The Song Planner

Alien Atmosphere

tagStarted 1951Peak 1979–2018Last big hit still active

Located in 1 route

Stage / Screen / Soundtrack → Sci-Fi / Fantasy / Worldbuilding Score

Score built to render the truly non-human—first contact, alien biology, incomprehensible intelligence—through sounds that resist familiar tonality and instrument identity: theremin and ondes Martenot glides, purely electronic tonalities, detuned and processed acoustic textures, microtonal clusters, wordless vocal smears and unplaceable timbres. The music avoids melody and human warmth, favoring strangeness, ambiguity and a sense of intelligence without emotion. Often slow and enveloping, it can tip from wonder to menace, keeping the listener disoriented about whether the alien is threat or marvel. It is the sound of otherness itself.

History

Alien scoring began with the electronic uncanny of the 1950s—Bebe and Louis Barron's all-electronic Forbidden Planet (1956) and Bernard Herrmann's theremin-laced The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)—which made non-orchestral timbre the sound of the extraterrestrial. Jerry Goldsmith's cold, atonal Alien (1979) fused orchestra and electronics into pure dread, while Kubrick's use of Ligeti gave alien intelligence a modernist choral face. The 2010s revived and refined the tradition: Mica Levi's Under the Skin (2013), Jóhann Jóhannsson's Arrival (2016), and Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow's Annihilation (2018) built shimmering, disquieting soundworlds for the genuinely alien.

Defining artists

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Essential listening

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  • Ex Machina (The Turing Test)(2015) — Ben Salisbury & Geoff BarrowSpotifyYouTube
  • Alien: Covenant (Main Title)(2017) — Jed KurzelSpotifyYouTube
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Sources

  • Philip Hayward (ed.), Off the Planet: Music, Sound and Science Fiction Cinema (2004)
  • Rebecca Leydon, "Forbidden Planet: Effects and Affects in the Electro Avant-Garde"
  • James Wierzbicki, Louis and Bebe Barron's Forbidden Planet (2005)