Why Avatar has the Most Ironic Soundtrack of All Time

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. I ask people, hey, do you remember Avatar and they always come back saying, do you mean the blue one or the good one and I think? that's the best way to describe this mutant freak show of a franchise with its own theme park and the sequels seem to exist only in news articles discussing how they were delayed again in addition to making at the time a record amount of money and apparently it's so good that it caused the Twilight moms to fall into their own kind of depression, it's a strange beast to try to understand if you're one of the three people on the entire planet who hasn't seen it, it's basically Pocahontas. but blue or you could look at it as Dances with Wolves but blue is actually remarkably similar to Fern Gully but blue and I think mathematically it's a lot like The Lorax but blue with a $237 million budget in James' Titanic Dream Team.

Cameron and Jon Landau, along with composer James Horner, again know what they know not only from Titanic but from all these other movies that everyone has seen. There's really no doubt how this movie became so amazingly successful, except it wasn't the

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. bad until you know what you're listening to even though this might be my favorite work of james horner in a spiritual sense this was a little hard to explain have you ever wondered why this movie had such a huge budget? I'm pretty sure a lot of it went to the super cool motion capture, which in the nine would have been pretty expensive, but I'm convinced that not an insignificant amount of the budget going into Avatar has some of the deepest lore you can imagine .

I'd never heard of it before, honestly it's starting to feel more like The Lord of the Rings where Game of Thrones, as soon as you start digging there's an entire book dedicated to explaining the Navi world and of course I bought it and, in turn, fans have compiled it. This whole expanded Navi story on its own wiki has the full history of the GDR, that evil corporation trying to take over Pandora, explains the superconductivity of unobtainium along with not one, but two fictional schools of thought that try to explain how unobtanium led to the formation of the Hallelujah Mountains.

Every plant you see in this movie has its own little section complete with made up binomial nomenclature. Explains the culture of the Navi, including how the population we see in Avatar is called Omaticaya. after the samba Omata or the blue flute Amada hyah literally translating the clan of the blue flute which of course does not appear in the film and they make sure to write that down in the book okay but if neither humans nor

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s have ever seen the flute, so how do we know what it looks like? Checkmate, atheists and guys, don't worry about every mistake.

I'm making this video. These Zeno musicologists they hired have you totally covered. It also highlights what the omaticaya are known for. his knits in his textiles because remember in the movie all those scenes where Jake learns to knit at the beginning just want to dismiss the book as if he were some dishonest English student who was so incredibly happy to get a writing job that he made up his own headcanon about how people in blue caps get married and have babies, but before we get there, I'd like to draw your attention to the Navi language we hear throughout the movie.

Who read? Isn't this a Cub Scout cipher where you simply change an English word to a made up one. This is a fully developed Con Lang or invented language complete with its own grammatical structures, all created by dr. Paul Frommer, a linguist at USC who was hired specifically to create this language. Navi is as much a language as Klingon and Elvish, and it's full of all kinds of interesting sounds that aren't in English, like these ejectives, fricatives, and glottal stops, both singing Luke. They hired Carla. Mayer, a dialect coach, to help actors deal with all these non-English sounds.

In fact, CCH Pounder, who plays Mowatt, managed to handle it fantastically. Forget the wonky, very rigid, what's your name here? or she says K and Jake, so let's learn well, Jake Zuly. that's the accent those sounds that aren't in english that's that ejective consonant that's the complete polar opposite of sam worthington he's just doing everything he can to try not to sound australian the enemy is out there and he's very powerful sometimes all your life comes down to one Crazy move, but we went back to pre-production, so they hired dr. Jody s Holt, a professor of plant physiology at the University of California Riverside, to make sure that all the plant science they did in the film was as accurate as possible, right down to how the actors were going to take samples, it's hard to overstate the absolutely astronomical amount of work. which entered the world of Avatar literally, as far as I know they actually modeled the Pandora solar system to get the day/night cycles accurate and for the planets and background to appear as they should within the world of Avatar.

This was the

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extra movie. To me, that's why they went ahead and put Avatar Land in Disney World and are still pushing to make those sequels. They've already done a lot of Star Trek world-building developing that deep lore and they want to make more profits. Thanks to your investment and with all those pre-production and development costs, we have my new favorite human being when he's not posting photos of the cakes he decorates on his website, Dr. Wanda Bryant is an extremely accomplished ethnomusicologist. Ethnomusicology is the study of music as it relates to culture, especially outside the Western European tradition, and when James Horner was hired by James Cameron and they reunited the former duo Titanic, Horner turned to dr.

