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Possibly everyone agrees that the most striking scene in Denis Villeneuve’s first chapter of Dune is at the Sardaukar parade grounds. We are transported to this hostile distant planet where the atmosphere is dark and rainy. Thousands of the Emperor’s menacing elite troops are lined up and there’s a speaker stationed up on a steep pyramid-like structure. But this scenery is not the most striking thing about the scene.
It’s that weird otherworldly menacing throat singing that the speaker is performing. Hans Zimmer went through a dose of sound design to get that voice. Using a skilled vocalist a linguist to write a new language and then over-processing it with compressors.
“I had of course completely transformed his voice into something that was more like a cannonball hitting you in the head ” Zimmer says in an interview with Vanity Fair. Villeneuve liked the chanting so much he used it at the beginning and Zimmer goes on to discuss the storytelling power of using the correct sound at the correct time.
