“Through sound and motion”: Sonic power in Villeneuve’s Dune
In this essay – which was awarded Top Student Paper (2026) in NCA's Theatre, Film, & New Multi-Media division – I analyze the sound design of Denis Villeneuve's Dune: Part One and Part Two, drawing on material rhetoric and poststructuralist philosophy to explore the films' and novel's themes of action, choice, and power.
“Duke Atreides’s House is building a secret army using a technique unknown to us, a technique involving sound”
—Shaddam IV, Dune (1984)
For rhetorical scholars, sound is not constrained to the ears but rather a multimodal experience that orients critics toward embodied listening practices (Ceraso, 2014; 2018; Hocks & Comstock, 2017; LaVecchia, 2017; Hawk, 2018a; 2018b; Gallagher, Rosenfeld, & Tomlinson, 2022; Butler, 2025). "A sonic approach to rhetoric," Hawk (2018b) suggests, "would mean that the rhetorical is at stake in every circulation of energy, every resonant encounter, and every unfolding future" (321). Edgar (2017) demonstrates the corresponding politics at stake in this claim, showing how sound does not merely move audiences but can constitute (and erase) subjects through material address. In political deliberation, Goodale (2013) addresses how “sonorous envelopes” like clapping, chanting, singing, or screaming have the capacity to comfort and protect an in-group, to disrupt or attack an outside, and more broadly to facilitate or constrain action. He invokes Deleuze & Guattari's (1980/1987) concept of the refrain, which illustrates how sound (operating at the level of premodal vibration) simultaneously introduces rhythmic order into chaos, produces and maintains an interior against an exterior, and manages the movement between inside and outside. Where the sonorous envelope names the rhetorical phenomenon (sound's capacity to constitute political space), the refrain names the ontological mechanism: expressive qualities of rhythm and frequency prior to representational content that make and unmake territory. In this paper, I explore Villeneuve's Dune films for a sustained cinematic elaboration of how these sonorous dynamics are enacted through spatiality and tactility, which constitute the vibrational distribution of interiority and agency and the substrate for movement.
Hawhee (2015) frames the rhetorical study of sensation through "the sensorium," a conceptualization that "refuses to separate the senses, to cordon them off into a 'subfield'" (5). She calls attention to the historically productive role of cinema in rhetorical criticism for the ways in which aesthetic experiences problematize ways of knowing for both audiences and critics. Scholars of film rhetoric have theorized its suasive capacity through affect, i.e. the presubjective intensities that precede and condition the named emotions through which subjects and publics take form (Lundberg, 2009; Ott & Keeling, 2011; Gunn, 2012; Watts, 2017). Where symbolic analysis asks what a text means, affective analysis asks what it does — how its material dimensions organize the sensory conditions under which meaning becomes possible at all. Attending to these conditions demands a critical practice attuned to sensation before signification. "Multimodal listening" is Ceraso's (2014) term for a critical attunement to sound perception as fundamentally synesthetic, incorporating aural, tactile, and visual cues. In his explication of sonic power, Goodman (2010) similarly takes synesthesia as primary. Sound as vibratory force precedes its encoding via the distinct mechanisms of the sensory apparatus (the cochlea, the skin, the skull, the eye). These sensory signals are immediately recombined into perception in which the senses blur once again. Low frequency sounds are “heard” in the skin even if the wavelength is too long to excite cochlear fluid; rhythmic movement in the visual field carries vibratory information that is factored into sensemaking about a sonic environment (Ceraso illustrates this with the techniques of percussionist Evelyn Glennie).
In recent decades, cultural critics have applied sound as a critical method by attending to its ontological properties and physiological effects, beyond or beneath emotion and meaning (Cox, 2011; Garcia, 2015; Gallagher, 2016; Jasen, 2016; Church, 2017). This work draws a distinction between presubjective vibrational force and its symbolic coding (Massumi, 2002). This affective and ontological turn has been tempered along several dimensions. First, the ontology of sound is only ever disclosed to listeners through cultural filters, and its analysis is reliant on encultured sonic metaphors (Kane, 2015). In addition, placing materiality in opposition to signification threatens to reify the nature/culture binary and obscure the inescapable positionality of inquiry (Goh, 2017; Thompson, 2017). In short, affect is not strictly prior to representation, but representation is itself affective. In a more pragmatic critique of how critics deal with affect, Brinkema (2014) argues that a refusal of formal analysis limits the explanatory power of affect as a conceptual tool, and instead advocates for renewed attention to the particulars of affect not as a vague field of forces, but as always realized in an instance and open to close formal reading. This prompts us to account for the effects of sound – what sound does – by attending to both its depiction and its uses, i.e. the role sound plays in managing the affective experience of film through both its narrative functions and design principles. On all sides of the affect problem, scholars draw on the lineage of affect studies – running from Spinoza through Nietzsche to the solo and collaborative work of Deleuze & Guattari – to articulate a relationship between finite/infinite and particular/universal that recognizes both the infinite virtuality of the world and its finite coded expression that is no less material or significant (Campbell, 2020). Rather than collapsing culture into nature, subject into object, representation into affect, or vice-versa, Deleuze & Guattari’s (1972/2009; 1980/1987) vibrational ontology offers insights into how sound and vibration distribute and maintain a sense of interiority/exteriority, self/other, and signal/noise.
