How Dune transformed a computer error, a cat and other everyday objects to create out-of-this-world sounds

How do you make spaceships, an alien desert planet, and a giant sandworm sound realistic to people on Earth? You get creative — using your own throat, a car, and a computer glitch.

"Mark and I are always looking for ways to record things on planet Earth and maybe transform them ever so slightly so that they become slightly less familiar," said Theo Green, who is one of two sound designers for the film Dune, alongside Mark Mangini. 

The duo made over 3,000 sounds for Dune, which is nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Sound, at Sunday's Academy Awards.

Rather than make sounds seem "alien," the sound designers wanted to take the audience somewhere that seemed real — a philosophy inspired by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve, said Green, who works out of Los Angeles. 

"He wanted us to ground audiences in its reality, almost to make people feel as if we were taking them there to the planet with a documentary crew."

The team travelled to Death Valley, Calif., to study the sound of sand, and perhaps produce what the desert planet of Arrakis, where Dune takes place, might sound like. 

Still, not all sounds were easy to study and replicate, such as the guttural sounds of a giant sandworm or the buzzing of a high-tech aircraft.

"We build universes out of sound because those universes don't exist in science fiction, so there would be a very paltry or meagre cinematic experience without sound or the sound effects themselves," said Mangini, who also works out of Los Angeles.

The iconic sandworm

The gargantuan sandworm is one of the most iconic parts of Dune. In one of the film's scenes, a sandworm eats a large vehicle.

"We wanted to hear the sound of a 400-metre long creature inhaling deeply to suction down this incredibly heavy vehicle. And I couldn't find any sandworms in the desert, so the next best thing, as is often the case... is we turn to ourselves," said Mangini. 

To make that sound, Mangini used his own throat.

"That sound was very simply recorded by taking a microphone and sticking it down my throat and making a huge inhalation sound," he said.

"We simply brought that acoustic organic real sound of my esophagus and enlarged it in the studio to make it have the size and weight of an actual soundworm." 

'The voice' and more

Green's favourite sound was "the voice," a technique a group of characters in the film use to control people. They didn't want to use an effect, so Green used three different voice artists to make the sounds of whispers in someone's head.

"It just helps us get that sense that we are in the room with the person as this effect, as this voice is being used," he said.

They also had to make the sound of a force field that characters used as armour during the film, once again without relying on the buzzing typical of a science fiction film. Green had started with an edited sound of a machine gun firing, but it wasn't quite right. 

Then his computer started making an error noise, and he knew that was it.  

To make the sound of a helicopter-like aircraft used in the film, Mangini used a combination of a cat purring, beetle wings flapping, and a canvas tent strap loose in a wind storm. To gather detailed sounds of the vehicle, he used his own electric car. 

In response to the praise for Dune's auditory experience and the Oscar nomination for its sound, Green said: "I think if it means anything, it means that people were listening to the movie and not just watching. It feels as if people responded to the subtleties that we put in the sound as well as the big, big sounds."

Written by Philip Drost. Produced by Rachel Levy-McLaughlin.