Bryant to help him develop a new type of music for the Navy and Bryant, being an absolute badass, wrote up his entire experience working on the film's music in an essay that will be linked in the description because I'm just not going to be able to cover it. all here and I can't urge you enough to read it yourself because it al

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seems like a crime scene investigation but we'll get to that and there's also this really great interview with Bryant where he talks about the whole experience in my outer space like YouTube channel I'll link to it in the description below, so again just to reinforce the idea of ​​how deep pre-production was when they started consulting with dr.

Bryant, they had already had the idea that Navi would have drum circles where each drum would represent a different planet in the Pandora solar system and they would play, quote, in a complex rhythmic structure that features multi-layered elliptical time signatures derived from the orbital patterns. from their solar system that I don't even know where to start with, the Navi are supposed to be Ligety fans or something he's really trying to make like a musical universe Alice, but for Pandora it was intense and Bryant immediately noticed some pretty sizable ones. problems like one, which the hell was intended to be a play on words, is an elliptical time signature and two, in his own words, he says, I realized that there is a disconnect between the artistic concept and ethnomusicology, the organ heat, an illogical perspective For example, that Almaty Samba, the blue flute, that this Navi.

The nation it's named after isn't actually a flute, it's a trumpet, so organology is a very important field to study when you want to invent an instrument, kids, then you realized that while the

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s have five fingers, the Navi only have four meanings. that if they're going to have some kind of headphone or wind instrument like a flute, then they're only going to have access to a pentatonic scale instead of our heptatonic, they're only going to have five notes per octave instead of the seven that you see. in the Western European tradition, which, curiously, created a big problem for Horner.

The idea with Avatar was that they wanted to take cultures from around the planet, throw them into an artistic blender, and then create a culture that wasn't completely recognizable. as a specific population or society on earth, they wanted something vaguely non-white that didn't single out any group of people, so they compromised on blue cats. People think of it like animals. Clearly, this is a rhino, but it has this head like a hammerhead shark and this peacock feather thing on its head, but obviously it's still supposed to be a rhino or a rhino substitute or like horses, they have this thing of eat ants and they have scales and he's like gills or something. whatever, but they're clearly still horses, that's basically what they were trying to do culturally for Navi now, when he heard that Navi would only have access to a pentatonic scale, Horner got a little nervous because it might sound too recognizable as Asian, African or Native American, he wanted a completely new sound at the same time Cameron made it clear that he was a very hands-on director who wanted to be involved in all aspects of music production, so when Bryan ended up concentrating too much on the musical logic of conceptual art Cameron admitted that, and a quote, sometimes a detail or two may have been consciously overlooked or ignored for the sake of storytelling, which holds up well, so you're saying you can break the barrel to maintain effectiveness . telling stories is fine, fine, but that's even though you're spending millions of dollars in pre-production to develop this alien world that you could then end up ignoring to better develop the story you haven't written yet, white, let's just call that a sign alert and let's move on for now okay so let's get back to the music so Horner was a very difficult client for Brian as Brian says.

Horner was well versed in all types of world music, so Brian had to dig deep to find pieces. of music and sounds that Horner had not heard before in the end she had 25 examples of music that she and Horner agreed would be viable. Here are some he listed Swedish cattle herding calls, folk dance songs of the Naga people of the northeast. traditional vietnamese and chinese work songs from india breeding songs from celts born and medieval norwegian laments central african vocal clinic persian terrier michael takes works from her will see the women's group finished for tina personal songs from the central arctic inuit and northern brush dances from California in On top of that, he hired singers from Bulgarian, Israeli, Indian and North African vocal traditions and at one point hired instrumentalist Tony Hannigan, who plays various panpipes, whistles, ocarinas and Kenna, among all sorts of other instruments not Westerners, if I hadn't already made my point clear.

Most likely this is where all the money for the film went, at least in terms of music budget, and they went absolutely crazy writing demo after demo after demo, they did everything they could to combine these completely different styles, which would have been extraordinarily difficult considering how they all came from different linguistic backgrounds with different vocal inflections and phonemes plus vastly different tuning systems, not all cultures dealt with a Pythagorean comma with the same temperament as Western Europe. If you want to learn more, there is a great article on no other music. History cliches blog as well as a great video linking twelve tones in the description of both and all that doesn't even begin to address the different rhythmic systems you'll find in this collection, think about how hard it is to get three. people on Twitter agree on anything, now multiply that by adjusting the math of the system and you have a completely different kind of nightmare.

Honestly, what they came up with sounds really cool on paper and it seems like at every point they were respecting all the concept art of the story. that had already been developed for this world like some of these microtonal drones that would have to represent a wa in the natural world for one of the songs, it was really fascinating to read about that, so when Cameron approached them and said he wanted a lot of different songs to relate to different aspects of Navi's life, which was also very interesting to read about, especially when he mentions that he didn't want the songs to be like a performance, he wanted it to be more about his daily life, which again It's an interesting, non-Western perspective for a director, which is very exciting to hear on a project like this.

