Why Does Music in Science Fiction Sound Like That?

As a genre, science fiction stands out for its cinematic grandeur (across media), for its use of futuristic civilizations as allegories for the present, for its rich world-building and multi-layered lore, and for its in-universe music.

Think of movies such as The Fifth Element, where Diva Plavalaguna entertains the passengers aboard a flying cruise ship. Or think of Star Wars, where the seedy cantina is enlivened by an almost-folksy live music selection. This kind of diegetic music (music that exists within the world of the story) is emblematic of what James Wierzbicki identifies as standard science fiction music in an article for Lied und populäre Kultur / Song and Popular Culture.

To Wierzbicki, science fiction music falls into two camps: “other-worldly, and thus never-heard-before music” and music that is “quite old-fashioned and earthbound.” This distinction, however, is not simply a matter of describing or performing a particular sound.

In literature, descriptions of otherworldly music have a long history. In 1623, Francis Bacon penned The New Atlantis, which recounts the rescue of sailors shipwrecked off of the eastern coast of South America. The survivors are taken to an island that, among other scientific and natural wonders, is home to “sound houses,” where the island dwellers get to enjoy “harmonies which you have not,” “music likewise to you unknown, some sweeter than any of you have,” “[representing and imitating] all articulate sounds and letters, and the voices of beasts and birds,” and “divers strange and artificial echoes,” among other auditory experiences.

Around one hundred years later, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels depicts encounters with imagined musical cultures. In the land of the giant Brobdingnagians, the king and queen amuse themselves by running “that way and this” along the sixty-foot-long keyboard of their daughter’s spinet, “banging the proper keys with [their] two sticks.” Gulliver later visits the Laputans, a highly sophisticated civilization inhabiting an island in the sky, who have successfully adapted the celestial music of the spheres. “Swift’s handling of the Laputan music—alluding to its strangeness but avoiding sonically specific description—is typical of how imaginary music has long been treated in science-fiction literature,” writes Wierzbicki.

Aldous Huxley offers one of the more detailed sonic descriptions of imagined music in his 1932 novel Brave New World. When Lenina and her boss attend a concert, the music is rendered in a fairly thorough manner, including a “thunder in A flat major,” “a diminuendo,” “five-four rhythms” and “darkened seconds.” Later, when Lenina goes to the cinema with her “savage,” the soundtrack features a voice “now throaty, now from the head, now hollow as a flute, now charged with yearning harmonics.”

More contemporary examples of otherworldly music appear in Arthur C. Clarke’s 1954 novel Childhood’s End, where the alien overlords produce sounds with “complex rhythmical patterns racing up and down through the audible spectrum, to vanish at the upper or lower edge of hearing.” And in Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 novel The Sparrow, the inhabitants of a distant planet are described as having “a voice of heartbreaking power and sweetness, operatic in dimension but so plainly used in hypnotic, graceful chant that the listener hardly notices its gorgeousness except to think of beauty and of truth.”

How did cinema respond? In part by inserting in-universe chants and music. As Wierzbicki notes, 1950s sound effect departments were busy “concocting blip-bleep-bloop noises to illustrate futuristic/alien technologies, but there was little effort to depict whatever ‘music’ denizens of the future, or aliens, might have heard.” One notable exception is Forbidden Planet, in which officers aboard an Earth-based spacecraft listen to music recorded half a million years earlier by the planet’s denizens.

The tides began to shift in the 1960s and 1970s. Consider, for example, Spock playing the lyre in the first season (1966) of Star Trek; the electronic “lounge” music in Barbarella (1968); the synthetic “Ode to Joy” in A Clockwork Orange (1971); the grunting chants of the mutants known as “The Family” in The Omega Man (1971) alongside the comparable hymns in Zardoz (1974); the glittery sonic backdrops for the mall and disco in Logan’s Run (1976); the cantina band in Star Wars (1977); and the after-dinner songs in the “Androids of Tara” episodes (1979) of Doctor Who.

As entertaining as they might be, most of these pieces of music “conjure up an image of what audiences of the day thought the future should sound like, and thus with each passing year their ‘contemporaneous strangeness’ seems more and more dated,” writes Wierzbicki. This music, ultimately, is earthbound. Even Diva Plavalaguna’s performance in The Fifth Element falls into this category—through no fault of composer Eric Serra or singer Inva Mula-Tchako. If you attempt to create in-universe music for a science-fiction franchise, according to Wierzbicki, you’ll inevitably run into an impasse.

“To reify such sounds—as is necessary in a filmic adaptation—is to ‘fix’ them permanently, to make them ‘heard’ in just a single way,” he writes. “To keep such sounds vague, as Bacon and Swift and so many others have done, is to give the sounds the freedom to be whatever individual readers imagine them to be.”

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