In this paper, I draw on critical practices of multimodal listening (attending to the ways cinematic sound design intervenes in the sensorium) in order to think seriously about and through sound in order to create new concepts. Listening to Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One and Part Two, I ask how sound operates as an index of cultural discourse and as a tactic of affect modulation in sound design. I find that Dune offers productive insights into the mechanisms by which sound as premodal vibration can facilitate and constrain movement, and explore the implications of this reading for the role of sound in constituting agency and subjectivity. I focus on two examples of sonic power used to manipulate the environment: (1) the Bene Gesserit Voice demonstrates a collectivity inherent to speaking language and foregrounds a model of power that flows through sympathetic resonance; (2) the sandworms of Dune illustrate the multimodality inherent to sonic tropes of rhythm and frequency and a surplus value in the transduction between modes. I argue that Dune both depicts and enacts the ways in which modes of vibration cut across matter to distribute interiority/exteriority. I frame sonic power here as a building and breaking of boundaries through vibration. These boundaries or membranes simultaneously constitute self/other and signal/noise while facilitating and constraining the movement of an entity in its environment. My analysis foregrounds two sonic effects caught in interdependent opposition: the effect of spatiality (related to orientation within an environment) and the effect of tactility (related to autoaffection and movement). I suggest that the tactile blurring between inside/outside and entity/environment is a constituent element of agency, defining action as an oscillation between orientation/movement.
Ecologies of Dune
“The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences”
—Pardot Kynes, Dune (1965/2005, p. 346)
The specialty of science fiction is the “what-if?” – a (usually technological) change in society’s material substrate that conjures a world through the ripple effects throughout its superstructure. According to Delany (1977/2009), genres of fiction can be distinguished primarily in terms of their subjunctivity, i.e. the potential relationship between word-image and reality. Whereas naturalistic fiction is defined as “events that could have happened” and fantasy is defined as “events that could not have happened,” sci-fi is defined as “events that have not happened.” Delany calls attention here to the limits of language’s temporality: “have not happened” is equally applicable to the revisionist past, lived present, or possible future. The character of sci-fi strikes a uniquely evocative balance of things beyond human experience that remain physically possible, which invites the audience to interrogate the mechanics of a fictional world in ways that would be nonsensical in other genres of fiction.
Two “what-ifs” structure the world and plot of Dune: (1) the spice melange, a substance endemic to the titular planet, whose unique psychotropic and prophetic properties facilitate – among other things – faster-than-light travel; (2) the ban on thinking machines brought about by an anti-AI insurgency known as the Butlerian Jihad, which led to organizations dedicated to the extremes of human cognitive and physiological capacity, such as the Bene Gesserit Sisterhood. Dune and its sequels tell the story of the Atreides family. The first novel follows the young ducal heir Paul Atreides, who becomes the object of a messianic prophecy by the colonized natives of the planet Dune. The prophecy of the Lisan al-Gaib is known by the Atreides and the audience to be a Bene Gesserit psy-op. Paul hesitantly embraces the false prophecy and, in reclaiming his lineage, launches a holy war across the universe. The “real” prophecy is the Bene Gesserit’s technical experiment (i.e. an ancient eugenic program).
The franchise has been subject to analysis for its wide range of themes, including climate restoration, colonialism, political economy, religion and messianism, and the relationship between the human and technology (O’Reilly, 1981; Touponce, 1988; see essays collected in Nicholas, 2011; Nardi & Brierly, 2022; and Decker, 2023). The most overt and widely examined functions of sound in Dune are two Bene Gesserit techniques: the Voice and the litany against fear. More broadly, the novel illustrates a polyphony of voices (internal monologues, private conversations, public oratory) alternately revealing and concealing each character’s inward and outward motives and emotions (Kucera, 2001). The function of sound in the novel and films extends beyond voices in several ways I explore below. Alongside its ecological materialist worldbuilding, Dune’s themes of rhythm and frequency explore mechanisms of agency and subjectivity in fantasy and society.
