While researching a bit about world building in science fiction, I stumbled upon an article about James Cameron’s “Avatar.” The film, known by many as “that movie with the blue people,” earned a staggering $2.9 billion at the box office placing it in the top 5 grossing movies of all time.

The article was written by ethnomusicologist Dr. Wanda Bryant on her involvement with the film. She was tasked with creating an entire musical style that wouldn’t belong to any culture present on earth, and would work in tandem with the cultural backstory of the Na’vi (the indigenous peoples of the fictional planet Pandora). She writes in her article about how her work evolved from various samples from all over the world, including “Swedish cattle herding calls, folk dance songs from the Naga people of Northeast India, Vietnamese and Chinese traditional work songs, greeting songs from Burundi, Celtic and Norwegian medieval laments, Central African vocal polyphony, Persian tahrir, microtonal works by Scelsi, the Finnish women’s group Vârttinä, personal songs from the Central Arctic Inuit, and brush dances from northern California.”

Her article goes on to discuss how they achieved their goal of creating music totally unlike anything anybody had ever heard before, but in the process they had also distanced themselves too far from western ears for the tastes of the director and producers. In the end very little of their work made it into the film, but reading her article about the process of developing an entire musical culture for a fictional indigenous people is nothing short of fascinating.

The article can be found at this link, I strongly recommend it:

https://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/journal/volume/17/piece/583