In Denis Villeneuve's recent adaptation of Frank Herbert's Dune (Villeneuve, 2021), the film's score, produced by renowned, award-winning film composer Hans Zimmer, plays a pivotal role in immersing viewers in the arid vastness of Arrakis. Dune’s auditory experience, which earned Zimmer an Oscar, exemplifies how a film score can guide the emotional and sensory experience of the audience, providing layers of depth and deepening the audience's engagement with the film and enhancing its overall impact.
By dissecting Zimmer's creative process, as explored in Vanity Fair's (2022) video How 'Dune' Composer Hans Zimmer Created the Oscar-Winning Score, we gain insight into how the intersection of aesthetics, style, and affect functions to deepen the film’s narrative and provoke a profound emotional response from its audience.
Vanity Fair (2022)
Imagining the Soundscape of Dune
Hans Zimmer’s approach to scoring Dune is deeply rooted in the novel’s themes of mysticism, ecological struggle, and interstellar feudalism (Herbert, 1966). The challenge he set himself was to step aside from his popularized, successful film composer image and regress to the teenager who once read Dune and “loved it”; the 13-year-old who, when consuming science fiction movies, questioned why these films always featured European Orchestra. Zimmer remarks, “We’re supposed to be on a different planet, different culture, we’re supposed to be in the future,” (Vanity Fair, 2022).
His response, now as a succesful adult film composer, was to write the Dune score from the perspective of his 13-year-old self, eschewing traditional (colonial?) orchestral ‘norms’ (cliches?) for a soundscape that mirrors the otherworldly and timeless essence of Arrakis itself.
In keeping with his desire to invent sounds and instruments that don’t exist, a practice followed on from his work on Inception (Nolan, 2010), Zimmer’s use of a wide range of unconventional and DIY homemade instruments, from a ‘duduk’ to manipulated sounds of sand, further cements his deliberate deviation from sci-fi’s status quo.
The Impact of Aesthetic Choices
Zimmer’s aesthetic decisions in scoring Dune are guided by the story’s emotional and physical landscape. The duduk, an ancient double-reed woodwind instrument, traditionally used in Middle Eastern music, creates a unique if not ‘haunting’ sound that serves as a channel to the ancient and spiritual, echoing the strong religious and cultural overtones of the Fremen and their desert planet.
This creative choice supports what Bourdieu (1984) describes as the ‘social trajectory’ embedded within artistic decisions, indicitave of Zimmer’s ‘cultural capital’ (Then & Now, 2019c), which includes his knowledge of unique musical instruments – and the access to talented musicians and artists who could co-create and play these exotic instruments and abstract sound sculptures - that align with the thematic elements of the films he scores (Vanity Fair, 2022). His decision to use such a culturally resonant instrument as the duduk enhances the story by embedding a sound that augments the film’s setting with a more authentic spiritual and cultural ambiance.
Then & Now (2019)
Zimmer’s creative process also reflects the dynamics of film scoring, where music should amplify, resonate with, and guide the viewer through the film’s emotional landscape. With the duduk, the score aligns with the film’s cultural and narrative structure, enhancing both the storytelling and the viewer’s emotional experience. This alignment is a sophisticated manifestation of Zimmer’s ‘habitus’ (Then & Now, 2019b) - his internalized dispositions shaped by years of composing film scores - which guides him to seek out sounds that elevate a film’s story world. Zimmer's reputation and symbolic capital within the industry allow him the creative freedom to make such radical and experimental choices, confident that they will contribute to the film’s success.
Furthermore, the tactile quality of the sounds used, particularly those created from sand, directly engage with Bullough's notion of 'psychical distance' (PBS Idea Channel, 2014), by collapsing the viewer’s sensory separation from the screen. This method of using diegetic elements within the score bridges the gap between audience and film, creating an immersive experience that enhances the affective engagement with the story’s environment.
These sounds provided a framework for what Zimmer believed to be the most important thing in the world: the human voice; the one thing that would not age and maintain relevance in the future (Vanity Fair, 2022). He combined a single male voice with compression techniques to create the Sardaukar Chant, whilst opting for a female voice in Loire Cotler to create the cry of a banshee used in the opening song, further enriching the emotional texture of the film.
Cotler’s voice, ethereal and resonant, carries with it a profound sense of mystery and allure, encapsulating the enigmatic and formidable nature of Dune’s desert planet and its inhabitants. Her voice belongs to a genre of sounds that Zimmer is particularly adept at weaving into his film scores, where the human voice is able to penetrate the viewer's core, leveraging the raw power of human expression to transcend traditional storytelling. I’m drawn to contemplate our own histories of oral storytelling, and how the human voice may have been manipulated – live and raw - without deploying additional technology, to enhance emotion in traditional storytelling.