To contribute to scholarship on Dune as well as rhetorical film criticism, I focus on the role of sound and vibration as power. I understand power not as a synonym for domination, rather in the sense of rhetorical energy (Kennedy, 1992) – not a noun but a verb, as in to empower. Rather than a critique of power that takes for granted the existence of power and the means by which it is exercised, I am interested in listening multimodally to literature and film for the ways in which movement and action might be facilitated or constrained.
While Herbert's prose provides useful context throughout my analysis, listening to the film or television adaptations provides two advantages. On the one hand, this allows us to hear and feel how sound manipulates and is manipulated. On the other, it illustrates how Herbert's concepts have been taken up in the sonic cultural imagination. Lynch’s evocative portrayal of sonic weaponry provides this paper’s epigraph. [1] However, I am interested in Villeneuve’s two-part film adaptation for its use of sound design in amplifying and modulating the broader themes felt throughout the Dune franchise. The films’ critical acclaim and successive Academy Awards for Best Sound, as well as Villeneuve’s upcoming (Dec 2026) adaptation of Dune Messiah (As Dune: Part Three), make these recent interpretations a rich and relevant site for exploring popular concepts and uses of sonic power.
I. The Bene Gesserit Voice
“I don’t speak. I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.”
—Bijaz, Dune Messiah (1969)
The Voice
The appendix “Terminology of the Imperium” describes the Voice as “that combined training originated by the Bene Gesserit which permits an adept to control others merely by selected tone shadings of the voice” (Herbert, 1965/2005, p. 671). By “registering” the body in the voice of the target, a practitioner of the Voice is able to not just psychologically manipulate, but physically compel a listener. Like the voice in general, the Bene Gesserit Voice in particular is an unstable “quasi-object” (Hawk, 2018a) that articulates binaries between subject/object, self/other, interior/exterior, matter/language, and biology/culture. The human voice operates at an intersection of many paradoxes (Neumark, 2010). It is disembodied yet implies a speaking body; it is utterly unique and personal to the speaker even as it operates only through intersubjectivity; it carries meaning while exceeding signification. Derrida (1967/1973) problematizes the autoaffection of speech – i.e. the unique ability of speech to have an effect on one’s own body without any mediating exteriority. This phenomenological self-presence results from the spatial and temporal simultaneity of the signifier (spoken word) and the signified (speaker's concept): “[i]t is implied in the very structure of speech that the speaker hears himself: both that he perceives the sensible form of the phonemes and that he understands his own expressive intention” (p. 78). This presence, however, is produced by an iterable difference that already inscribes an outside: “[h]earing oneself speak is not the inwardness of an inside that is closed in upon itself; it is the irreducible openness in the inside” (p. 86). The autoaffection of the voice is made possible by the movement of alterity, a movement that produces the illusion of an interior self in the first place. All metaphysical concepts related to agency and internal vs external causality emerge to cover up this mutual constitution of inside/outside and self/other.
In Herbert’s work, the V(v)oice embodies and amplifies these paradoxes. [2] Mack (2011) suggests that Herbert’s portrayal of the Bene Gesserit Voice is a response to these and similar cultural anxieties around the human voice. The speaking voice is understood as the precondition for all signification and subjectivity (particularly the voice of the mother – significant in the context of the all-female Bene Gesserit sisterhood, who take on the role in social planning once assigned to machines in a reversal of our history of “computers”). At the same time, the grain of a voice always exceeds its signification, its prerepresentational (signifiant, in Barthes’s terms: the materiality of signification itself) affective force challenging subjectivity and self-determination. For Mack, the Bene Gesserit Voice resolves these cultural anxieties around the voice through a fantasy of control. “Rather than warn readers about the problematic tendency inherent in the absolutism of the Voice, Herbert instead positions the Voice as a tool of redemption, a means by which his displaced and manipulated protagonists can regain power through careful application of their skillful abilities” (p. 54). Skilled users of the Voice practice full bodily and linguistic awareness in order to align affect with signification, thereby dominating their surroundings and achieving self-determination. However, it is significant that use of the Voice involves “registering” the voice of the target to redirect flows of desire within a preexisting affective ecology, meaning the speaker can only exercise their own agency through becoming-listener. This is why Kucera (2001) is more ambivalent about the role of authorial (i.e. Herbert’s or Paul’s) capacity to bind and dominate multiplicity under an absolute. Drawing on Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, Kucera suggests that “Herbert dramatizes, through the very vehicle designed to counter it, the seeming inescapability of the insistence upon ‘a single and unitary language’” (p. 233). The centrifugal polysemy of language and polyphony of Dune’s external dialogues and internal monologues is, in every word, in conflict with the centripetal gravity of absolute meaning imposed by the author function. At the same time, the centripetal force of the absolute is reliant on heteroglossia: at the very least a dialogic engagement between the author, the text, and the reader. The use of vocal style as an authoritarian overcoding performed through attunement with the other (or “registering” the voice) parallels the messianic absolutes that Paul reluctantly (and tragically) accepts.
