The Hans Zimmer interview is fascinating. However it was jarring to see him introduce one of the singers doing the rhythmic singing as something unique when it’s essentially the percussion singing that’s common in Indian classical music. I guess even the greats have their blind spots.
I went to watch the interview just because of this comment, thinking "of course it has to be more than just Indian singing," and it turns out it was a variation on that theme. Apparently it's called Konnakol. I've heard the style, but I wasn't familiar with the name until now.
As you said, though, everyone has blind spots. The world is vast, and there's a lot to miss. I have to wonder why the woman who did the singing never told Hans Zimmer what it was, or why he didn't ask, since the situation implies one of those two.
When I used to be an editor there would be a final sound pass done after me mostly for top quality music, dialogue tweaks, etc. A lot of my sound effects though ended up making it in the final product depending on the quality and how well they matched up. I very quickly found myself getting excited and randomly recording strange noises in public - that squeaky fan in the parking garage you might not normally notice might in fact be making some super unique mix of resonances that can be manipulated into something really cool!
I sometimes teach classes in how to make audio recordings for fiction. When I'm sure they know the basics, I'll usually challenge them to do something really different with the sound. Here's one assignment I often give them: Record a sentence. Reverse the sentence. Learn how to pronounce the sounds of the sentence as heard backwards. Then re-record the backwards sentence. Then flip it forward again. Now enjoy your David Lynch moment.
This makes me feel like there's a big opportunity for AI in sound design. Could we have a person provide inputs and goals and then have an AI come up with an infinitely evolving palette of sounds to be mixed and utilized towards those goals?
Potentially yeah. The problem is that it is not just about creating accurate sounds but also often something unique (but not unreasonably unique) or even something that has a subtle call back in peoples memories to something else. The latter would be very hard for an AI to accomplish. But what might be interesting is if a proficient Foley artist could take a unique sound they had recorded and then input that base sound into some kind of AI based software which would then spit out tons of different versions for them to listen to. I would imagine the Foley artist could still do a much better job for the final piece tweaking the sound themselves but it might provide a quick way to get some inspiration on how to edit the audio.
Many years ago I worked at a community TV station. One of the things we did was to add sound to footage where audio was missing or unusable.
Had great fun doing things like recording pulling sellotape fast, that bizzarely ends up sounding like breaking glass. Or maybe it just sounds enough like it when played against video of it, and your brain does the rest.
Interestingly enough, there is no mention in the article or no appearances in the movie, as far as I know, of the sounds dunes naturally make. Under certain conditions, dunes will actually sing or, more accurately, drone.
I have not read Dune, so I don’t know if Frank Herbert was aware of it or if it wasn’t discovered at that point, but if he didn’t know about it, I’m pretty sure he would have liked that a lot.
They went out into a desert to record this. I don't think they used these sounds in the movie, but they were heavily inspired by the real world phenomenon.
They also buried mics in the sand, to record what that would sound like.
Yes, I read the article. They recorded sounds they were making, such as walking, stepping on sand with Rice Krispies, and thumping the ground, but as far as I can tell, they did not record the sand singing, drumming, or droning on its own naturally, which it does.
Herbert was fascinated by desert and dune ecology. He would have loved this if he knew about it (maybe he did).
My favorite sound effect is in Monty Python movies whenever they have a knight in shining armor falling down the stairs. The sound effect is that of a galvanized garbage can filled with junk banging down a staircase. Makes me laugh every time.
I don't mean this in a derisive way, but was anyone else just a little disappointed by the Dune soundtrack? When I saw Hans Zimmer was working on it, I really expected him to get cut loose on this project. Instead we got pretty standard Hans Zimmer fare, some of which just sounded like him phoning it in. We're in the desert? Do the stereotypical Arabic singing sting! We're in a dark evil place? Cue the chanting (which wasn't anything interesting, either; just some people reading off the names of different Duniverse factions, nothing creative). Since Dune was (to me) always about this constant subversion of tropes, hearing Zimmer lean into these played-out sounds really sucked the air out of a movie I anticipated for a while, and a musician who I have great respect for. Maybe my expectations were unrealistic, though.
