Maybe I’m crazy, but I just watched the Dune: Part 3 trailer, and that sounds an awful lot like Timothee Chalamet chanting in the background. (I’m not crazy! Polygon confirms it here.) You can hear him humming softly to Chani as they talk about having a baby, and then he leads a group of Fremen in a war chant. By the end of the trailer, his chanting becomes shouting, desperate and violent as it propels the action forward.

The Hans Zimmer soundtracks for the first two Dune films have been written about extensively, and are works of genius. Zimmer invented new sounds to create a far-future aural universe where no instrument has remained unchanged except the human voice (and apparently the bagpipes). The soundtracks also explore a wide array of human vocal sounds from soprano arias to Tuvan throat singing, from whispering to chanting to shouting.

The whispers that accompany the Bene Gesserit are one of the clearest musical references to the lore of the Dune universe. They represent the ancestral memory of the sisterhood, and as such, only contain female voices. In Part 2, Paul, the Kwisatz Haderach developed the unique (for now) ability to access the generic memories of his male forebears. Zimmer’s soundtrack reflects this by introducing male voices in the ancestral whispers. This subtle difference shows how the world is changing because of Paul. I think Part 3 is going to do something similar with its soundtrack and I’m super excited to hear it.

In Dune: Messiah, Paul Atreides is no longer a Duke’s son, a desert nomad, or even a Duke himself. He is Muad’dib, the Fremen Messiah and Emperor of the Known Universe. He is presiding over a devastating galactic war and swiftly becoming one of the most important people in human history. While his singing/chanting may only play a small role in the soundtrack, I hope we hear it a lot more. Like I said above, Paul’s voice actual propels the action in the trailer, just like Paul is pushing the whole galaxy toward war and toward (or away from) his Golden Path. If Paul’s voice is a consistent, subtle presence in the music of Part 3, it would be a constant reminder that his influence is everywhere, inescapable. This is Paul’s world.

It is uncomfortable to hear Paul shouting in the background even while he speaks softly in the foreground to his mother, but that’s a perfect image of the tension of Paul’s character in this story, and the tension we feel in trying to understand him. He is a thoughtful, traumatized man who wants to live a quiet life with Chani and have children, and he is also the driving force behind a galactic jihad, the inexorable Muad’dib who has wrapped an entire religion around himself in order to bend the human race to his will. If Zimmer makes use of Chalamet’s voice throughout the score, it will illustrate this tension masterfully and make us feel empathy for Paul even as we are in horror of him, which is right where we need to be.