This is not the single and unitary language of the speaker self-determined, but a collectivity inherent to language. Far from “a world where the voice is[...] under control of the subject” (Mack, 2011, p. 56), Dune is a world where voice is as much a means of control as a means of being surveilled, as much affecting as being affected. Deleuze & Guattari (1980/1987) identify this collective assemblage of enunciation (CAoE) as the social field that is the condition of possibility for any individuated statement: "the murmur from which I take my proper name, the constellation of voices, concordant or not, from which I draw my voice" (p. 84). A speaker's V(v)oice is always already an indirect discourse, a selected subset of the voices that traverse and constitute it and from which the speaking subject is not presupposed, but extracted as a temporary assignation of individuality. By making the order-word – an orienting and spatializing function within a CAoE – the elementary unit of discourse, they offer us an account of suasive effects prior to a subject and object of enunciation.
Even as he becomes aware of his own immortal will to power at the story’s climax, Paul realizes his own subjugation to a collective will: “All humans were alive as an unconscious single organism in this moment, experiencing a kind of sexual heat that could override any barrier. And Paul saw how futile were any efforts of his to change any smallest bit of this. He had thought to oppose the jihad within himself, but the jihad would be” (Herbert, 1965/2005, p. 608). Every step Paul takes to avoid jihad in his name inadvertently brings it about. Like Hamlet, his tragic hesitation shears against the flow of time and his voice and self-presence are revealed to be no longer his own, but “an exquisite distillation out of random patterns—endless queues of happenstance meeting at this nexus” (p. 77) that reveals the irreducible openness of his own interiority. If, as Kucera suggests, the Voice with its subtle tone shades (like the voice of the author with its rhetorical force) collapses the openness of language under the sign of the absolute, we should understand this as occurring through the temporal synchronicity of heterogeneous voices and wills. The practitioner of V(v)oice is never self-determined and autoaffecting but always already an expression of complex genetic assemblages that territorialize across both biological and memetic milieus.
Sound effects
After deconstructing the self-presence and self-determination of voice and the Voice, the problem we turn to is this: by what mechanisms does the V(v)oice act as a nexus, and how does it distribute agency in this way? I suggest that low frequencies operate in a tactile register. They territorialize in that they (1) establish a membrane through vibratory resonance; (2) do this in relation to the fluidity of an environment put in motion by the same vibration. The surround-sound design emphasizes spatial cues that are more readily apparent in high frequencies, where the shorter distance between wavelengths makes localization easier. Here we find the referential effect of language is built out of prelinguistic spatializing or orienting effects of sound (what psychologists refer to as auditory scene analysis).
