What Does a Siren Actually Sound Like?
About a month ago, I watched Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and that one Siren scene sent me down a much bigger rabbit hole than I expected. Homer tells us exactly what their song can do to a person, but not enough for anyone thousands of years later to know what that song should actually sound like. A book can leave that to your imagination, but a film can’t.
I had never really thought about before watching it: what is a Siren actually supposed to sound like?
We all know what the Sirens do. Their song is so irresistible that sailors willingly follow it to their deaths. Odysseus has his crew block their ears and tie him to the mast so he can hear it without following it. Homer gives us the idea of a sound powerful enough to override human reason, but he obviously never left us a recording.
That becomes a pretty unusual challenge when you’re turning the story into a film. Ludwig Göransson, the film’s composer, somehow had to give the Sirens a real sound after thousands of years of people imagining it for themselves. And simply making their song beautiful wouldn’t really be enough. It had to make you understand why Odysseus would be completely drawn into it.
His answer is much stranger.
Göransson ended up building the sound around the aulos, an ancient Greek double-reed instrument that looks a little like two pipes being played at once. Göransson has called it the “rockstar instrument” of ancient Greece because of how widespread and culturally important it once was. The version heard in The Odyssey, however, had to be reconstructed. Archaeomusicologist Callum Armstrong worked with other researchers using ancient texts and surviving evidence to figure out details as basic as how its reeds might have worked, because the original organic materials haven't survived.
I love that detail because it immediately complicates the idea that Göransson simply went out and found an “ancient Greek instrument.” What we're hearing isn't a perfectly preserved sound from thousands of years ago. It is research, reconstruction and interpretation happening at the same time.
And the choice of the aulos for the Sirens is surprisingly fitting. Sirens were actually depicted playing auloi in ancient Greek art, and the instrument itself was associated with musical enchantment. Its reedy sound was even compared with birdsong. So when the aulos starts bending and almost wailing through the scene, Göransson isn't just using an unusual instrument because it sounds ancient. There is a cultural relationship between the instrument and the mythology behind what we're seeing.
But he doesn't try to make it sound like a museum piece either.
The aulos is recorded and manipulated with modern techniques, surrounded by electronics and voices. The score also draws on Albanian iso-polyphonic singing, a living vocal tradition Göransson traveled to southern Albania to record. Across the film, he combines that with lyres, synthesizers and 35 bronze gongs of different sizes.
So what sounds “ancient” in The Odyssey is actually a very modern construction.
As someone who studied ethnomusicology, this is probably the part I find most interesting. One of the first things you learn is to be careful with words like authentic. Music doesn't sit frozen inside a culture waiting for someone to reproduce it correctly centuries later. Instruments change, performance practices disappear, traditions travel, and the evidence we have of very old musical cultures is often incomplete.
We don’t actually know exactly what Bronze Age Greece sounded like, so Göransson is working with the evidence that remains and using it to build something that feels convincing.
That distinction matters because Nolan specifically asked him not to use a traditional orchestra. The modern symphony orchestra obviously didn't exist in Odysseus's world, but audiences have heard orchestras underneath historical epics for so long that they barely register as historically strange anymore. Huge strings, brass and choirs somehow sound “ancient” to us because cinema has spent decades teaching us that they do.
Göransson and Nolan took a different approach, building the score around materials that could actually belong to the world of the film. The lyre became connected to the sound of Odysseus’s bow, bronze was used for percussion, and even the sound of people striking sheets of metal during the alarm at Troy became part of the score. At that point, the line between music and sound design starts to blur, which also feels connected to a larger shift in film music toward building the sound of a world rather than simply scoring what happens within it.
Göransson did something similar with Sinners. Rather than simply writing a conventional horror score and adding some blues references, he built much of the score around a real 1932 Dobro resonator guitar, the same kind of instrument carried by Sammie in the film. He and Ryan Coogler worked with blues musicians and other tradition-bearers, and the film's music moves through blues, gospel, Irish music and other traditions because music isn't just accompanying the world of Sinners. It is the world.
Hans Zimmer's Dune scores take the idea in another direction. Because Arrakis isn't Earth, his team didn't want its music to sound comfortably orchestral either. Musicians manipulated electric cello, guitars and winds into unfamiliar textures, and woodwind specialist Pedro Eustache even developed a chromatic version of the duduk, an Armenian woodwind instrument, because the existing instrument couldn't do what the score required.
One is reconstructing an instrument from the past and the other is modifying one for an imagined future, but both are ultimately trying to make the world of the film sound like it belongs to itself.
That might be why some of the most interesting film scores right now feel less like music placed underneath a movie and more like soundscapes built from inside it. The instrument itself carries information. Where it comes from, what it is made of, how someone plays it and even how closely the microphone is placed can become part of the storytelling.
The Siren scene makes this especially clear because everything depends on what Odysseus is hearing. Rather than giving the Sirens a conventionally beautiful song, Göransson makes the sound move between something inviting and something slightly uncomfortable. The aulos can sound almost human at times and strained at others, while the voices never quite settle into something familiar. To me, that makes Odysseus’s reaction much more believable than a beautiful melody ever could.
The point isn’t really whether the Sirens sound beautiful, but whether we can understand why Odysseus can’t stop listening. That also gets at something interesting happening in film music more broadly, where the question is becoming less about what melody fits a scene and more about what the world itself should sound and feel like.
For The Odyssey, answering that meant archaeomusicologists rebuilding an instrument whose reeds disappeared thousands of years ago, an ethnomusicologist helping connect the production with a living Albanian vocal tradition, and one of Hollywood’s biggest composers putting those sounds next to synthesizers and modern production.
We’ll never know exactly what Ancient Greece sounded like, and that isn’t really what the score is trying to prove. It takes what has survived, interprets what hasn’t, and gives us one possible version of that world. So what does a Siren actually sound like? We still don’t know, but Göransson makes a pretty convincing case for what one could sound like.
