By Joe Holley
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, May 18, 2006
Steven Marshall, 58, a sound engineer who played guitar with Stevie Wonder, listened for the voice of Richard M. Nixon on an infamous White House tape and restored the dulcet tones of Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh on a rerelease of "Gone With the Wind," died of melanoma May 6 at his home in Woodbine.
Mr. Marshall, better known as Stephen St. Croix, was a rock-and-roll guitarist with a thing for sound -- both making it musically and recovering it digitally. Founder and president of a Baltimore-based company called Intelligent Devices Inc., he approached the National Archives in 2000 with a plan for extracting the sound from the infamous Watergate tape with the 18 1/2 -minute gap, known as tape No. 342.
The tape was known to contain a conversation between Nixon and his chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, but how the gap occurred remains a mystery. Nixon's personal secretary, Rose Mary Woods, testified that she accidentally erased it while making a transcript, but forensic tests undercut her explanation.
"And being the sort who would rather think too big than too small," the Baltimore Sun noted in a 2001 profile of Mr. Marshall, "who seeks rather than shirks challenges, who -- from racing dragsters as a teen-ager to touring on one of his half-dozen Harleys at age 53 -- has always liked to live fast, loud and brashly, Stephen St. Croix believes the best person for that job is Stephen St. Croix."
The process he proposed involved building a special tape machine with 200 heads that would read remnants of coherent sound that the erasing missed. After a two-phase test, archivist John W. Carlin decided in 2003 not to proceed with further testing, based on recommendations of the National Archives Technical Evaluation Panel, of which Mr. Marshall was a member.
Steven Curtis Marshall was born in Baltimore and grew up in Scottsdale, Ariz. He spent part of his childhood on a Pima Indian reservation and became a rock-and-roller while sweeping floors at an alcohol-free club in Phoenix.
As the Sun noted, his musical career was born when the house band's drummer failed to show up and Mr. Marshall stepped in. He taught himself how to play keyboard and guitar, toured Europe with bands in the 1960s and managed to graduate from the American School in Lugano, Switzerland, in 1967. He also attended Carnegie Institute of Technology, predecessor to Carnegie Mellon University, as a fine arts major but dropped out.
His wife said he was a born tinkerer, whether on motorcycle engines, recording devices or computers. The New York Times in 2000 called him a "gizmo fiend."
His genius for tinkering helped make him a millionaire in the early 1970s after he invented the Marshall Time Modulator, a delay processor that allowed musicians to modify or multiply their voices. The device was used to help create Darth Vader's voice in the "Star Wars" movies.
A session man for many years, he was hired by Stevie Wonder in the mid-1970s to play guitar on the album "Songs in the Key of Life." The liner notes credit him with use of the Marshall Time Modulator on the song "All Day Sucker."
He began moving away from music and into special effects, engineering and producing in the 1980s. His big break came when a friend told him that Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was looking for someone to restore and enhance the audio for the rerelease of 1939's "Gone With the Wind." He wasn't sure how he would go about doing it, he said in later years, but he wasn't afraid to try. He ultimately came up with a process called "revectorization."
"We worked on the thing around the clock until getting to the point where our computers could distinguish between the rustle of a hoop skirt and the static hiss of an old sound track," Mr. Marshall told the Chicago Tribune in 1985. He went on to restore a number of classic films, including "The Wizard of Oz," "Easter Parade" and "Yankee Doodle Dandy."
In 1995, he co-founded Intelligent Devices, a company that designs and develops audio software, as well as a number of speech recovery and processing systems for use by law enforcement. The best known is SES, or Sound Extraction System, a software program that extracts human speech from noisy environments.
The motivation for the device was Mr. Marshall's discovery that a friend, a California law enforcement officer, had been shot and killed during an undercover operation gone bad. Although the man was wearing a wire, fellow officers couldn't hear his calls for help because of noise and sound distortion.
His marriage to Ann Murray Marshall ended in divorce.
Survivors include his wife of two years, Teresa Marshall of Woodbine; his mother, Shirley Stevenson of Peoria, Ariz.; his stepmother, Margaret Taylor Marshall of Baltimore; and three brothers.