The film medium lends a mystical perspective to the Voice that is downplayed in the novel, where the Bene Gesserit technique is explicitly a complex interaction between voice, word, and context (an affective function of logos in the broad sense). In the film, Jessica convinces her Harkonnen kidnappers to kill each other with just the sonority of her voice tuned to the resonant frequency of the target. In the novel, however, she must account for not only the soldiers’ voice and body, but their affective orientation: “She pitched her voice in low, intimate tones. ‘Gentlemen! No need to fight over me.’ At the same time, she writhed sinuously for [the Harkonnen soldiers’] benefit. She saw them grow tense. In this instant they were convinced of the need to fight over her. Their disagreement required no other reason. In their minds, they were fighting over her” (p. 215, emphasis in original). While the novel performs the paradoxes of the voice textually, the sound design in Denis Villeneuve’s films expressionistically renders the sound of the Voice as exterior and multiple, a constitutive precursor of subjectivity. In an opening scene, the inexperienced Paul initially fails to use the voice as his ancestral voices come through scattered and multiple. His own voice sounds as a low rumble, the bass frequencies vibrating the audience’s body but the low-pass filter muffling the sense of the command. Elsewhere, such as when Paul experiences his first prophetic spice trance in the desert, these same voices reappear, guiding Paul as they swirl in surround speakers. Only when the Voice is performed with proper technique (e.g. by Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam in an early scene of the first film) are these ancestral voices brought into temporal unity of presignifying affect and signification that absorbs the speaker and listener under the same will. Similarly, when these ancestral voices express themselves in Paul through his eventual mastery of the Voice, they are synchronized with the powerful bass frequencies of his own voice. It is worth noting here that Barthes (1972/1977) hears particular grain in the voice of Russian octavists, whose low registers reveal little emotional encoding but a wealth of information about the materiality of the body. Jasen (2016) elucidates that bass frequencies are “something more than merely physical or textual. As the agency that puts bodies at variance with themselves and their surroundings, it is a catalyst of becomings, both individual and collective” (p. 16). Dune sound designer Theo Green drew inspiration from dub artist Lee “Scratch” Perry, recording playback of the Voice through bass-heavy speakers in a resonant room to capture the spatial ambience (Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2022). Low frequency sound waves are too large to localize due to the minimal difference in sound pressure between ears, meaning the spatiality of this overdubbed Voice refuses generative orientation except for the impressions of the embedded room vibrations, which can only signify loudness: asignifying sound as the signifiant substrate for meaning. The Voice envelops the sonic apparatus in a placeless space whose only characteristics are particle motion, a low frequency warning like that of a thunderstorm building on some horizon, inescapable.
To recap: in the V(v)oice, we find low-frequency sound establishes the body as a vibratory milieu – an unstable interiority that constitutes inside/outside through sympathetic resonance. Language is spoken by enculturation and through the body of the listener; agency in Dune is a shearing effect of past and future. Whereas delocalized low-frequency and infrasonic vibration turns attention inward to the body, I now elaborate on the ways in which this combines with the orienting effects of spatiality and ecological listening, together constituting the possibility for movement.
2. The Sandworms of Dune
“I recognize your footsteps, old man.”
—Paul Atreides, Dune (2021)
Ambience
Thomas Rickert (2013) uses the concept of ambience to explore how information is enmeshed with an environment, with consciousness and subjectivity understood to be distributed and emergent. Both take place at the level of interaction between forces prior to interior/exterior (e.g. human/tech; human/nature), in a pervasive ambience. The ambience metaphor can be misleading insofar as it suggests a low velocity ecology, but the principles are most noticeable at either extreme (Henriques, 2003; Heller, 2015). Rickert’s technical sense of ambience is derived from two popular senses of the word: (1) ambience as spatiality, and (2) ambience as the irreducible multimodality of experience (Rickert, 2004). In the first sense, ambience refers to an audio signal’s reverb or echo. What differentiates a “delay” echo from a reverberation is the complex interplay of acoustic reflections at various times, volumes, and frequency distributions. As Dune sound designer Mark Mangini explains, “there are a number of embedded cues in everything that we hear in normal life because everything we hear lives in an acoustic universe. Every sound we hear bounces off a tree, bounces off the street, bounces off your nose as you speak” (Flight, 2023). The second sense of ambience is derived from Brian Eno’s notion of “ambient music.” Recognizing that processes of listening and composing are always enmeshed in an environment, Eno (and Rickert) blur distinctions between signal/noise in a situated listening experience and challenge conventions of authorial agency in favor of a distributed model of composition. E.g. the film’s score and sound design are often indistinguishable: musical vocalizations blend with hallucinated ancestral voices. Bass strings feel like rumbling stone and sand which feel like paranoia and tragedy.
The multimodal semiotics of sonic phenomena play a crucial role in the planetary ecology and political economy of Dune. [3] That the sandworms of Dune are attracted to rhythmic movement is a fact that habituates the planet’s human and nonhuman residents. It informs the precise timing of spice mining operations as well as the stochastic movement of native Fremen walking across open desert (it is characteristic of Fremen to move not silently, but with only sounds characteristic of the environment [p. 365]). In the films, it is used as a guerrilla tactic against Sardaukar soldiers by Liet Kynes and as a rhetorical proof by Chani. The harmonic resonance of Holtzman shields (otherwise omnipresent in combat scenarios) provokes visceral aggression in worms, fundamentally altering the tactics of desert combat.