I completely disagree. I think it was pretty different compared to typical Zimmer soundtrack; it felt very alien and didn’t lean on an orchestra as much. For me, the soundtrack was an important part of why the movie was so engrossing in a theatre. Many of the people I know (subjectively) felt that the music was pretty unique and non-stereotypical. I mean, compare any of the top blockbusters and the soundtracks are all going to be pretty similar — Dune is an outlier, at least compared to that!
> We're in the desert? Do the stereotypical Arabic singing sting!
Well, Herbert did base Fremen culture, in part, on the desert-dwelling Bedouin and San People. The scenes were shot in Jordan (Wadi Rum) and Abu Dhabi (Liwa).
YouTuber Thomas Flight has an interesting video on the score (he's a fan):
I dunno, I think it was really spectacular. It's "standard Hans Zimmer" in the way that it's a bunch of new sounds no one has ever heard before - but they are also close enough to normal sounds and cinematic themes to be familiar. To me it's the mark of true skill. It sounds like something out of this world, but also something I'm already comfortable with.
I bet there's maybe 5 people on Earth who could score a movie like this and make it as credible as Hans did.
It was good. It did the job. The notion that Hans Zimmer is one of a handful of people that could score this much less anything is kind of ridiculous. I also disagree it sounded out of this world, it was comfortable though because it was obviously Zimmer.
> We're in the desert? Do the stereotypical Arabic singing sting!
It's interesting you say that because Hans Zimmer specifically said in an interview they tried their best to dodge the cliche' middle eastern musical tropes in this soundtrack. Perhaps they didn't go far enough for some people.
If you want to see the full scope of Hans' work for Dune I would suggest checking out 'The Dune Sketchbook'. It is Hans' uncut attempt at the soundtrack for the film, and it's very adventurous.
Eventually these music cues had to be edited and adapted for the final version of the film, so a certain amount of compromise was necessary, but this is your best look at the essence of what Hans is doing, and it's very exciting. I like it better than the final soundtrack, and it ruined my appreciation of the final film somewhat because I know what Hans was going for.
I'm not sure if we should be that surprised by middle eastern tones when we have terms like Butlerian Jihad[0] and Emperor Padishah[1] Shaddam[2] IV - infact, one of the things I like about Dune is this amalgamation of the east and west in names/terms in far far future - a future so distant that the religions we know now have mixed up and produced something very new but still relatable. Otherwise, if the focus was just to be as alien as possible, we could have characters made of entirely unknown matter speaking in an unknown medium - except they won't be as accessible. I think the trick is to make things as alien as possible without leaving humanity entirely behind, which I think Dune manages to do beautifully.
I could have been happier with the soundtrack, but I think most of that is on the director rather than Hans Zimmer. The Dune Sketchbook Soundtrack [1] was in my opinion quite good; I think the director just chose to avoid some of the really cool, but rather esoteric, music he had available.
Hans Zimmer explained parts of the writing process for one of the Dune tracks in a recent episode of Songexploder: https://songexploder.net/dune
I found it quite interesting and did not get the impression that he is just phoning it in, but it is difficult to judge from a short podcast of course.
Remember when Kubrik went into space and eschewed a traditional sci-fi soundtrack of theremins playing in locrian mode in favour of classical compositions by one Strauss or another? Science fiction movies, at least, were changed forever and in a good way. Ground was broken.
The Dune soundtrack evoked the middle east but leveraged cliches to do so. It was good music and an enjoyable listen but not ground breaking and if people associate wailing voices and heavy bass synth glissandos with desert scenes in future, it will only be because many movies have done that before Dune. Sticking to tried-and-true ups the grosses.
Agreed. I had very high expectations, but not unrealistic ones (i.e. I expected a memorable quality, but not the most memorable possible) that were not met. I actually now think Hans Zimmer was the wrong choice - they needed the Howard Shore of sci-fi, someone with experience but who was not a big name yet and needed to create something truly great to get there.
