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How did Hans Zimmer do those amazing glitchy vocals in the Dark Phoenix score?

Amazing vocal manipulations. I also definitely hear Jerry Goldsmith's "Alien" motif at the beginning!
(the one where woodwinds played it in the first film)
 
Pier said:
The voices sound like these Indian vocal rhythms. I've heard them when practicing complex rhythms before learning to play the tabla.



I imagine if you slice those on some sampler and added some delays you'd get a pretty similar result.
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Lost track of this thread but never forgot it. Yes, that's exactly what it is.

I remember when I was going to school and interned at a commercial jingle house. We use to hire this drummer name Glen Valez who had adapted this blend of Indian rhythmic drumming to the Bohdran and other hand drumming. He's amazing.

I guess Hans knows him too and through him he probably found this vocalist.

 
José Herring said:
In that Charlie Daniels song the Devil Went Down to Georgia, my biggest secret growing up from my family was that I liked the Devil's music better.

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Coool! ;)

But, back to the track: It is so very well done!
Sometimes it seems to me that Hans has access to other worlds that exist at the same time, as far as the (musical) vibrations are concerned. ;)
 
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José Herring said:
I think the release is actually more popular than the movie itself.
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Yeah the whole "experiments" OST release is excellent. I hope DUNE is that trippy and even more!

AFAIK Zimmer did not experiment too much with vocals before, but Dark Phoenix is this trippy introspective score centered around the female voice, and my hunch is that he will do something similar for DUNE, exploring the "humans as musicians" concept, all the kind of vocal sounds that can be produced, maybe using vocalists the way he used wind instruments on Interstellar? Stuff like that. Because it relates closely to the plot and themes of DUNE's story and the "superpower" that the main character unlocks.
 
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NoamL said:
Because it relates closely to the plot and themes of DUNE's story and the "superpower" that the main character unlocks.
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It makes sense considering the voice used by the Bene Gesserit.

I expect a great deal of influence from Arab / Middle Eastern music too. Maybe even some Sufi stuff. Not only because of the desert and spiritual themes, but I think Frank Herbert was inspired by those cultures to create the Fremen.
 
Josh Richman said:
So what plug-in / process was used to create the dark Phoenix demo tracks?
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Most of the xperiments soundtrack from what I can tell is heavily layered live recordings. There's clearly a ton of editing and sound manipulation as well, I'm not saying that isn't the case... But the wall of sound effect from about 1:10 in X-HZT, (which is what I suspect people think of as "glitchy") sounds like a dense and heavily layered series of live recordings.

I recently was sent a raw vocal session tracked for a project with a similar-ish vocal approach and it's all about working with a vocalist that can do this kind of rapid syllabic chanting/whispering/singing.... From there my guess is various parts were isolated and made into loops, then heavily layered with other complimentary loops, creating a sort of massively dense rhythmic vocal wall of sound...
 
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jcrosby said:
Most of the xperiments soundtrack from what I can tell is heavily layered live recordings. There's clearly a ton of editing and sound manipulation as well, I'm not saying that isn't the case... But the wall of sound effect from about 1:10 in X-HZT, (which is what I suspect people think of as "glitchy") sounds like a dense and heavily layered series of live recordings.

I recently was sent a raw vocal session tracked for a project with a similar-ish vocal approach and it's all about working with a vocalist that can do this kind of rapid syllabic chanting/whispering/singing.... From there my guess is various parts were isolated and made into loops, then heavily layered with other complimentary loops, creating a sort of massively dense rhythmic vocal wall of sound...
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Yes, but it does seem like some processing trick. I sear I saw someone claiming to have figured the technique.
 
Josh Richman said:
Yes, but it does seem like some processing trick. I sear I saw someone claiming to have figured the technique.
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It could be and I'm not saying that processing isn't part of the soundtrack. But my guess is you're referring to the stuff around 1:10 of the track below?

What I hear is mostly just lots of layers of whispered/muttered/beat-boxed-like voice 'scatting' (for lack of a better phrase..) Maybe we're talking about different things, but the foreground of what's going on in the section linked below are real phrases.

X-HZT:

 
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jcrosby said:
I stumbled across a great video today that reminded me of this thread. It shows that the "glitchy effects" from the Dark Phoenix score are natural voice.

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Told ya. Listen to around 1:12.

Pier said:
The voices sound like these Indian vocal rhythms. I've heard them when practicing complex rhythms before learning to play the tabla.



I imagine if you slice those on some sampler and added some delays you'd get a pretty similar result.
Click to expand...
 
Pier said:
Told ya. Listen to around 1:12.
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Yeah I was also positive it was natural voice. The album credits also list Loire Cotler, (the woman shown in the interview I pasted earlier using the same technique)....

Interesting link too. Seems very likely there's some direct influence. (Quite a bit I would imagine)...
Reminds me of seeing Zakir Hussain in concert. Absolutely amazing! 🪘🪘


EDIT: 100% Direct influence... The tile of the video lists it as Southern Indian Vocal Percussion Solo

 
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