Name: Listening To Blade Runner
Uploaded: 2026-03-16T17:16:52.000Z
Duration: 8 min 6 s
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It's impossible to imagine the long awaited sequel to Blade Runner without some version of the iconic music that Vangelis composed for the original.

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That's because the Blade Runner score is more than a score.

It's an indispensable element of the movie.

I mean, you could make that argument about almost all film music.

A movie minus its music is not the same movie.

I mean, that's true too, if you were to swap one kind of music for another.

In the video I did on Howard Shore's incredible leitmotifs in the Lord of the Rings, I tried to show how the score helped guide and elevate the emotional beats of the story.

It's a great work from a great composer and hugely influential on the trilogy.

But I think Blade Runner's music is different.

The score isn't laid on top of the visuals.

The music is sort of baked into the DNA of the movie itself.

All the audio that you hear, including score, sound, design and dialogue, it's tightly integrated.

This integration is really what separates Blade Runner from other science fiction films.

After all, electronic music had been a staple of science fiction cinema for three decades by then, going all the way back to Bernard Herrmann's use of the theremin in the Day the Earth Stood Still.

Herrmann and other revolutionary composers like like Lewis and Bebe Baron used winding, bending, sputtering electronic sounds to evoke aliens and alien planets.

Blade Runner is somewhere in the middle between the amelodic soundscapes of Forbidden Planet and the grand symphonic themes of something like Star Wars.

Mengelis is pulling from that same toolbox of electronic sounds.

But these noises are put to use for a more musical purpose.

In order to achieve that dreamlike quality that the film has.

The audience shouldn't be able to identify where the music music ends and the world begins.

The atmospherics that infuse this scene are a good example of what I'm talking about.

They sound a little bit like wind chimes, something that could very well be in the space and match pretty well with the dancing light on the walls.

And yet the sound is so layered with faint computery noises that it could also be a machine somewhere in the room.

It also serves as a kind of atmospheric bed from which the clearly non diegetic not in the world strings rise as Rachel enters.

Even the dialogue has a lot of reverb, giving it the same dreamy quality as the score.

Of course, reverberation is absolutely everywhere in Blade Runner.

You could even say that it's the manipulation of reverb that gives Blade Runner its distinct feeling.

And though Vangelis is such a virtuoso at wielding it, the digital reverb that you hear in this movie was something relatively new to me.

The world's first digital reverberation machine, the EMT250, was released only six years before Blade Runner premiered in 1982.

We hear it when we're in big spaces, how our voice reverberates and decays across the room.

Digital reverb uses algorithms to extend that decay even more.

The Lexicon 224, which is what Vangelis use for Blade Runner, could extend decays up to 70 seconds, allowing you to make spacey, ethereal sounds like this.

The emphasis on reverb accomplishes a few things.

As essayist Andrew Stiller noted, heavy reverb, because it implies a huge, enclosed, hard surface space, creates a mood of mystery and paranoia.

It also gives everything a feeling of distance, as if the audio is coming from far away, like in a dream.

And finally, reverberation blends things together.

And this is one of the crucial ways Vangelis folds separate audio sources into one aural master track.

Every scene is composed to create this cohesive acoustic environment.

Sometimes the emphasis is on dialogue or sound effects.

Other times it's on the nostalgic music that calls back to classic film noir.

Except that solo saxophone was never actually used in classic film noir, which is a whole nother video.

But anyway, most of these scenes were interpreted by Vangelis on the spot.

The way he composed the music for Blade Runner was by watching the freshly edited scenes on a screen in his studio and playing whatever they evoked in him.

At the time, he used Primarily the Yamaha CS80, an analog synthesizer featured so prominently in Blade Runner that Vangelis has his own section in the CS80 Wikipedia page.

Even today, the CS80 is prized among audiophiles.

It seems like anybody who ever writes about it describes it as a living, breathing thing.

That's partly down to the fact that the keys were pressure sensitive.

So the sound that it produced has a marvelous acoustic quality.

In a way, it's the perfect instrument for Blade Runner, a machine with the ability to match the emotional weight of the real thing.

See, in one, in one go, you can have from there to there is different Sound to there, which is different.

Again, As much as possible, Vangelis used his spontaneous first take compositions and the result is a deeply personal reaction to the images.

A second vision that fuses with the director's own.

Vangelis, like the great composer Edgard Vereys before him, attempted to bring to life the complete sound profile of the city, interpreted through the genres of Blade Runner.

Anybody who's lived in a large metropolis knows that sound is a constant feature there.

At night, you might hear a siren or a scream somewhere in the distance.

We may not have wheezing or sputtering machines, but

these days we sure have a lot of beeping ones.

Vangelis strings all these disparate noises together with musical themes that are stunning and appropriate.

When the music swirls, it's as if it's coming from within the characters themselves.

Unfortunately, Vangelis isn't coming back for Blade Runner 2049.

His job is going to Johann Johansson, a great composer who's worked with director Denis Villeneuve three times before.

I mean, everybody's gonna be waiting for him to play someone else's iconic music.

If I were him, I'd resist the urge to mimic Vangelis completely.

As much as I'd like to hear every classic note again, the sequel deserves music as personal and human as its original.

I'm excited to hear Johan Johansen's interpretation of a world that so many of us are so eager to return to.

This episode was brought to you by the Great Courses Plus.

The Great Courses plus is an on demand video learning service, which basically means that it's got around 7,000 online video lecture series from some great Ivy League professors and other professors about all kinds of subjects.

One that I think you should really check out is called Music and the Brain by Professor Patel, which explores in depth the neurological relationship to music over 18 awesome episodes.

If you go to thegreatcoursesplus.com nerdwriter it's the first link in the description.

You can get a 30 day free trial and after that, annual memberships are $14.99 a month and monthly memberships are $19.99 a month.