That's more or less with consistent with the movie being a solid 8/10 instead of anything better.
Hans Zimmer being involved is exactly why I was not looking forward to the soundtrack. He has really started to phone in these overly loud, overly dramatic, and overly gaudy soundtracks. It just drives me insane. He has no creativity and very obviously has teams of people just doing very stereotypical stuff that the masses seem to like. I love Villeneuve, but I can’t fathom why he likes working with Zimmer unless it’s a studio choice he has to go with.
i didn’t know it was him ahead of time but when i watched it on a flight a few weeks ago i pegged it as standard zimmer work. it was like blade runner 2049 and gladiator had a baby. quite derivative. enjoyable, but derivative.
It's a bit of a tangent, but I think if you're after an example of Marianne Faithfull's later-career "smoky, commanding voice" you could do worse than the 2002 Beck collaboration, Sex With Strangers, from Kissin' Time:
And for an example of where she's willing to push it, her fearless version of Roger Waters' Incarceration Of A Flower Child, from the earlier Vagabond Ways:
There should be a 'whosampled' for film Foley work, where it has YouTube clips of the sound in the movies and the Foley artist recording it. Endlessly fascinating stuff.
I watched "Ronin" and then made the mistake of watching the "Making of..." documentary.
The documentary showed how the foley artists made and added the sound effects for the car chases. It completely ruined the movie for me, as when I'd see the chases the picture in my mind was of the foley artists rattling things in coffee cans, etc.
Working in gamedev the audio team would always share how they did certain sounds on the condition that you never mentioned how outside of the room.
There's nothing more infuriating for the audio team then someone pointing out how an audio was made in a demo only to then have to redo a track because that's all key people can think of when they hear it.
Didn’t realise until I watched a making-of, and it blew my mind a bit, that pretty much all noises are added in post. Makes sense I guess as it’s probably hard to get good sound when filming at extreme telephoto or with drones and things.
For example, a foley artist made the sounds of a polar bear playing in the snow by squishing a rubber glove full of cornflower.
Since then all nature docs have felt fake as my brain can’t get over the fact that none of the noises are real. They’re too distracting and it breaks the immersion completely.
I'm curious if the decision to have the Sardaukar speak a different language was made in post-production. The Bashar on Salusa Secundus's lips seem to be forming the English words, with the harsh foreign syllables ADR'd in.
> Ever since I saw Dune (2021) I was interested in the conlangs spoken in the film, including Sardaukar. Cue my surprise however finding out that Sardaukar is not actually a conlang - David J. Peterson (the creator of conlangs in Dune as well as Dothraki and High Valyrian in GoT) said that it was actually just English, but warped and modified by the sound team.
Dune in cinema was a transcendent experience. I didn't analyze so much why, but I think it was the soundtrack (+being let outside for cinema "after covid").
Fun story - '94 there was a deodorant ad with Charles Barkley where he plays an "explorer". In the first two seconds of the commercial, you can hear the grinding of stone doors (think Indiana Jones).
How did the jingle house create such a noise you ask?
Two toilet tank tops from the bathroom, rubbing together. A perfect match!
Talking about sound design and engineering: One of the best introductions to film sound design that I've found is the extra material found on the DVD for THX 1138, where Walter Murch talks about his work on the movie. Some of the work he did there was also used or reworked for Star Wars.
There are also some very interesting interviews of him on YouTube:
If you like the Dune Sountrack, be sure to check our “Dune Sketchbook” as well. It’s a lot of the experimental raw material drawn out and explored further.
I usually find articles on "foley" interesting, this included. A shout-out to the movie that introduced me to this area: [1]; this is in the "Bengali" language but still a recommended watch if subtitles are available.
Its the story about a team of B-list celebs putting on a radio play where everything goes wrong. The most famous celeb requests a slight change in the script, and it snowballs. The CD library is locked so the new sound effects required have to be made by the security guard who used to do foley back in the day. Good movie!
