Film music used to be built around themes: a melody for the hero, a motif for the villain, a love theme that returns at the end. Over the last half century a different vocabulary has taken hold, especially in science fiction, horror and political drama. Instead of a tune, the audience hears a held tone, a low hum that seems to come from the building, a texture that never quite resolves. Drone music in film has become the standard sound of distance, dread and the unknown, and its history runs from Soviet experimental electronics to the Academy Awards.
This article follows that path through a handful of landmark scores, most of which have their own entries in the site’s Glossary.
Why drones work on screen
A drone does something a melody cannot: it suspends time. Without a pulse to count or a phrase to anticipate, the viewer loses the usual cues for when a scene will turn. That uncertainty is exactly what suspense requires. Sustained low frequencies also have a physical presence in a cinema, felt as much as heard, and a static tone leaves space for dialogue and sound effects instead of competing with them.
There is a further reason, which explains why so many of these scores belong to science fiction. A drone has no obvious human author. It can sound like a machine, a planet, a radiation field or an alien intelligence. Composers have used that ambiguity to suggest forces larger than the characters on screen.
Solaris (1972): the planet as a sound
Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris is the foundational case. Its composer, Eduard Artemyev, was one of the earliest champions of the ANS synthesizer, a photoelectronic instrument built by the engineer Yevgeny Murzin. According to the Movie Music UK obituary published after his death in December 2022, Artemyev combined Bach’s chorale prelude Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ with electronic textures generated on the ANS, blurring the line between score, sound design and the sounds of the planet itself.
The division of labour is telling. Bach represents Earth and human memory; the drones represent the ocean-planet, an intelligence that cannot be understood. The ANS worked by reading images drawn on glass plates, and its washes of sound were ideal for that role. Artemyev went on to score Tarkovsky’s Mirror and Stalker, where natural sounds and processed electronics merge even more completely.
Horror and the modernist inheritance
Western cinema absorbed similar sounds through a different route: the orchestral avant-garde. Clusters and sustained textures by composers such as György Ligeti, whose Atmosphères was used by Stanley Kubrick, gave filmmakers a way to make the orchestra sound vast and inhuman. Kubrick returned to the modernist repertoire in The Shining, where sustained, unstable textures suggest that the hotel itself is the threat.
Video games and later horror cinema extended the language. The industrial ambience of Silent Hill and the long resonant tones of contemporary horror owe as much to dark ambient and industrial music as to the concert hall.
Under the Skin (2013): the alien in the strings
Mica Levi’s score for Jonathan Glazer’s Under the Skin is one of the most influential film scores of the century so far, and it was the composer’s first. According to the album’s documentation, Levi worked mainly with viola over ten months, drawing on Giacinto Scelsi, Iannis Xenakis and John Cage. In an interview with the BFI’s Sight & Sound, Levi noted that much of the writing is microtonal, which is why the strings seem to swarm rather than play in tune.
The effect is the alien protagonist’s perspective rendered as sound: cold, insect-like and almost unbearably close. Levi’s approach proved that an acoustic, hand-played drone could be as estranging as any synthesizer, and it opened the way for a generation of string-based minimal scores.
Chernobyl (2019): a power plant as an instrument
Hildur Guðnadóttir’s score for the HBO miniseries Chernobyl pushed the idea of the setting as sound source to its logical end. Instead of an orchestra, Guðnadóttir, the field recordist Chris Watson and producer Sam Slater recorded inside the decommissioned Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania, where the series was filmed. The Holland Festival, which later staged the score live, describes the team spending a day in August 2018 recording machinery and rooms 600 metres long, then processing the material through old tape machines.
The result is barely distinguishable from the environment it describes: pumps, turbine halls and resonating corridors shaped into slow, menacing drones. Hildur Guðnadóttir won an Emmy for the score and, months later, an Academy Award for Joker. Her work on Chernobyl is the clearest demonstration of how far drone techniques had travelled into mainstream production. A detailed account of the recording process appears in Sound On Sound.
Jóhannsson, Villeneuve and the sound of scale
The Icelandic composer Jóhann Jóhannsson defined the sound of Denis Villeneuve’s films in the 2010s. His score for Sicario used low, pounding sustained tones to turn the US-Mexico border into an almost geological threat, and Arrival used voices and processed textures to suggest an alien language. Both relied on the same principle Artemyev had established: sustained sound to signal something beyond human scale.
Villeneuve’s Dune brought that lineage to its largest audience. Hans Zimmer’s score, built from processed voices, custom-built instruments and enormous low textures, won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2022, Zimmer’s second Oscar after a record gap of 27 years. The trailer-era braaam, a huge sustained brass-and-synth blast popularised in the 2010s, is a commercial descendant of the same idea.
What the cinema took from drone music
Across five decades, these scores borrowed three things from the drone tradition. The first is duration as tension: a tone held long enough becomes a question. The second is timbre over theme: the identity of a score lies in the colour and grain of its sound rather than in a melody. The third is the environment as performer: a planet, a hotel, a nuclear plant or a desert can be made audible through sustained tones.
The traffic has also run the other way. Many drone and ambient artists now cite film as an influence, and scores like Under the Skin and Chernobyl are listened to as albums in their own right. The site’s survey of drone music’s evolution from ancient practices to contemporary experimentation places this crossover in a longer history, and the guide to essential drone music albums is a starting point for hearing the concert-hall and underground sources these scores drew on.
For anyone who came to drone music through cinema, the Glossary’s film section offers further listening, from Blade Runner 2049 to The Zone of Interest, where sustained sound carries the full moral weight of what remains off screen.
