2.1 Mellé’s innovations

Born in New Jersey in 1931, Mellé was first and foremost a jazz saxophonist, and when he was just nineteen years old, he became the first white musician signed to the prestigious Blue Note label (Bettencourt Reference Bettencourt2004; Burlingame Reference Burlingame2004). During the 1950s, he established a strong reputation for himself not just as a reliable Greenwich Village session player but also as a designer of album covers. Formally trained neither in music nor in engineering, yet intrigued by what he read about the sonic capabilities of the RCA Mark II Synthesiser that, with much fanfare in 1957, had been installed at Columbia University, Mellé began to scour army-surplus stores in search of what he needed to tinker together various devices whose electronically generated sounds were not merely programmable but performable. Very much in the shadow of similar-minded but commercially more savvy developers such as Robert Moog and Donald Buchla, Mellé eventually built up a collection of instruments that he first displayed in public, three years after relocating from New York to Los Angeles in the hopes of breaking into the film/television business, at a 1967 gig at the Monterey Jazz Festival with a quartet he called the Jazz Electronauts.

With this quartet – which, along with himself on soprano saxophone, included pianist Forrest Westbrook, bassist Benfaral Matthews, and drummer Fred T. Stofflet – Mellé attracted a modicum of notice at Monterey and convinced the Verve label to commit the group’s sounds to vinyl. In the liner notes for the 1968 Verve album titled TOME VI, Mellé wrote that his invented instruments produced sounds not emulative of sounds that already existed but, rather, sounds that were ‘strongly indigenous to [the instruments] themselves’. And at length he described at least some of these instruments, among them the Electar (an entirely electronic device whose means of access was somehow comparable to that of a plucked-string instrument and which allowed the performer to control such parameters as ‘pitch, decay, and amplitude’), an Envelope that generated mostly rhythmic ‘mutations’ of notes played on bass or cello, a Doomsday Machine that was ‘a lower register’ version of an otherwise not mentioned Electronic Cymbal, a modestly named Effects Generator (‘capable of producing arpeggiated passages of infinite variety and complexity’), and the album’s eponymous Tome VI (whose acronymic name derives from ‘transistorized oscillator/modular envelope’ and which was ‘a subminiature system of … circuitry built into a conventional soprano sax’) (Mellé Reference Mellé1968).

Commentators on the Monterey performance were largely indifferent to what Mellé and his colleagues had to offer. Remarking on the festival’s Sunday afternoon ‘experimental’ session that featured not just Mellé’s ensemble but also the Don Ellis Orchestra and a group fronted by Ornette Coleman, a columnist for the Los Angeles Sentinel noted that the entire affair ‘only succeeded in having people walk out of the stadium in droves’ (Robinson Reference Robinson1967); an anonymous writer for Newsweek observed that ‘for the futurists’ in the crowd the festival indeed featured ‘cosmic crashes and busy-signal bleeps supplied by the Gil Mellé quartet’, and that all this was contextualised by Mellé almost condescendingly saying: ‘We play these [invented instruments] solely because they increase the range of sound the group can produce, not … to impress you’ (anon. 1967).

Reviewers of the ensuing TOME VI album of course noted the group’s sonic palette, but for the most part – almost as if they were responding directly to Mellé’s address to the Monterey audience – by the new-fangled sounds themselves they were not impressed. Journalistic response to the Electronauts’ characteristic sound – a sound described by a latter-day critic as ’a breezy blend of cool jazz and modal jazz with electronic sounds interwoven naturally into the mix’ (Holmes Reference Holmes2017: 238) – was on the whole tepid, and in the long run the results of Mellé’s experiments came to be regarded, as Richard S. Ginell politely put it in a retrospective review of the TOME VI album, as ‘merely a curiosity’ (Ginell Reference Ginell2017).

What director Wise actually thought of TOME VI is anyone’s guess, but he must have been at least intrigued by some of its sonorities. It was surely the album’s unusual sounds, not its ‘cool’ and ‘modal’ elements, that caught Wise’s ear.Footnote ³ In a memoir, Wise noted that he ‘listened to a number of people who were doing electronic music at the time’ and eventually ‘settled on Gil Mellé’ (Leeman 1995: 199–200). But this settling on Mellé, to judge both from Wise’s further comments and from what Mellé told Larson, resulted less from Wise’s audition of TOME VI than from a face-to-face meeting early in 1970 during which a 39-year-old novice somehow managed to convince a 66-year-old Hollywood veteran that he was the one person on the scene who could provide a still-aborning new project with music at the same time rich in what the filmmaker vaguely said he wanted and absolutely devoid of what the filmmaker in no uncertain terms said he did not want.

2.2. Mellé vis-à-vis Forbidden Planet and The Birds

In his interview with Larson, Mellé admitted to being quite familiar with Forbidden Planet, the 1956 MGM production that most people today would probably say was in fact the first Hollywood film to be accompanied entirely by electronic sounds. But Mellé insisted that what Louis and Bebe Barron had done for Forbidden Planet was neither music nor a composed score. It was all just noises, he said, generated by ‘ordinary test equipment that you would find in any television repair station’ (Larson Reference Larson2005: 25).

