How a sound designer gave an alien its voice (and 250 words)

Erik Aadahl, the sound designer behind “Project Hail Mary” and 2014’s “Godzilla,” uses his background in biology to bring characters to life.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Flora Lichtman?

  Hey, I'm Flora Lixman, and you're listening to Science Friday. A few weeks ago on the show, we talked about the sci-fi space exploration movie Project Hail Mary. And I was particularly obsessed with the sounds that the alien in the movie, Rocky, was making. They're distinctive, and they're funny, and Rocky talks a lot. And so I asked Andy Weir, who wrote the book Project Hail Mary and who's a producer on the movie, if the sound designers actually made a real language for Rocky, like if it was internally consistent. And here's what Andy said.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  I don't think so.

• 0:45Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, I'm so disappointed. I didn't get the answer I wanted, but then, almost like in a movie, we got this very surprising message on our listener line.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Hello, Science Friday. This is Eric Adol, calling from Los Angeles, California. I'm a longtime listener, and I recently enjoyed your interview with Andy Weir and Dr. Wong about the science of Project Hail Mary. A question came up about the sound design of Rocky's alien language. And as the sound designer of Project Hail Mary, I'm in a unique position to answer. Love your show. Keep up the good work.

• 1:25Flora Lichtman?

  Eric is not just the sound designer behind Project Hail Mary. He also did sound on 2014's Godzilla, Transformers, and A Quiet Place. And he's here to tell us all about the art and science of making movie monster roars and more. Eric Adol, thank you for being here.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  It's a pleasure to be here.

• 1:45Flora Lichtman?

  I'm genuinely so happy you called us. This is like the center of my nerdiness. It seems like the best job. Is this the best job?

• 1:56Speaker 03

  Well, I don't have too many frames of reference, but yeah, I would say it is one of the best jobs I can imagine.

• 2:04Flora Lichtman?

  Are you that person at the restaurant who's like always listening? Like, are you like, "Shh, guys, I hear an interesting teacup clink and I must capture it." Like, are your ears always on?

• 2:17Speaker 03

  Yes, my ears are always on, though at restaurants, I'm usually trying to filter out all of the noise. But when I'm just going about my daily life, you know, if I open a door and it creaks in a weird way, I think, "Okay, gotta go grab my rig, record that." If there's an exotic bird that shows up in my yard, gotta get the rig, record that. One of the nice benefits of my job is it does kind of open up your awareness to experience. And so I try to always be aware of what is happening sonically around me and then maybe worry later about how I might be able to use that in a movie.

• 2:59Flora Lichtman?

  Well, let's talk about one of your movies, Project Hail Mary. We have to talk about the alien Rocky's voice. As I said, this is like a thing I'm obsessed with. So for people who haven't seen it, here is Rocky saying his name in his native tongue.

• 3:20Flora Lichtman?

  It's beautiful.

• 3:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, and that scene, that's one of my most enjoyable little moments because Rocky's saying his Eridian name for the first time to Dr. Grace. And then Dr. Grace asks him, "Well, you know, what's my name? What's your name for Grace?" And it's just like a burp, you know? So Rocky has a much more elaborate version of himself. And the way that was directed by Chris Miller and Phil Lord was they asked for something that was sort of beautiful and proud. And you could imagine he's saying, you know, "I am Rocky from the boulder, rough-textured hills of X, Y, Z."

• 4:04Speaker 03

  You know, like, it's a long kind of epithet. So, but yeah, that was a fun moment where he could kind of open up with his expressiveness.

• 4:18Flora Lichtman?

  Can we hear it one more time?

• 4:28Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, clearly multi-layered. What sounds are in there making up that voice?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  So, so, um, let's go from the lower frequencies to the higher frequencies. So, the bass kind of note there is a didgeridoo, and that's creating kind of our bass notes. And so that's what we performed for that. And when you get into the more gurgly layer, there's some humpback whale.

• 4:59Speaker 03

  There's also some avian species and one of my, there's a class of birds, thrushes, that have just the most beautiful song. And that sound that we just heard for Rocky's name has a solitaire bird.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  And we slowed it down to get it into, by a couple of octaves, to get it into a more musical register that works better for the human ear. And that's the kind of melodic center of Rocky's name for himself.

• 5:36Flora Lichtman?

  Were there any other ingredients that you used in his vocalizations?

• 5:40Speaker 03

  For most of his communication when he's calm, we used an ocarina.

• 5:46Flora Lichtman?

  What is that? And can you play it?

