Hans Zimmer’s score for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune (2021) won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 2022 and was conceived around the idea of inventing instruments and sounds that do not exist, at least on Earth. Zimmer worked with the sculptor and instrument builder Chas Smith, whose metal sculptures are struck, bowed and manipulated, bent a cello until it resembled a Tibetan long horn, and recorded inside a friend’s resonating chamber full of unusual metals.
Voices carry much of the weight. The singer Loire Cotler provided the rhythmic vocal pulse that runs through the film and a primal cry for the scene of the box and the needle, while the Sardaukar chant fuses Tuvan throat-singing techniques with an invented language whose syllables were split, stretched and processed. The heartbeat of the thumper, the device that calls the sandworms, was worked into the score together with the sound team, blurring music and effects into a single low, ritual drone.