You're listening to song exploder where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishikesh her way.

In the film Arrival Amy Adams plays a linguist trying to decode an alien language. This is the day they arrived.

The object touched down 40 minutes ago.

Mama, it's going to happen. I don't know.

Dr. Banks, you're at the top of everyone's list when it comes to translations.

You hear any words?

It's their language.

The score was composed by Johann Johansson, his third film collaborating with director Denis Villeneuve.

In this episode, Johann breaks down a piece from the score called Heptipad B and how, like the film, it revolves around the concept of language.

This episode is part of a series I'm doing over the next few months highlighting film music that I think could and should be considered for an Oscar.

These awards episodes are presented in partnership with New York Magazine's site Vulture.

For more, go to Vulture.com slash awards.

Hi, my name is Johann Johansson and I composed the score for the film Arrival.

The film is directed by Denis Villeneuve.

He sends me a script at an early stage and the basic premise was about a linguist that is

charged with a task of establishing communication with an alien species at lands on planet Earth.

The very first sessions we did, I was working in the studio in Berlin with some great analog tape machines.

Spent several days recording various instruments and kind of creating these rich, very layered, very deep and very complex analog tape loops

and recorded them at different speeds, so a very low note, for example, recorded at high speed and then played back at the lowest speed.

It becomes this sort of subsonic rumble, really.

And we did this with several instruments, cello, trumpet and the human voice.

Plus on each channel we were doing sound on sound recording, so we were recording over the sound while keeping the previous sound.

...