The use of vocal music in Dune taps into the deep-seated associations humans have with the voice as a primal instrument of emotion and identity. In cultural terms, the female voice in the opening song acts as a siren call, drawing the audience into the world of Arrakis and mirroring the seductive danger of its vast, open deserts. It also reflects a nuanced understanding of the film's gender dynamics, particularly the pivotal role women play within the Fremen culture and in the life of the protagonist, Paul Atreides. By embedding this element into the score, Zimmer not only bridges the psychical distance but also subtly nods to the underlying themes of feminine power and mystique that are central to Dune.
Style as an Emotional Conduit
Zimmer’s style in Dune is distinctively minimalist yet sets the tone for profound emotional depth. It diverges from the traditional theme-led scores repeated in blockbuster films, which Zimmer himself often composed, to adopt a more ambient, mood-driven approach. This style resonates with what Susanne Langer (1953) describes as a creation of ‘living form,’ where music is a ‘patterned sound’, involving tonal analogs of not just human emotion but also of the world-building elements of the film (Overthink Podcast, 2023). In Dune, the score becomes a character of its own, reflecting the life forces of Arrakis - its danger, its beauty, and its mystery; it helps forge a visceral connection between the audience and the film's environment.
Overthink Podcast (2023)
Furthermore, this musical approach aligns with the existential themes of Herbert's book: destiny, survival, and power (Herbert, 1966). By employing a style that prioritizes mood over melody, Zimmer's score invites the audience to feel the weight of these themes, to experience the uncertainty and the awe they provoke. It's a style that asks the audience to inhabit the emotional and physical landscapes of Dune, engaging with its complexities on a more intuitive, and perhaps subtle, level.
Intersecting Aesthetics and Affect
The affective power of Zimmer’s score is pivotal in rendering the complex emotional landscape of Dune. Affect theory suggests affects are pre-cognitive, or, non-conscious forces that resonate through bodily responses to visual, auditory, and narrative cues (Then & Now, 2019a). Zimmer and his curated artisitic team harness these principles, creating a score that taps directly into the audience's affective registers, bypassing rational interpretation to evoke raw, visceral reactions. His use of exotic futuristic sounds such as deep droning and ethereal sand whispers are the tools that mediate this emotional exchange. The deep drones might resonate with a viewer's physical sense of sound to evoke the vastness or ominous nature of Arrakis, while the lighter, sand-inspired whispers could bring a sense of ethereal, mysterious quality to the desert planet.
Zimmer’s approach to incorporating these sounds effectively blurs the lines between the film's physical and emotional landscapes. The auditory stimuli represent the environment but also seem to emanate from it, as if the desert itself is communicating through the score. This method aligns with Massumi's (2002) view that affects can transfer between entities, suggesting that the environment of Arrakis itself can evoke emotional responses in the audience through its embodied sounds. This environmental affectivity enriches the film's immersive experience, making the audience feel physically present on the vast, wind-swept dunes, despite viewing the film at a theatre or in the comfort of one’s living room.
Perhaps it was the impact of working through the Covid-19 pandemic, with Zimmer’s eclectic team spread across the world working in their own familiar, comfortable environments with regular intra-team communication (Vanity Fair, 2022), that enabled such a dynamic and experimental creative process and ultimately the score we hear today in Dune. By integrating diverse musicians and creating new, exotic-sounding instruments and sounds, Zimmer brilliantly enables the viewer to embark on a heightened emotional journey through Arrakis soundsacpe. His approach is a masterclass in using film music to enhance narrative through aesthetic innovation and demonstrates the critical role of film scores in shaping how audiences experience and emotionally connect with the cinematic story. Zimmer’s Dune score exemplifies how media creators can use aesthetics to evoke specific emotional responses, thereby deepening the audience's engagement with the film and enhancing its overall impact.
Warner Bros. Pictures (2024)
References
Bourdieu, P. (1984). Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (R. Nice, Trans.). Harvard University Press.
Herbert, F. (1966). Dune. Chilton Books.
Langer, S. (1953). Feeling And Form: A Theory of Art. CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS NEW YORK.
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press.
Nolan, C. (Director). (2010). Inception.
Overthink Podcast (Director). (2023, October 13). Susanne Langer on Symbolism and Artistic Expression. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gwYNyxDTOhQ
PBS Idea Channel (Director). (2014, September 3). 2 Short Ideas: Art, Distance and The Daily Show | Idea Channel | PBS Digital Studios. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLyIXaK9UY0
Then & Now (Director). (2019a, February 9). Introduction to Affect Theory: Brian Massumi & Eve Sedgwick. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeMS8QEYIQU
Then & Now (Director). (2019b, April 2). Introduction to Bourdieu: Habitus. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WvzahvBpd_A
Then & Now (Director). (2019c, December 14). Bourdieu: Cultural Capital, the Love of Art & Hip Hop. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=th0eYWnGZ_4
Vanity Fair (Director). (2022, March 17). How “Dune” Composer Hans Zimmer Created the Oscar-Winning Score | Vanity Fair. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93A1ryc-WW0
Villeneuve, D. (Director). (2021). Dune.