Alanna Gilis 

Opinions Editor 

amg7393@psu.edu

Hans Zimmer recently won the Oscar for best original soundtrack for his composition in “Dune”. In total, the German composer has won 45 awards for his soundtracks. 

There’s so much I could say about his music. I’ve been listening to it for years, and it provides the perfect background music for studying or writing papers. This is very beneficial to me as someone who is a Creative Writing major, because his music has so many different vibes and moods that I can find a soundtrack that fits my needs perfectly. 

In my opinion, his best movie score comes from the movie “Interstellar”. Chances are that if you’ve been on TikTok for any length of time, you have heard at least a snippet of his music from this movie. 

Aside from just being beautifully composed, the thought behind the individual songs on the soundtrack is incredible. While Mathhew McConaghey and Anne Hathaway’s characters are on the water planet looking for the astronaut, Miller, whose ping they’ve received, undercutting the score is a prominent ticking noise. The name of the song playing is “Mountains”, and it’s repetitive and patterned out every 1.25 seconds. It blends so well with the music that upon first watch you may not realize it’s even there. 

However, an insane amount of thought went into that ticking noise. It’s established earlier that due to the incredibly high gravitational pull on Miller’s planet, as well as some other factors, time will pass differently for them on this planet than it will for their remaining family on Earth. Every hour they spend on this planet will be seven years on Earth. 

So that ticking noise that plays every 1.25 seconds? That’s the equivalent of one Earth day passing. Zimmer mathed out how long the crew had spent on Miller’s planet, then found how long it would take for an individual day to pass, and then wrote a score that keeps time for the audience in a way that they might not even realize. 

It’s genius and an incredible demonstration of audible storytelling. Even if they don’t know that every ‘tick’ is an Earth day passing, the score still imparts in the viewer a sense of suspense due to its nature of sounding like a clock counting down. 

Unsurprisingly, his soundtrack for “Dune” is just as well executed. The music sounds otherworldly and futuristic, just like the setting of the film. Just like with “Interstellar”, a lot of world-building thought went into how the music of this movie would reinforce the storyline. 

Zimmer and his team created new instruments to achieve many of the sounds heard throughout the score. His reasoning was that for a film that takes place so far in the future, the way humans make music would change, too. The team also learned how to play existing instruments differently to give them a more unknown and otherworldly sound. 

One of the throughlines in the “Dune” soundtrack is the keening, almost choral female voices. Zimmer kept the sound of human voice in, without any electronic modification, because the one instrument that would not change in the future is the human voice, according to him.

Hans Zimmer’s movie scores are incredible and they add so much to whichever movie they are a part of. They stand alone as pieces of incredible composition. His recent Oscar win for best original soundtrack is more than well deserved.