The Role of Experimenting with the Human Voice in Film Music in the Representation of the Human/Alien Divide: the Case of Arrival (2016)

This article focuses on the musical dimension of experimentation
in the creative space of science fiction film, concerning its uncanny, new
and fantastic places, and otherworldly encounters within fictional, but
possible worlds. The aim is to consider the function and potential of
the audible – to examine how sound is used in the filmic exploration of
the boundaries between the human and the alien (the unknown). More
particularly, we are interested in the role that human voice-like and human
vocal sounds can play in this divide, as we believe manipulations with
such audible qualities contribute greatly to the emotional dimension
of cinematic stories of otherworldly encounters. For that purpose, we
concentrate on Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016) and its soundtrack
composed by Jóhann Jóhannsson, who resorts to different singing practices
and vocal techniques to accompany a story charting the territories between
the human and the alien.