As part of a university project in my Bachelor’s degree, I and two fellow students re-soundtracked an iconic scene from Stanley Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Due to copyright this scene cannot be published, but is available in Google Drive via the link below:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1X4cwm5rQiDiwxGTufS0faESeuLMNMqmp/view?usp=sharing
The scene depicts Dave (the astronaut protagonist) attempting to re-enter his spaceship from an external pod after retrieving the body of his colleague who was free-floating away from the spaceship following an attack by the ship’s artificially intelligent computer HAL.
The scene is understandably tense, with Dave initially attempting to reason with and argue against HAL, following HAL’s refusal to allow Dave to re-enter the ship. This is followed by Dave making preparations to re-enter the ship from his pod without his space helmet. From Dave’s perspective, this would be an incredibly stressful situation; he is certainly aware that leaving the pod into the vacuum of space is likely to lead to his death, but equally, remaining in the pod is not an option. The scene climaxes with Dave blowing the hatch of the pod in order to eject himself into the airlock of the ship, closing the outer-door of the ship and re-pressurising the airlock.
Our objective was to reflect Dave’s emotional state throughout the scene in the soundtrack, as well as to realistically depict the sonic environment visualised, without this sounding clichéd or forced. Following his argument with HAL, we wanted to convey Dave’s shock, anxiety and stress audibly, through suggestion of his temporary dissociation from reality by applying reverberation on his voice and with the introduction of dissonant arpeggiated music. This section is followed by a period of relative calm and focus as Dave is forced to release his dead colleague in order to access the airlock. Subsequently, as Dave approaches the airlock, the rise in tension is reflected in the introduction of a single-note, bass dominant synthesised ostinato, influenced by the music associated with the approaching Shark in Stephen Spielberg’s Jaws. This sound develops into a crescendo as the scene progresses, with the introduction of an arpeggiated sequence as he aligns the pod hatch with the airlock. As he activates the controls necessary to blow the hatch, the music morphs into an alarm sound, matching with a flashing alarm light behind him in the pod. Further alarms are introduced as Dave progresses with the evacuation sequence, culminating in a cacophony of alarms and dissonant music as he prepares to exit the pod. The scene finishes with Dave ejecting into the perceived silence of the vacuum of the airlock, before closing the airlock to the sound of re-pressurisation.
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