Sandworms use low frequency vibration not only as communication, but to render sand viscous and permeable to movement. As in the case of whalesong, larger animals tend to process information at a lower frequency and higher transmission distance. At a sufficiently low frequency, sound is felt in the skin more than it is heard in the ears. At a sufficiently high volume, even higher frequencies can be felt even without the ears. A breakdown of frequency into rhythm and hearing into touch should then be unsurprising in the case of the sandworm. This can be seen in the cymatic patterns that appear in the sand as “wormsign,” turning the desert to quicksand as the worm approaches. These vibrational visuals echo in Paul’s prophetic visions, as prolonged exposure to the worms’ spice melange byproduct renders rigid time viscous and permeable.
This high-intensity, low-frequency vibration is what allows sandworms to mark their territory. The perception of rhythmic movement (rhythm being continuous with frequency) is therefore a sign of a rival sandworm or smaller prey. The Fremen sandwalk renders movement undetectable at the low frequency perception of the sandworm, acting as an encryption algorithm to disguise signal in noise. The thumper has the reverse effect: the equivalent of a sine-wave generator that produces pure signal. The same effect can be heard in the mouth-clicking of the Fremen makerkeeper, used to calm and kill young sandworms to extract a concentrated form of spice melange. [4] Human-generated rhythmic noise is a siren for the worms, an interpellation and sometimes a drowning. Like the Voice, calling and navigating the worm requires registering exteriority, or attunement. In addition to an opaque reference to “tuning” thumpers, it is established that some types of sand (particularly drum sand) are more resonant than others and provide both danger for desert walkers and advantage for calling the worm.
Spatialization
Michael Gallagher (2016) outlines four aspects of spatiality in relation to sonic power: location, participation, technologies, and frequency effects. First, the movement of sound through bodies allows a listener to make inferences about its location in space. For binaural listeners, the arrival time difference between two cochleae allows placement on a left-right spectrum, while more subtle differences in frequency curve based on the shape of the ear provide cues in the remaining two spatial dimensions. This filtering effect is crucial for environmental awareness and orientation in relation to semiotic cues. In the previous section, we explored how the Voice situates the listener in a CAoE and interiorizes the spoken word through low frequency pressure, which lacks distinct spatiality. Because of its tactility and ambiguity, low frequency sound is often a source of anxiety (Leventhall, Pelmear, & Benton, 2003). In the case of wormsign, the transduction of low frequency vibration through the sand highlights the power dynamics of the environment. The sheer size of the worm presumably allows it to sense and localize low-frequency sound, and thereby exercise control over its environment to an extent that is impossible for humans via a differential politics of frequency. Conversely, the presence of wormsign is an index of its movement and can be both an affective and semiotic source of fear for human residents of the planet. As Gallagher notes, however, the affective mechanisms of sonic power are not deterministic but always polysemic. The participation of Fremen in the sonic ecology of Dune – reading wormsign and writing thumpers – illustrates this two-way exercise of bodies in the propagation of sonic affects. Finally, as with the Voice, the limitations of the Dune universe (including the religious ban on electronic computation as well as environmental hazards, like the effects of Holtzman oscillation) de-emphasize technologies of sound and instead emphasize techniques, or technologies of the body such as the scrambling effect of the Fremen sandwalk.
Prophecy
The power of the voice and the desert as vibratory milieu come together in montage through multimodal depictions of sound in the film’s spice hallucination sequences, illustrating how premodal vibration functions to distribute interiority/exteriority. The ornithopter sequence that closes the second act of Part One demonstrates this vividly: (1) high frequency cues are spatializing, indicating the directionality of projectiles while low-pass roll-off indicates a barrier between the chaos of the outside and Lady Jessica’s recitation of the litany against fear, an affect modulating refrain which (as Deleuze & Guattari [1980/1987] note against a more literal reading of the concept) is best whispered rather than chanted or sung; (2) low frequencies cross the barrier (with a good LFE channel and subwoofer, the ornithopter and the storm are tactile as parts of the same movement, the same “flow of the process,” as Jamis puts it). A prophetic sequence interrupts Paul’s efforts at control (i.e. at forcing simultaneous orientation and action), explicitly recalling the movement of the sandworm. Here Paul probes the future by destabilizing time (a concept explored more thoroughly in the novel’s sequel) in the same way sandworms use vibration to destabilize sand, facilitating movement. The same ancestral voices that are invoked with each use of the Voice return to orient Paul within the CAoE. Whenever Paul projects his will into the future (through prophecy or manipulating others), there is necessarily an ancestral voice speaking through him. In his Hamlet-like states of contemplation and inaction (when a response is most demanded of him) these ancestral voices are disembodied, spatialized. His body becomes a nexus of agency and a conduit for action (“terrible purpose” in the novel) through the temporal binding of this CAoE with a despatialized, purely tactile and internal voice. The refrain establishes territory by transcoding between vibratory milieus (worm/sand; worm/human; worm/water/prophecy) and a corresponding surplus code value. E.g. the becoming-maker of the makerkeeper’s clicking facilitates a transcoding between the body of the worm and Atreides via concentrated spice melange. In the first instance with Jessica, this constitutes an auscultatory relationship between socio-technical apparatus, mother, and fetus (see Edgar, 2017). The second instance is brought about because of Paul’s prolonged exposure to the worms’ milder spice byproduct. Similar cymatic patterns introduce a spice trance wherein ancestral voices instruct Paul to drink the water of life in order to similarly render rigid time viscous and permeable. [5]
Discussion & Conclusion
“A process cannot be understood by stopping it. Understanding must move with the flow of the process, must join it and flow with it.”