• 5:48Speaker 03

  It's a simple wind instrument and it sounds kind of like this.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  And that can be pitched, you know, we record it high resolutions, 192 kilohertz, way above human hearing range. And we can slow it down without losing any fidelity into a nice five, six octave range. He does get a little bit impatient and more agitated and/or annoyed with Dr. Grace. And for that, we used contralto clarinet, which has a nice, like, a little bit more, you don't, you know, it sounds like an animal, but, uh,

• 6:30Flora Lichtman?

  A little more edge.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  A little more edge to it, a little rasp to it.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  You know, it's funny, with certain sounds, you can close your eyes and you can put a label to it like, oh, that sound is, sounds annoyed. Or that sound, sounds content.

• 6:49Flora Lichtman?

  That clarinet is annoyed.

• 6:52Speaker 03

  It's a little pissy.

• 6:55Flora Lichtman?

  It's amazing. I mean, it's almost like you have to be a wildlife biologist and also a musician of many instruments to do this job.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  I am a, I am a musician and I did double major in biology and cinema in college.

• 7:11Flora Lichtman?

  It really does show. I mean, how does the recipe come together? Like when you're putting together Rocky's sort of, you know, language or vocalizations, are you like, oh, I might need a pinch of humpback whale to really, you know, complete this? Is it like cooking or is it something different?

• 7:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a little bit like cooking. It's a little bit like knitting.

• 7:38Speaker 03

  And I think of it a little bit like painting. You know, colors being frequencies and you try to be very specific with what sound frequencies you use because like painting, it can very quickly become muddy. The ideal is simplicity. You know, if you can be simple and bold, that's kind of the ideal. So first, we wanted to just figure out what is his voice? You know, the, the voice conveys the soul and the, and the spirit. And then, once that was figured out, then we got into the nitty gritty of his Iridian language, which we wanted to be accurate with. We wanted the word for sleep in this section to be

• 8:21Speaker 03

  consistent with sleep later, but there might be a different context. And so it might be performed a little bit more intensely or a little bit more calmly or quickly or slower, depending on the context. So.

• 8:34Flora Lichtman?

  Oh, my gosh. So the language is actually consistent throughout.

• 8:38Speaker 03

  The language is consistent.

• 8:39Flora Lichtman?

  Correction.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. He's got, there's about 250 scripted words for Rocky. So the sleuth. ...out there who want to go do some forensic sound examinations can probably spend a year trying to parse all that out.

• 8:57Flora Lichtman?

  Well, you, like you said, the sound brings Rocky to life. And it's a huge part of the movie.

• 9:05Speaker 03

  I think it's, to me, it's half of the cinematic experience. You know, we use our eyes and we use our ears. And in a way, our ears can manipulate emotion more powerfully in a more subliminal way.

• 9:19Flora Lichtman?

  You think so?

• 9:20Speaker 03

  I think so. I mean, well, you know, just, just the way sound works on, on our brains is it goes through our medulla oblongata first, before it hits the auditory cortex. And, and that's where you get things like pitch and localization and sound level, power, intensity. That's all pre-thought, you know? A brilliant filmmaker once said that sound kind of comes in through the back door and images come in through the front door. And in a way, that gives us a lot of power over how, how to express emotion and evoke emotion in an audience. So, yeah.

• 10:01Flora Lichtman?

  We have to take a break, but when we come back, we have to talk about another iconic movie creature vocalization that you hooked up.

• 10:14Flora Lichtman?

  If you know, you know.

• 10:21Speaker 04

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• 11:05Speaker 04

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• 11:49Speaker 04

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• 12:04Flora Lichtman?

  Let's talk about Godzilla.

• 12:06Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 12:07Flora Lichtman?

  So let's go back to 1954. This is the original Godzilla roar.

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Classic.

• 12:17Flora Lichtman?

  Iconic, yeah. Eric, you were tasked with making an updated Godzilla roar for the 2014 movie. Because it's an iconic movie and an iconic sound, did it feel like a lot of pressure?

• 12:31Speaker 03

  Well, yeah, there's pressure to it, you know, because it's a piece of cinema history. And it's so iconic that you can play that sound anywhere around the world and people close their eyes and they know that's Godzilla. So we definitely needed to pay homage to that. And the director, Gareth Edwards, he was like, you know, we can't really use that 1954 recording. When you put that in a theater, it's sounds kind of old. It's a little vintagey.

• 13:08Flora Lichtman?

  A little dusty, yeah.

