sonic dimensions of worldbuilding
how the tenet soundtrack plays with the film's central theme
A few weeks ago, I gave a talk about how Christopher Nolan & Ludwig Göransson played with time inversion in the Tenet soundtrack.
You might be wondering, didn’t Tenet come out, like, four years ago? Why does this matter now?
There’s so much growing discourse about how worldbuilding is the new brand building. How everything is spatial now – 3D, immersive, multi-sensory content, digital products and new technologies. So much of this discourse is centered around text and visual aesthetics – but I think sound is an important but often overlooked dimension to play with. Tenet’s soundtrack is an excellent example of how sound follows the same logic and mechanics as the rest of an imagined world.
If you’re already familiar with Tenet, you already know it’s, like, the most complicated movie ever. If you haven’t seen Tenet, minor spoilers ahead.
Tenet is about time inversion – a person or an object’s entropy can be reversed by passing through a portal (called a turnstile), now moving backwards through time, while the rest of the world appears to be moving forwards.
Tenet, the name itself, is a palindrome – the same forwards as it is backwards.
Time inversion is also the central theme to the soundtrack, from how the music was recorded, to how it actually sounds.
When composing and recording the soundtrack, Göransson would record musicians playing the score forwards, then reverse the sheet music, then have the musicians play the same thing but backwards, then reverse that recording, then layer the two recordings over each other. The end result, when both are played simultaneously, is a sound that is ambiguous as to whether you’re listening to music playing forwards or backwards – because it’s actually both.
In Tenet, Robert Pattinson plays the character Neil. This is a raw recording of the orchestra playing Neil’s motif forwards, taken from Göransson’s breakdown of the soundtrack on Rolling Stone.
Now, this is what it sounds like when the orchestra is playing his motif forwards and backwards at the same time, run through some effects. The end result is this beautiful ocean wave-like sound, ambiguous as to whether his motif is moving forwards or backwards.
John David Washington’s character, The Protagonist, also has a motif that follows his character throughout the film.
What’s interesting is when you play Neil’s motif backwards, Neil’s reversed chord progression becomes the harmonic support that perfectly matches the melody of The Protagonist’s motif moving forwards. The Protagonist moving forwards = Neil moving backwards, and vice versa.
In the film, there’s a concept called a temporal pincer movement – two teams work towards the same objective, but one team (the red team) in the present is moving forwards through time, while the other team (the blue team) is moving backwards in time from the future, and they meet in the middle to share information.
This concept plays out in the final action sequence of the film. As the scene happens, in the music playing underneath it, there’s heavy percussion that’s driving forwards, while a guitar and repetitive snare drum play in reverse.
This is what the same audio sounds like when flipped backwards. You’ll notice that no matter if it’s played forwards or backwards, it sounds the same – like a musical palindrome. Just like the title of the film.
So, as you approach worldbuilding and spatial design, how can sound become a new dimension to play with? As you develop your brand, your experience, your lore – how can sound expand and fully crystallize the central concept, the north star that they coalesce around?
Nick Susi is a strategy executive and entrepreneurial builder transforming partners through community-powered cultural knowledge. He is formerly the Head Of Strategy and co-founder of Complex Collective, Complex Networks’ community-powered cultural intelligence org. He previously led digital strategy for the startup that built Jay Z’s media brand, Life+Times, was one of the early core team members of community-powered research collective RADAR and co-founded a music management company guiding artists, songwriters and producers.