What do aliens sound like? We have no idea, but for Hollwood’s smash hit “Project Hail Mary“, that was the question that Oscar-winning sound editor Ethan Van der Ryn (“King Kong,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers”) and Oscar-nominated sound editor Erik Aadahl (“The Creator,” “A Quiet Place”) had to answer, as the duo and their team painstakingly delivered a convincing non-human language for its endearing Eridian, the chirping E.T. creature named Rocky.
That special linguistic connection between a stone-skinned alien and the reluctant astronaut Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling) was an essential challenge for the sci-fi film. In addition to Rocky’s vocalizations, Van der Ryn and Aadahl were also responsible for crafting hundreds of sounds and noises needed to fill out the soundscape.
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For Aadahl, collaborating with “Project Hail Mary’s” New York Times bestselling author was a star-struck moment, revealing that he was more excited to meet him than any big Hollywood celebrity he’d ever worked with.
“To me, he’s just a god,” Aadahl admits. “Knowing the book, the first conversation with Chris and Phil [the movie’s directors] was if there were ever a movie where we want to be faithful to the science, this is it. We pitched hard to really embrace the vast vacuum of space, and when we do use sound, we have a scientific explanation for that use of sound. Story-wise, it lent us a lot of power to really put Dr. Grace in these realistic environments to, through sound, really describe the stakes. “
This led to some interesting discussions about what sounds would play in certain scenes, and where realism should take a back seat to entertainment.
‘With the sound, we’re trying to paint a picture of what is Rocky’s sonic soul.’
Ethan Van der Ryn
“What is it like when he’s in his claustrophobic EV suit? He can’t hear anything when it’s not pressurized. Only his own breathing, the fans of his EV suit, and the solidian sounds of what he happens to be touching and how it’s interacting with his body. We were all excited about all of this, and Andy said, ‘Just don’t forget the rule of cool,’ recalls Aadahl.
“So he was giving us a bit of latitude. He did want to hear what those astrophage engines sound like. We definitely felt like we could get away with certain dramatic sound flourishes. We didn’t want it to be like ‘Star Wars’ where there’s TIE fighters flying through space, and you hear it clearly. It’s not that kind of movie.”
Trying to conjure up Rocky’s avian/aquatic speech from scratch posed numerous obstacles and refinements to create that perfect harmony of strangeness and familiarity. The process took an inordinate amount of trial and error before the sound sorcerers felt they were on the right track.
“We finally got to be where we needed to be in the final 20 minutes of the creative process of the mix,” notes Van der Ryn. “That process of Rocky’s Eridian voice and language went from the day we started, right down to the very end. It was a constant iterative process of refining and refining.
Poetically, the sound team’s journey to understand Rocky’s voice started at the same point that Ryland’s did. “We started on the scene where Rocky and Grace meet for the second time,” explains Van der Ryn. “For us, it seemed like the most challenging scene in the movie, and we thought if we can get his language feeling right in the scene, it’s going to work in the movie.
“Sometimes in sound design, it’s a process of figuring out what doesn’t work, to figure out where you need to go. The direction from Phil and Chris was wanting it to be a combination of musical, as well as having a visceral creativeness to it. The whole time it was about finding that balance between those two poles, word to word, sentence to sentence, moment to moment.”
“We didn’t want it to be like ‘Star Wars’ where there’s TIE fighters flying through space.”
Erik Aadahl
With infinite possibilities of how to approach this endeavor, Van der Ryn and Aadahl’s starting point was Weir’s 2021 sci-fi source book, and his general descriptions of what Rocky’s Eridian vocalizations sound like.
“When Rocky is more serious, he speaks in deeper tones that are not unlike whale song,” Van der Ryn explains. “When he gets more irritated or excited, his pitch goes up. So we knew we had this frequency range to work from, which was basically from whale to piccolo and everything in between. With the sound, we’re trying to paint a picture of what is Rocky’s sonic soul. What does he sound like and how do we use sounds to convey his intelligence, what he’s thinking, how he’s feeling, and how he’s trying to communicate?”
To establish Rocky’s sonic timbres, the team had to decide what instruments could be used for a performance without using computers or synthesizers.
“We wanted it to sound very organic and grounded, and living and alive,” Van der Ryn adds. “Reed instruments have that kind of range. We pulled in a bass clarinet and started playing with that. And there is a whole version of Rocky that is bass clarinet, and we wound up jettisoning that.
“After trying many iterations and pitches, it was Chris [Miller] who helped us unlock it. He used the word ocarina. We thought that’s an interesting choice for a wind instrument. It’s very expressive. It’s flute-like but has a little more organic kind of tone, and it’s got a lot of range. We just recorded the crap out of it in high resolution, 192 kilohertz, so we had all the fidelity to slow it down an octave, two octaves, three octaves, whatever we needed.”
Chris Miller and Phil Lord helped hone in on Rocky’s voice more when one day the directors showed up, and Miller pulled out a jug used for music from his car trunk. They filled it up with various levels of water to obtain different deep pitches, which became all of Rocky’s bass notes.
“This whole process is very much about experimentation, and trying to find what starts to tickle you,” Aadahl continues. “When do we feel like the soul of Rocky is coming out? For his agitated sounds, he gets more of a rasp, and the best ingredient for that was the contra-alto clarinet, which almost sounds a little like a whale. We also used the natural world of animals for the other part of Rocky’s vocals. That ranged from humpback whale for his ‘Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!’ to a lot of bird song. Rocky’s own name for himself is a type of thrush called a solitaire bird slowed down.
“Then there’s hippo in there for his eating, and there’s frog in there too. We also took those sounds we’d designed, ran them through a transducer, and used that to resonate a block of granite, and then re-recorded that. So you’re hearing tonal harmonic sounds resonating actual physical rock.”
As audio-centric designers, the entire world is a sonic inspiration, and the feat for the acclaimed pair was to use not just their brains but their hearts.
“It’s a real tapestry,” Van der Ryn concludes. “Rocky has five different vocal chord bladders, and it gave us the leeway to layer multiple sounds on top of each other. That’s the first time we’ve ever done any kind of creature vocal work that we had that leeway. It’s been super gratifying to see how many people connected with the movie. That’s definitely what we were feeling all the time we were working on it. It was special.”
“Project Hail Mary” is in theaters now. You can also pick up the “Project Hail Mary” novel by Andy Weir, which the film is based on, from Amazon.