I just watched ST:V again last night, and I don't want to make a bashing thread because well, It's bad, but we've seen enough of those threads I just want to know why the Pioneer Probe screamed when it was hit? Had it grown sentience or something? :P
William Shatner was directing. That's only the only answer I have, other than somebody thought it might have been cool to humanise an inanimate object.
I can't believe I've never noticed Pioneer scream during all of the times I've watched TFF. It's almost enough of a reason to dust the DVD off tomorrow and watch it yet again. Well, almost.
I think it was supposed to be a random, mechanical sound that happened to sound almost human. Of course, there was no audio hardware on the probe, so it was probably supposed to be whimsical.
It's fairly common to mix screams or animal noises into explosive sound effects to give them some additional emotional weight, but they're typically mixed in better and far less noticeably than in this film.
You can find all sorts of stuff like this in movies if you look hard enough. It's just a sound cue meant to subliminally enhance the viewer's emotional response to the scene.
It just made me burst out laughing, I'm amazed I even noticed it because I wasn't really paying much attention that far in :P I guess laughter is an emotion...