An inspirational sound designer is Mark Mangini, born in Boston 1956 he grew up as a musician, specifically a guitarist. In 1976 he started his career in the industry “intended on becoming an interpreter at the U.N. until he could no longer ignore his love of film and moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in film.”
His first job in entertainment was a sound editor for a cartoon from Hanna Barbera Studios. soon after he had a twenty-five year run as owner and operator of post-production sound company, Weddington Productions Inc. Now as a Supervising Sound Editor, Sound Designer, and Re-recording mixer at Formosa Features, a Musician and Lecturer, Mangini continues to make his life’s work creating unimagined aural worlds and fabricated sonic realities for theatrical motion pictures.
And its one of his recent works that I would like to focus on: Dune (2021, Denis Villeneuve) has brilliant sound design. “Whereas many productions bring in sound designers after many of the visuals have already been finalized, supervising sound editor Mark Mangini (who worked with Villeneuve on Blade Runner 2049) began building the audioscape of Dune from its early days of production. As a result, the sound actually informs all sorts of things we see on-screen, and even fills in some of the conceptual gaps of the Dune series. (How can a giant worm actually burrow through so much sand? It vibrates with a low frequency to displace particles.) Mangini’s team set up in a hotel on the edge of Death Valley, and quickly learned that one of the tropes of the desert we know—the omnipresent howl of dry wind—was an invention of film, repeated by film. In fact, dunes are often still, silent places, and when they aren’t, they actually sing and groan much like an ominous soundtrack. The team sourced sounds from nature, dragging microphones through the sand to simulate a worm, hammering the earth with a rubber mallet to capture the sound of a “thumper” gadget that the citizens of Arrakis use to summon the beasts. While these sounds are post-processed by cutting-edge audio software to enhance various characteristics, the core is organic, and thereby believable.”
https://www.fastcompany.com/90697830/deconstructing-the-psychedelic-sounds-of-dune