Survivors include his wife, Roberta.