Film scoring has always chased one elusive goal: making electronic and orchestral sounds breathe like a living performer. In recent years, MIDI Polyphonic Expression has become one of the clearest tools for closing that gap, and few examples illustrate it better than Hans Zimmer's work on Dune: Part Two.
The Osmose and "The Music of an Imaginary Future"
For the Dune: Part Two score, Zimmer worked closely with Expressive E and Haken Audio to build sounds around the Osmose, a synthesizer whose keybed responds continuously to pressure, pitch bend, and release gestures on every single key. Zimmer has explained the appeal in simple terms: on a normal piano, a note "goes 'plonk' and dies out," but on the Osmose, "within that travel of that key, the sound can change completely." That's the core promise of MPE hardware — the ability to add vibrato, swell, and shape to a note the way a violinist or guitarist would, rather than triggering a fixed sample and waiting for it to decay.
Zimmer summed up the creative payoff plainly: the instrument "let us play the music of an imaginary future" — a fitting description for a score built around a desert planet and forces beyond human control. The collaboration became one of the most visible mainstream demonstrations of what MPE can add to a score that mixes orchestral and electronic textures.
Why This Keeps Happening in Film Music Specifically
Film composers face a particular pressure that separates them from many electronic producers: they're often asked to make synthesized or hybrid sounds carry genuine emotional weight across long, dialogue-free passages, frequently on a tight turnaround. Traditional velocity-and-mod-wheel MIDI performance can sound mechanical in that context, especially on sustained pads, drones, or solo lines meant to mimic breath or bow control. MPE controllers close that gap because expression happens continuously and per-note, rather than as a single global modulation applied to an entire chord. A composer can shape one note in a cluster while three others hold steady — something no ordinary keyboard, and no ordinary orchestral sample library control scheme, allows.
The Hardware Barrier Is Coming Down
Until recently, getting this kind of expressive control meant buying a full synthesizer like the Osmose, the ROLI Seaboard, or a Haken Continuum — a serious investment for composers who already own the software instruments and sample libraries they want to control. That's shifting. Expressive E's own Osmose CE, a controller-only edition of the same keybed released this year, strips out the onboard synth engine entirely and focuses purely on sending expressive MPE data to whatever software instrument a composer is already using. It's a signal that manufacturers see demand not just from synthesizer buyers, but from composers who want the gestural keybed as a front end for their existing orchestral and electronic instrument collections — without paying for a second sound engine they won't use.
What This Means for Composers Getting Started
The good news for anyone curious about this workflow is that the entry point no longer requires a flagship instrument. Many modern sample libraries and software synths — including several orchestral and hybrid instruments built specifically with MPE in mind — already respond to per-note pitch, timbre, and pressure data out of the box. Pairing one of those instruments with almost any MPE controller, from a full keybed to a compact grid controller, is enough to start exploring the technique that Zimmer and his team used on one of the most talked-about scores of the decade. The lesson from Dune isn't that you need Hollywood-scale gear to benefit from MPE — it's that continuous, per-note expression is often the missing ingredient between a sound that plays back and one that genuinely performs.