Synth manufacturer Expressive E has released a documentary taking us behind the scenes of Dune: Part Two with Hans Zimmer, giving viewers an insight into how Zimmer and his team composed the film's epic and futuristic score.
In the documentary, Zimmer explains that he wanted to avoid composing a traditional orchestral score for the Dune series, in order to place the film, a sci-fi based on Frank Herbert's 1965 novel Dune, in a different universe. "Why can't we believe that there will be new instruments, there will be new sonic textures?" Zimmer says. "Why can't we go and invent new things that don't remind us, in a peculiar way, of the past?"
In his quest to discover "unique sounds" for the score, Zimmer employed the Osmose, an instrument developed by Expressive E and Haken Audio that he said empowered him to "play the music of an imaginary future". "We had one or two [Osmoses]," says collaborator Steven Doar, "and we started playing with it, then Hans said 'we need five more!'"
Announced in 2020 but released last year, Osmose is an MPE-enabled synthesizer and controller that offers performers three dimensions of control from every single key, thanks to its AKA (Augmented Keyboard Action) technology. The first dimension is the initial key press, the second is the synth's polyphonic aftertouch and the third is the lateral movement of its keys, made possible by the Osmose's raised keybed. Along with Zimmer, Osmose has earned a number of famous fans since its release, including Flying Lotus and Jean-Michel Jarre.
"Rather than having a piece of technology in the room, you suddenly have another musician in the room, that you're having a conversation with"
"Rather than having a piece of technology in the room, you suddenly have another musician in the room, that you're having a conversation with," Zimmer says of Osmose. "For us, it was an obvious thing once it existed. You've built an instrument for Dune, so we should take advantage of that. You guys spent an enormous amount of time building exactly the instrument that should have been built 100 years ago."
The documentary provides a fascinating glimpse into how Osmose was used to create synthesized vocal lines for the score. "Hans had an idea for this very long vocal part that would just continue throughout a few scenes, and would constantly be evolving," Doar says. "It was this idea that within one note, so much can happen. That's what [the Osmose] does," adds Zimmer.
Christophe Duquesne, instrument designer for Haken Audio, explains how the team transformed a sample of musician Molly Rogers' voice into a synth patch using Osmose's resynthesis feature, giving them the ability to not only play the vocal, as you would with a sampler, but also manipulate its timbral characteristics in real time via the instrument's expressive keyboard.
"This is an important instrument," Zimmer says of the Osmose. "It's an important step forward in what can become the history of 21st-century music. While nations are fighting and politicians are useless, and television programs like The Bachelor are ruining any culture that we might still have left, you guys [Expressive E] went and built something that can actually create beauty and rage and emotion, and all sorts of things that amplify who we are at our best." High praise indeed.