—First Law of Mentat, Dune (1965/2005)
In his recent editorial “on the necessity of rhetorical theory,” Kelly (2026) argues against an easy cynicism about the role of theorizing in light of the real exercise of oppressive power. “Rhetorical theory is a metadiscourse which explains how language and symbolic action address the uncertainty and chaos of our public existence” (p. 2). Eckstein (2021) suggests there is a productive tension between sound as a method (what he calls “sound rhetoric”) and the critique of sound as cultural production (“the rhetoric of sound”). “Sound rhetoric encourages us to think of newer formulations, temporalities, and possibilities for rhetorical theory” (p. 244). Focusing on what sound does and how sound works, rather than necessarily avoiding the question of culture, has the potential to make audible the “cultural procedures that discern signal from noise” (p. 243).
I have argued that Villeneuve’s Dune films illustrate and enact how modes of vibration cut across matter to distribute interiority/exteriority. Sound as a premodal force establishes membranes between self/other and signal/noise through the play of self-difference that facilitates all movement. We hear two mechanisms in an inverse but nondetermined relationship: (1) the effect of spatiality, related to orientation within an environment; (2) the effect of tactility, related to autoaffection and movement. This tactile blurring between inside/outside and entity/environment is a constituent element of agency as an oscillation between orientation & movement, and subjectivity as surplus transduction value in this oscillatory process. This reading helps us refine concepts related to sound’s role in the enactment of power & agency (spatialization : multimodality :: CAoE : autoaffection). Sound as premodal vibration (understood through multimodal perception) is not flat and undifferentiated, but infinitely differentiated across different modes, registers, and frequencies. Watching, hearing, feeling, and reading Dune reveals two such differentiated effects: spatiality & tactility.
Derrida's critique of the voice as self-presence and his articulation of its fundamental alterity should be understood in the context of his broader project as the first deconstructive step toward new productive theorizations. Deleuze & Guattari's (1980/1987) notion of the collective assemblage of enunciation (as mediating the transduction between vibratory milieus) helps us overcome skepticism of the voice and move toward a structural understanding of the politics of voice, i.e. an account of how the façade of self-presence is produced through resonance, attunement, and the ongoing vibratory labor of territorialization. Sound studies has yet to fully move past Derrida's phonocentric critique, and for good reason (Eckstein, 2021). This paper explores the subjunctive imaginary of Dune and its adaptations as an affirmative way through without nervous dismissal.
Spatiality and tactility are not parallel features of sonic experience but constitutively interdependent mechanisms. Gallagher, Rosenfeld, and I (2022) have examined how sound invites orientation within an environment (its locative function) and facilitates an active response (its generative function). Here I suggest that agency can be understood as an oscillatory relationship between these locative and generative effects. Such an oscillation is what Deleuze and Guattari's concepts of refrain and territory make politically legible. Interiority is established through a movement of forces that comes prior to it: a membrane that takes on its barrier function through sympathetic resonance. The refrain does not describe a stable territory but the ongoing vibratory labor by which territory is produced and therefore contested. Selfhood emerges as autoaffection through the process of attunement. The resonant membrane of interior/exterior comes into being not as a binary distinction, but as a coupling that turns overflow of affect into productive desire. This is Deleuze & Guattari's (1972/2009) challenge to psychodynamic theory: subjectivity is a result of surplus value in natura naturans: not lack in a primal unity but an excess in primal multiplicity. Paul's proliferating names and titles — Kwisatz Haderach; Lisan al-Gaib; Muad'Dib; Usul — constitute the surplus of incompatible interpellations, none of which originates in him. This paper's articulation of spatiality and tactility names the two mechanisms by which this surplus is produced: spatial orientation as a representational locative function that designates an inside; tactility as a generative affective movement that reproduces while cutting across inside/outside.