• 13:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, a little dusty. How do we do that with the technology we have 70 years later? And so that led into...

• 13:19Speaker 03

  Four months of experimenting.

• 13:22Flora Lichtman?

  Wow.

• 13:23Speaker 03

  And I wanted a sound that just felt like an anthem that I could fill the theater with in Dolby Atmos and just, you know, my barometer is always, am I getting goosebumps or not? And if I don't, I'm like, okay, I need to keep experimenting, keep trying stuff. And it, and it, sometimes it's very serendipitous how this works. There's happy accidents that weren't intentional. And for something, you know, different, I was recording a lot of different sounds using dry ice. So you've got basically frozen carbon dioxide gas. It's very cold and you can use it against different metals.

• 14:06Speaker 03

  Usually metals are the most interesting things to apply to dry ice. And I, on the Foley stage, we had this six foot long cylinder. It was a piece of like air conditioning ducting. And just put that on top of this block of dry ice and it started resonating and, you know, because the dry ice is cooling the metal, the, the metal is now condensing and vibrating in doing so. And that vibration starts to push air and it just started doing this whale.

• 14:50Speaker 03

  And I thought, okay, wait, there we are. That's, that I can use as sort of the central ingredient for the new roar and hopefully it translated.

• 15:01Flora Lichtman?

  Let's hear it.

• 15:10Speaker 03

  And, you know, it is funny, the inhale before he does the roar is, that's an elephant blowing through his trunk. And it, it was Michael Jackson's former elephant, um, Bo and her partner, Suzie, who were, are now living on a refuge in Lancaster, California. And the way you get elephants to trumpet, they trumpet when they're happy, um, is to...

• 15:41Speaker 03

  Let them go to the pond. And so they were basically stampeding when they did that. And so the trick is to mic them in a way where you're not hearing tree branches snapping and, you know, get a nice, clean trumpeting sound and, or trunk, you know, raspy trunk sounds. So

• 16:06Flora Lichtman?

  Were you just like, hi, I need, hi, hello, elephant sanctuary. I must come mic your, mic your elephants?

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. One of our assistants reached out and they were totally into it. So.

• 16:19Flora Lichtman?

  Okay, before we go, I want to play a game with our listeners. We're going to play a sound from the Terrence Malick movie, The Tree of Life. And this particular sound is the sound of the universe expanding, which also sounds like a hard assignment, just as an aside.

• 16:37Flora Lichtman?

  And, okay, everybody listening, I want you to think about what this sound could be.

• 16:50Flora Lichtman?

  Is it a ghost, Eric?

• 16:53Speaker 03

  I have not been able to record a ghost yet.

• 16:58Speaker 03

  But yeah, so for, so for the entire reel two of The Tree of Life is kind of a 20-minute us witnessing evolution of the universe from the very beginning, from the big bang, through creation of stars and planets and evolution of life on Earth through different periods. And obviously, in space, there, we're working with a vacuum. So using sound in space there was more to create a feeling. It wasn't necessarily intended to be literal. It was more to, to evoke kind of vastness and mystery and maybe loneliness.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  Terrence Malick had kind of asked us to just go with your instincts and we'll see. And I did not tell him what it was. He asked me. And I've learned this over many years. It's not always a good idea to tell a director what the sound is, you know, because sound is, it's a very abstract art. You're often using something that has nothing to do with what you're witnessing visually on screen. And that's, that's part of the malleability of sound and the expressiveness of sound is you can be very abstract with it. And he said, well, okay, don't tell me until we're done, but I'm going to name it. And he named that the sound of eternal silence. So that's what in my personal

• 18:35Flora Lichtman?

  Yeah, perfect.

• 18:36Speaker 03

  It's perfect, right? I mean, sometimes you need a poet to apply words to sounds because sounds can be very hard to describe. So I thought that was very poetic. And when we were done, I told him what it was. And that was me breathing into a microphone.

• 18:55Flora Lichtman?

  Sometimes the answer's right in front of you, or in you.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  Right, literally.

• 19:01Flora Lichtman?

  Thank you for what you do, Eric.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Well, thank you for listening.

• 19:06Flora Lichtman?

  Eric Adal, the sound editor and designer behind many of your favorite movies, and apparently a Science Friday listener. This episode was produced by Kathleen Davis. And if you liked the sound of this podcast, or maybe something didn't sound right, or maybe you too are a sound designer behind some of our favorite movies, call us and let us know, 8774-SY-FRY, 8774-SY-FRY. We'll catch you next time. I'm Flora Lichtman.