I wanted a weaving song, a hunting song, a funeral lament, like a spiral song for a wa or something, and if you're really curious, yes, the lyrics to those songs appeared in the book, which is absolutely fantastic until you read what ended up happening initially. Cameron wrote the lyrics to these songs in English, which when translated into the Navi language with a non-English sound became a bit difficult to sing and he began to sing.change the lyrics so that it sounded better to their Western ears again. Different languages ​​with different phonemes have different ways of making their language sound good when sung, which is why studying these things precisely is so important.

It's important to reiterate that this is a really basic thing, if you want your songs to be sung in the native language using these new sounds, the songs will end up sounding a little different than what you're used to, you could even say that these songs will help you. On top of that, It sounded strange, when Horner and Bryant began putting together the individual songs drawing inspiration from everywhere, they ran into the problem of fusing the non-Western sounds with the Western Orchestra that was going to fill in the gaps in the score later. All this being said and done, this would still be a standard blockbuster movie with the standard blockbuster movie

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, the different non-Western musical systems led them to use a microtonal system that would contrast significantly with the Western Orchestra they would play for the rest of the film. movie, but to be clear, they set out to create music that sounded like nothing anyone had heard before, the problem was that's exactly what they did and they went out and wrote music that sounded like nothing. someone had heard before, which in turn led Cameron to tear down each of their demos because they didn't sound right to him, probably because they had made music that no one had heard before, which again to me sounds exactly like what you want happens when you write about a culture that is literally strange, millions of dollars in pre-production research, but yeah, it just doesn't sound quite right, how about next time, instead of wasting all these resources, you just throw a bunch away of instruments in a wood chipper and save everyone some time to be fair Bryant paints Cameron is someone who is aware of the difficulties they had, but it doesn't make any sense that he would shut them down so hard, it's like that. exactly what you paid for what you expected so at the end of this whole ordeal only one song appeared in the film the lament before the tree of souls Cameron said he wanted to break with the na'vi tradition remember this is a tradition that they're reconciling and he wanted them to write Navi Amazing Grace, something that everyone could understand from Oklahoma to South Dakota, which is a direct quote and when they even tried to embellish the vocal lines and that song to make it sound. even a little less Western or even European Cameron shot it down again and again at this point everything almost completely fell apart for the duo Bryon specifically says that the Navi Amazing Grace episode forced us to realize that our dreams of creating a Truly unique and unusual musical sound for Navi would be tempered by the fact that this wasn't our movie in the end and I left a lot of things here, they basically had to abandon almost all of their work on the movie when you hear some kind of vocal line that fits into Navi. it's a meaningless lyric that has no meaning the syllables Horner chose were to get through the orchestra not necessarily because they meant anything, they could literally be singing about what they had for lunch, it wouldn't make any difference the only microtonality or at least the non-western tonality that is heard in the film appears at the end of sentences in which the tone drops.

Horner ended up having the same problem with the live instruments that he had with the songs and ended up just testing them out so he could simply treat all the non-Western instruments as his traditional Western instruments, all the drums were completely digital with multiple drum sounds layered on top of each other. another until it sounded perfect, so when you listen to it, the score sounds incredibly digital, which "I makes these scenes feel much more artificial and computer-generated at every moment. Horner and Bryant did the best they could, they were closed and then had to build some kind of artificial replacement that sounded vaguely like the original guy who was doing something like that." They will talk and act as if they are from the native culture, but that is not why that sounds familiar.

Bryant mentions that there are, in fact, a few snippets of his work in the film, such as the way the film begins with a call vaguely reminiscent of one of the Swedish cattle herding calls he had shown Horner at the beginning, but other than that and the tree of souls lament, Brian really makes it look like very little of the original work done in the film, other than the vague tamriel colors here and So far in my research I've found five places where I can identify very clearly here was the sound source that I brought to James Horner and here is something very similar, it's not the same, you can hear Horner's creativity in it, but the concept or the sound. quality something that is there and that is very recognizable when talking about the overall effect of the score she cites Marvin cooks a history of film music Cooke might have been writing about the score for avatar when he talked about the widespread use of ethnic instruments and voices sometimes lending authenticity to a cultural or geographical setting of the film, but sometimes perpetuating a pervasive exoticism that suggested that Hollywood stereotypes were still a guiding spirit, that is, the score of the avatars in a nutshell, this score It's like you take something from a group of people. without actually asking for it and then repurposed it beyond recognition to make money, that's how hard it is for them to visualize something like that happening, but it's like the musical equivalent of what Horner Bryant set out to try to make this soundtrack.

