Hans Zimmer's Dune

Written for the University of Hertfordshire. (2021)

Music is one of the most crucial elements when building a fictional world in a film; as George Lucas said, “Music is the magic dust in movies” (American Film Institute, 2021). It can provide historical background and emotional context or enhance the physical ambience of the story, and it can accomplish this through various musical resources and tools (Kalinak, 2010). This year, ‘Dune’ was released, a film in the year 10191, where humanity has created an intergalactic empire and control for the planet Arrakis is at stake. Arrakis, also known as ‘Dune’, is a harsh desert planet, home to destructive sandworms, and the producer of ‘spice’, a valuable drug and asset used for space travelling throughout the universe. As the story is situated around 8000 years into the future and explores a story in which humanity has established an intergalactic empire, one can assume everything we know will be different (Collura, 2021). So, when faced with the challenge of building a world so different from ours, Denis Villeneuve contacted Hans Zimmer to create a film score that supports this futuristic story. Hence, this essay will explore how Hans Zimmer effectively achieves worldbuilding by creating an original and out-of-this-world score through instrumentation, the human voice, and sound design.

Hans Zimmer achieves worldbuilding by suggesting a historical background through innovative instrumentation. When Zimmer began unravelling his ideas on bringing to life the musical themes he was composing, he concluded he needed to “get away from a Western orchestra” (King, 2021). This was because he remembered watching Star Wars when he was young, and even though Zimmer glorified the score, he could not grasp why he was hearing orchestral music (Holub, 2021). He wondered why he heard trumpets, cellos and conventional instruments if he was in a galaxy far, far away—leading him to “create a colour palette that is completely custom-built for this movie” (Newman, 2021). The result is an unorthodox and provocative selection of instruments and how they are used (King, 2021). Zimmer explains he created the instrumentation palette by having fun with using acoustic instruments (Desowitz, 2021). He used a cello as a Tibetan Longhorn to create a war horn and disguised all elements of acoustic reality through his virtual synthesisers (King, 2021). Zimmer also collaborated with musicians from three continents to develop a culturally mixed palette (Burlingame, 2021). He used and virtually manipulated instruments like Indian bamboo flutes, Irish whistles, seismic rumbles of distorted guitars, and an Armenian contrabass duduk (King, 2021). One of these musicians, Chas Smith, “struck, scraped and scratched various metallic instruments, as he even created one from Inconel 718, a superalloy used in SpaceX engines” (King, 2021). Through examples like this, the uniquely crafted instrumentation disrupts technological barriers and becomes far more experimental than Zimmer and his team ever hoped (Newman, 2021). This led to a realisation of how “when you start to hybridise these far-flung influences and techniques, interesting sounds start to happen,” Zimmer’s team composed over four hours of music for an hour and forty film score (King, 2021). Through different cultures and the power of technology, Zimmer suggested a historical background to the world built in the film and hinted at how instruments from that era might sound (Film in Lincoln Center, 2021).

Nevertheless, Zimmer creates all the score surrounding the human voice, as he uses it to provide emotional context to different world elements. Even though Zimmer creates an other-worldly instrument palette to emulate the difference between Dune’s world and ours, he still focuses all his themes towards the human voice. Zimmer argues that “the one instrument which is true to any culture is the voice,” hence, he decided to use the voice as the only transcendental instrument and create the rest with his team (WaterTower Music, 2021). Due to this, Zimmer decided to create a score driven by a choir of female voices, reflecting on the dominance of women in Dune (Desowitz, 2021). As Loire Cotler recorded the main vocal parts for the score, Zimmer recalls how she “drew on everything; from Jewish niggun (wordless singing) to South Indian vocal percussion, Celtic lament, and Tuvan overtone singing” (King, 2021). This led to a mystical presence in the female choir as they sang, screamed, whispered and chanted (King, 2021). However, Zimmer not only blended various cultural singing techniques but invented a language with his team and David Peterson, a linguist who was helping create a language for the film. This created an other-worldly sense as we could not understand what they were singing. “It is a language you do not understand, yet somehow understand it emotionally,” Zimmer argues (WaterTower Music, 2021). Thus, through the mixture of singing techniques from all over the world, a new incomprehensive language for the regular audience, and a constant conflict between ethereal-sounding vocals and distorted-sounding vocals, Zimmer managed to build a world and creatively visit a place where nobody had gone before (Schiller, 2021). Through this variety of emotional singing performances, the score communicates emotions of distress, peace, calmness, horror, relief, and even sexual desire. Hence, this allows the audience to submerge themselves into the world that is being created and understand the emotional context behind crucial story elements such as the Harkonen’s (the enemies), Dune (the planet), the Bene Gesserit (a pseudo-religious organisation) and much more.

