Arrival is Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 film about a linguist trying to communicate with alien visitors, and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score for it is built largely from the human voice. Taking the script’s concern with language as the starting point, Jóhannsson worked with the chamber choir Theater of Voices and with more experimental vocalists, using throat singing and harmonic singing to treat the voice as texture rather than as a carrier of words.
The layered vocal drones were also a way of avoiding the familiar clichés of science-fiction scoring, suggesting a form of communication just out of reach. For the opening and closing Villeneuve preferred Max Richter’s existing piece On the Nature of Daylight to a vocal version Jóhannsson had prepared, a choice the composer supported. The Academy then ruled the score ineligible for the Best Original Score Oscar, judging that the prominent use of pre-existing music could sway voters assessing the original work.