It is true that for Forbidden Planet the Barrons did not compose film music in the traditional sense, which is to say that they did not view, or contemplate, particular filmic moments and then set about creating, in effect from scratch, music to match those moments; rather, they studied scenes of the film and then selected materials from their vast collection of tape-recorded sounds – triggered not so much by store-bought equipment as by hand-made circuits that often burned up as soon as they were animated by electricity – and in numerous ways transformed them, or combined them, into aural materials that they felt in genuinely musico-dramatic ways suited the film’s assorted romantic, comedic, or frightful needs (Leydon Reference Leydon and Hayward2004; Wierzbicki Reference Wierzbicki2005). It is also true that producer Dore Schary, who originally commissioned the Barrons to come up with only a few futuristic sound effects but eventually came to believe that what they had done quite on their own indeed constituted a serviceable film score, only at the last minute changed his mind about what to call the Barrons’ work; probably troubled by a memorandum circulated by MGM’s legal department that in effect wondered if the powerful Hollywood chapter of the American Federation of Musicians might object to a film score that involved not a single human performer, Schary just days before Forbidden Planet’s release decided to identify the Barrons’ work, in the opening credit sequence, not as electronic ‘music’ but as ‘electronic tonalities’ (Rubin Reference Rubin1975: 12) (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Title credit for Louis and Bebe Barron’s contribution to the 1956 film Forbidden Planet.

Alfred Hitchcock’s 1963 The Birds came up not at all in Larson’s extended interview with Mellé, and one can only wonder what Mellé’s reactions might have been if this film’s electronically generated sonic elements had been brought to his attention. The Birds is unusual, not just for Hitchcock but for Hollywood in general, in that its only two instances of music per se (a fragment of a Debussy Arabesque tinkled on a piano, a ditty sung by children in advance of the assault on their schoolhouse by a vicious murder of crows) are innocuously diegetic. Yet as François Truffaut observed in his book-length series of interviews with Hitchcock, ‘the bird sounds’ throughout the film seem to be ‘worked out’ as if they were components of ‘a real musical score’ (Truffaut Reference Truffaut1985: 297). Truffaut called special attention to the film’s penultimate scene, which depicts a four-and-a-half-minute avian attack on an isolated house; this climactic scene contains no dialogue, and all of its sounds – not just the bird-related screeches and squawks but also the noises of windows being shattered, logs being tossed into a flaming fireplace, furniture being dragged across a wooden floor, and nails being hammered into makeshift barricades – result from a synthesiser called the Mixtur-Trautonium (Wierzbicki Reference Wierzbicki2008).

Hitchcock did not need to be reminded by Truffaut that this particular sequence of electronic sounds, like various shorter sequences scattered throughout the film, was deftly put together by someone who throughout his long career thought of himself not as a technician but as a composer. Reluctant to call it ‘music’, Hitchcock in the title sequence for The Birds nevertheless acknowledged that the significant contribution made to his film by German Trautonium expert Oskar Sala amounted to much more than mere sound effects. For contractual reasons granting pride of place in the credit sequence to Remi Gassmann, an American who had studied with Sala in the 1930s and who in the making of The Birds played no role whatsoever except to broker the relationship between the filmmaker and his former teacher (Wierzbicki Reference Wierzbicki2008), Hitchcock rightly described Sala’s work not just as ‘electronic sound production’ but also, significantly, as ‘composition’ (see Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Title credit for Oskar Sala’s contribution to the 1962 film The Birds.

2.3. Different working methods

Without MGM executives aware of what they were up to, and working only from a rough cut of the complete film, Louis and Bebe Barron, whose previous cinematic experience amounted to providing sonic support for just a few non-narrative avant-garde films, pieced together what eventually came to be accepted as Forbidden Planet’s full score entirely within the small confines of their New York apartment. Responding to film reels sent to him from Hollywood, Oskar Sala, who by this time had worked often with German filmmakers and was quite familiar with the idea of sound/image synchronisation, generated all of his sonorities for The Birds, bit by meticulous bit, at the West Berlin facility that housed the one-of-a-kind Mixtur-Trautonium that he had spent years developing. Hitchcock and a sound-related entourage indeed paid a visit to Sala at his West Berlin studio, but this was just before the film’s release, and largely for publicity purposes; in advance of this face-to-face meeting, Sala’s communication with Hitchcock had consisted only of cablegrams and the trans-Atlantic exchange via postal services of film reels both with and without sound (Wierzbicki Reference Wierzbicki2008).