It sounds like this beautiful collage of music from all over the planet, but in the end it was specifically designed to be as inoffensive as possible while still sounding vaguely non-Western. Let me see if I understand you correctly: a guy who heads a project sponsored by a massive corporation decides, directly or indirectly, to hire a doctor who specializes in a field where his work could help legitimize the intentions of the project, but in every opportunity, for the sake of profit and ease of access, this guy undermines the doctor and her work in such a way that she is effectively kicked off the project and can now only comment on the legitimacy of her actions from afar.

Where have I heard that story before? Not that it's not obvious when you review the fine-toothed comb movie, it's kind of a mess like, let's say in the end they decided to use certain instruments and textures to represent different populations, okay, it sounds vaguely non-Western, we'll call it Navi sounds good, so why do the humans get these vocal lines when Approach the Home Tree and Jake and Navi get this brass moment during the final confrontation, we even hear brass when Jake shows up on that pterodactyl, in fact the animals come to save the day, it almost sounds like Superman is showing up, you could argue that Horner was one.

He got ahead of the game and was trying to make the blue flute that doesn't appear in the movie and is actually a trumpet here in the movie playing all these brass, but it's about forty chests that no one will get because there's literally nothing that sounds more European than the brass, it's sure there's a really cool nature motif that comes back again and again and there's a really cool moment where they break out of jail and again when the colonel shoots Grace, where we get this haunting Dias. . like a melody that lights up the ship, the problem is that both that nature motif and its haunting Diaz moment appear in the love ballad they marketed with the film, and you can tell they desperately wanted this to be new.

My heart will go on. which when you look at it that way means that this moment is actually a reference to the love ballad or the love ballad has a reference to the medieval song of death, choose either way, it's strange to be completely fair though There's one thing I really like about the soundtrack and it's the hearth tree motif when Jake first sees the hearth tree, he's a prisoner, it's night and it's really scary, but he wakes up there, it's day, the reason is less sinister and that's really cool, we also understand it when Jake wakes up. from the ashes of the origin tree and goes to help Navi again because everything is thematically about the origin tree, it also plays at the core of shooting grace and when the rogue yes, his callsign is rogue, follow, copy, start to fight against the gunboats perhaps. because they are both fighting over the origin tree in Navi.

I don't know, wow, which is great, but in the grand scheme of things, that's something Horner was able to sneak under the mountain of three hours of scathing imitation when you look at this movie as a whole, with all the work that went into it. was made to create at the time the most successful film in history, the story behind the music is nothing short of depressing, on the one hand Horner's efforts were commendable, he never had to turn to an ethnomusicologist nor did he have to put everything that effort to try to create this familiar but contrived musical landscape, but he did it anyway and I would absolutely kill to listen to those demos, but if your entire movie is basically a blue version of Pocahontas Dances with Wolves Fern Gully and the Lorax might as well make you a little good.

I don't know, maybe sit down with one of those stories and really think about what it's trying to say because the soundtrack to this movie is the musical equivalent of strip mining. Yes, it made a lot of money, but it came at a cost. We're all worse off for not having a score that could have had all those different types of world music coming together at every twist and turn, mutated non-Western music that they. It was compiled to fit a Western audience. There is virtually nothing in this score that isn't just a permutation of traditional Western European music.

This was one of the most amazing and inspiring Hollywood scores ever, as well as being James Horner's masterpiece, but they simply undermined the duo's efforts time and time again. I can't emphasize this enough. Everything in this film was artificially designed to satisfy the preconceived notions of its audience. Everything in this movie is fake. It's a varnish. Nothing is remotely genuine. That's why Disney had absolutely no problem integrating it into the hyperreality of the theme parks this is not what non-Western music sounds like this is what Western audiences think non-Western music sounds like it's like they don't even bother to watch their own movie because the story Behind this soundtrack is something

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ally familiar.

I think one of the most important things is to keep your ears open. Keep your ears open to unusual sounds. You know, things that might be a little uncomfortable for you now that, with a little listening, some of them might become. favorite sounds in your musical world thank you for watching like this my sponsors for making these videos possible with a very special thanks to Alex Cole Kowski Alex clinker Clara so at least on thomas google it Hayden Elsa Jacob Silas Jordan Adams Karin Rosa now Kate J Kim colada Marin John Zatara Noah Grape Ray Locke Rafael Martinez Silas Rick Osborne and Who am I I would also like to thank everyone who asked me to talk about James Horner.

I feel that this is his best unpublished work. I'd love to hear. what those demos sound like and I feel like this is an underappreciated effort that he made towards the famous guy, you know, like make sure to subscribe and check out my other videos, follow me on Twitter and Twitch, answer your music questions live and If you really If you like what I'm doing then consider supporting the channel on Patreon, but that's all I have for now, thanks for watching. Apparently there is a Pandora Research Foundation that links to Pandora pedia, which as far as I know is like an official license.

Disney database full of expanded knowledge about avatars and there is a whole page on this website about Na'vi music theory and it says they use pentatonic, diatonic and microtonal scales.