Roger Ebert has said that for some people, movie history begins with Star Wars. George Lucas has said that sound is "half of the picture". The sounds from the Star Wars series sit between those two quotes. Ben Burtt became the world's most influential sound designer by creating the sounds for the Star Wars series.

This list was created by factoring how famous or influential a given sound is, and also considering the sound from a sound designer's point of view. For example, the Darth Vader sounds are simple to create, yet the voice from James Earl Jones became one of the most influential sounds of the series. Compare that to the voice of Poggle the Lesser, which is not as famous, but a masterpiece of cutting and pasting phonetic sounds together.