Attending to this transduction requires a critical practice that offers a means to move past the differentiation of modes. Multimodal listening (Ceraso, 2014) offers a method for dislodging the Kittlerian “historical a priori” for the technical production of media; an inheritance of separate sensory channels which demands the differentiation of sensory modes. Multimodal listening and attention to the generative and locative functions of sound move us instead toward an ambient ecology in which the various modes of sound are already recombined in experience (Rickert, 2013). This differentiation is not politically neutral but habituated by the scientific analysis of the body as a set of discrete organs, each a channel to plug into for recording, manipulation, and playback (Kittler, 1986/1999). The body, as Artaud contests, is not a sum of organs; the organs are a source of irritation to the body insofar as they impose discrete boundaries on what is already a continuous encounter with the world facilitated within a vibratory milieu.
Vibrational ontology suggests a spectral rather than modal epistemology. Sound cannot be held as having a privileged interiority compared to sight nor any other sense a privileged exteriority. Rather, frequency itself distributes the semiotic functions across spectra in ways that cut across the differentiation of sense organs: ultrasound operates as visual and exteriorizing; high frequencies are aural and spatializing; midrange frequencies are vocal and symbolizing; low frequencies and infrasound are tactile and interiorizing. All are semiotic in a broad sense. There is less a separation than a series of variable interlaced mechanisms of sensation and information processing whose distribution is a function of the body encountering the environment. Consider the low frequency effects LFE channel (the .1 in 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound formats) and the subwoofer that transduces nonlocalizable, tactile effects toward a range of consequences. Not a distinct mode or pair of modes, but a set of contextually meaningful jargons that define the passage between symbolic (digital) coding and somatic vibration in relation to 5-7 discrete spatial channels (or, with Dolby Atmos, 128 discrete sound objects). Consider also the sandworm with its massive deterritorialized body, which has no use of cochlea but is able to spatialize the low frequency pressure waves of thumpers. By attending to the acoustic ecology of experience, cinematic sound design can illuminate the environment not as noise or background, but as a site rich with subtle meaning that requires attunement. Critical and social media reactions to Villeneuve’s Dune films reveal audiences’ attention to sonic detail on repeated viewing, a testament to the style of multimodal listening it encourages.
Notes
[1] Lynch’s film is noteworthy for his interpretation of the “weirding way”: in the novel, this refers to the neurophysiological awareness and full-body control that comes with Bene Gesserit training, while the film depicts it as the use of an external “weirding module” to amplify and focus frequencies of the voice, using the voice not just to influence minds but to destroy objects through sympathetic resonance.
[2] Terminological note: I capitalize Voice when referring primarily to the Bene Gesserit technique; lowercase when referring primarily to discourse; and combine V(v)oice when specifically dealing with their metonymic relationship.
[3] See Warner Bros. Entertainment (2022) on how this semiosis was expressed during the production process.
[4] A similar clicking can be heard from the Harkonnen(?) slave-handlers on Giedi Prime. Meaning-effect is ambiguous in this case but likewise correlated with sedation and death.
[5] Cf. surplus in Paul’s coding & decoding of familial & messianic titles. Paul is on one hand the object of a eugenic conspiracy by the ancient order of Bene Gesserit to breed a superhuman Kwisatz Haderach. On the other hand, he becomes the subject of a prophecy by the indigenous people of Arrakis (a psy-op by the Bene Gesserit, planted for leverage over Arrakis) that foretold the prophetic Lisan al-Gaib. This double-sided prophecy (one side true but unrealized, the other hyperstition) propels the plot forward from the second half of the novel to the end of the trilogy. A surplus value of code is derived from the tension between the two visions of the future, one structured by technological (genetic) codes, the other by spiritual (mythological) codes, each experiencing a reversal of intention and causality through the shared sign of Paul Atreides. This surplus code value is illustrated by Paul’s many proper names: given and chosen names and titles, mythic phrases from various languages, forming connections with each other as they interrupt their own signifying chains. “Muad’dib” refers to a political agency which cannot be reduced to any quantitative relation of Duke Atreides—Kwisatz Haderach—Lisan al-Gaib. “Paul” and “Usul” are then split off, generating distinct forms of intimacy which are structured by Paul/Usul’s relationship with time and “terrible purpose.” Paul is the product of many discourses which call forth different subjects. This polyvocal protagonist-as-messiah (anointed by the text in the name of god the author to carry out a task) only takes on more aspects through the trilogy until coming to its inevitable and tragic apotheosis in God Emperor of Dune.
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