Short answers, pulled from the story.
Ben Burtt has won four Academy Awards. Two are Special Achievement Academy Awards: one in 1977 for creating alien, creature, and robot voices in Star Wars, and one in 1981 for Raiders of the Lost Ark. He also won Best Sound Effects Editing in 1982 for E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and in 1989 for Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.
Burtt created the lightsaber hum by combining the idle sound of a film projector with the feedback from a broken television set. This approach was part of his broader philosophy of using real-world "found sounds" rather than purely electronic effects.
The Wilhelm scream is a sound effect originally recorded for a character named Wilhelm in the film The Charge at Feather River. Burtt popularized the in-joke by inserting the scream into many films he worked on, including Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope and Raiders of the Lost Ark.
Ben Burtt created and performed the vocalizations of WALL-E as well as other robots in the 2008 Pixar film. His voice work on the film earned him an Annie Award nomination for Voice Acting in a Feature Production.
Ben Burtt was born in Jamesville, New York, on the 12th of July 1948. He studied physics at Allegheny College in Pennsylvania, graduating in 1970, then earned a master's degree in film production at the University of Southern California.
The audio black hole is a technique Burtt used in Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones, inserting less than one second of absolute silence just before the detonation of seismic charges. The brief silence primes the listener's mind to perceive the following explosion as louder and more dramatic. Burtt traced the idea to a conversation with a retired sound editor in film school and to the airlock sequence in 2001: A Space Odyssey.