Hans Zimmer achieves world-building through sound design, as he manages to communicate the physical ambience of the story. Desowitz (2021) suggests Zimmer’s score is “an experimental retro-future invention of instruments and sounds to convey the beauty and danger of the Arrakis desert planet,” and to achieve this, he created a score centred around the human female voice, as well as the instruments and sounds he innovated. However, how he designed, recorded and produced these sounds is why they seem other-worldly. As part of his creative process, “Zimmer spent a week in Utah tuning into the sound of the desert” as he wanted to “hear the wind howling” (King, 2021). When he decided to disappear into Monument Valley and the desert in Utah and Arizona, he carefully analysed how the wind howl sounds through the rocks, how the sand grits in your teeth, and the vastness and endlessness of the desert. Through experiments like this, Zimmer managed to understand the acoustics and the flow of sound in a desert, allowing him to direct one of the vocalists, Lisa Gerrard, by saying: “just breathe, make the sound of the wind going through the dunes” (Bhavani, 2021). Through his newly created instruments, the power of technology and the human voice, he managed to “superimpose the sonic quality of one instrument onto another” as he created these impossible sounds (Desowitz, 2021). Zimmer also worked very closely with the sound design team, as they shared samples of the sounds they had designed for the worms travelling underneath the desert or of the thumper used to call these (Desowitz, 2021). Moreover, as they used hydrophones to capture these sounds, Zimmer and the engineers concluded that a desert was just as noisy as a sea beneath its surface, leading them to create an operative phrase, “This needs to sound like sand” (King, 2021). Beyond experimenting and learning from the desert, Zimmer also used resonating chambers like the one Chas Smith, one of the collaborating musicians, had in his home (Desowitz, 2021). Through the experimentation and analysis of these different atmospheres, he even managed to imitate the feeling of tiny grains of sand falling onto a surface through sound (Vejvoda, 2021). These experiments in the moment of recording and mixing gave Hans Zimmer enormous freedom to invent a world, be sonically free, and use colours that had never been heard before as he was asked to create a world (Vejvoda, 2021). Hence, through these experiments and implementation of sound design, Zimmer suggests a feeling as if the music was being played in Arrakis itself instead of a recording studio, allowing the creation of a specific musical texture when listening to the music, which eventually draws the audience into Arrakis and the world of Dune.

In conclusion, Hans Zimmer uses innovative instrumentation to elaborate on historical context, the human voice to bring an emotional context and sound design to create the physical ambience of Dune. This allows the creation of an eerie, ominous and dramatic score, with a unique mix of choral, world music, rock and electronic sounds created by friends and colleagues on three continents (Burlingame, 2021). As a producer of the film, Mary Parent describes she finds the score to be “incredibly exotic. It is emotional, it is intense, it is wholly original and very specific to the film” (WaterTower Music, 2021). It shares the same adjectives often used to describe the world of Arrakis, allowing Hans Zimmer to understand how “in a peculiar way, it is one of the more organic scores I have done” (Burlingame, 2021).

By Chia Bella James/Warner Bros. Pictures on Vanity Fair (2021)

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