Very much in contrast to how the Barrons and Sala devised their electronic sounds for Forbidden Planet and The Birds, Mellé concocted his Andromeda Strain score as the film was being made, during nighttime hours at a well-equipped recording studio on the Universal Studios lot that during the day was used for more conventional purposes. For the sake of a 17 January 1971 article in the Los Angeles Times, music critic Martin Bernheimer twice observed Mellé in action, the first time when at least some of the music in the face of projected portions of the still in-progress film was being created, the second time ‘a few weeks later’, when ‘the scene [had] shifted’ from the nocturnal workroom ‘to a dubbing studio’ in which director Wise and ‘attendant console engineers’, equipped with what was considered to be ‘the finished print’ of the film, were attempting to mix Mellé’s music with both dialogue and sound effects (Bernheimer Reference Bernheimer1971, Y1 and Y42).

Bernheimer wrote that at the time of his second visit to the Universal lot ‘ten weeks had elapsed since Mellé began working on the film’ (Bernheimer Reference Bernheimer1971, Y42), and more than a decade later Mellé told Larson that the Andromeda project ‘took me ten weeks of recording’ (Larson Reference Larson2005: 25). There is good reason to believe, however, that Mellé in fact worked on the film score for quite a bit more than just ten weeks. A credible note on the Intrada label’s 2010 CD re-issue of the film’s so-called ‘soundtrack album’ informs us that the content of this album was recorded at Universal Studios not just on 13–14 December 1970 (which would have been five weeks before Bernheimer’s article was published) but also on 12 and 14 October 1970 (which would have been thirteen weeks in advance of Bernheimer’s article).

However long Mellé in fact worked on his music for The Andromeda Strain, it surely was early in the process that he decided on his sonic materials, which included not just sounds produced on electronic instruments of his own making but also conventional yet easily transformable sounds produced by a small group of hand-picked instrumentalists (bassist Dave Parlato, flautist Gretel Shanley, percussionist Brian Moffat, pianist Peter Robinson) and likewise easily transformable noises that he collected at such sites as bowling alleys, lumber mills, and Pasadena’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. These materials, once they had been tweaked to Mellé’s liking, were stored on the individual bands of a 24-track tape. Then, either before or as clips of the film were made available to him, with his fingers on the tape deck’s numerous sliders, Mellé in effect ‘improvised’ his music ‘in real time’ for the sake of a two-channel recording device (Larson Reference Larson2005: 26).

Some of Mellé’s recorded cues, upon being matched with film in the dubbing studio, had to be re-done, not because they were sonically faulty but because director Wise felt that a certain timbre or gesture hinted even slightly at the ‘standard background music score’ that, in this particular film, he wanted very much to avoid (Leeman Reference Leeman1995: 199). Indeed, Wise had charged his composer of choice with creating what Mellé described as ‘a kind of non-score’, something that would be theatrically viable yet which featured ‘no themes, no chords, no harmonic structure’ (Larson Reference Larson2005: 26). Eager to please a director whose keen ears had earlier been applied to the successful making of such diverse films as The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), West Side Story (1961), and The Sound of Music (1965), Mellé repeatedly adjusted his cues until they met Wise’s desire for a sonic ‘underpinning’ that would ‘heighten the tenseness of the film’ but which on the whole was less like conventional music than like ‘sound effects’ (Leeman Reference Leeman1995: 199–200). At last satisfied, Wise – doubtless aware of how MGM had labelled the Barrons’ score for Forbidden Planet and of how Hitchcock had labelled the panoply of electronic sounds that figured so importantly in The Birds – hesitated not at all in calling Mellé’s work what in fact it was. Without qualifiers, the credit sequence describes Mellé’s contribution to The Andromeda Strain simply as ‘music’ (see Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Title credit for Gil Mellé’s contribution to the 1971 film The Andromeda Strain.

3.1. The album

According to Universal Pictures’ legally necessary and thus quite official cue sheet, the music labelled ‘Wildfire’ that underscores the film’s main title sequence lasts precisely two minutes and twenty-nine seconds, but on the album the same-labelled track is extended for twelve seconds more than that. More remarkable, the album tracks labelled ‘Xenogenesis’ and ‘Strobe Crystal Green’ are both much longer than the corresponding cues that occur late in the film and which sonically animate things that the scientists see through their high-powered microscopes; according to the cue sheet, these compositions have lengths of 1:32 and 1:47, respectively, yet on the album they have lengths of 2:40 and 4:55. In the film, the three interrupted parts of the cue labelled ‘Desert Trip’, which accompanies a pair of the scientists’ dusty arrival at the research facility, last in toto just 1:24, but on the album the same-titled music is afforded an interrupted duration of 4:14. According to the cue sheet, the music labelled ‘Op’, which underscores a routine body-cleansing procedure, lasts a mere twenty-four seconds; on the album, the same-titled music sounds for almost three minutes.

Whereas most of the album’s six tracks involve extensions of same-labelled film cues, two of them are compressions of what is heard in the film. Early in The Andromeda Strain Mellé’s music for a short while accompanies the exploration by two of the mustered scientists of the town where the satellite has been recovered; later in the film – beginning at the 0:53:20 mark, just before the start of what is quietly labelled Day Three of the main story’s four-day timeline – this same grim music for a much longer while haunts not just the chief scientist’s recollections of his own visit to the decimated town but also the troubled dreams of two of his colleagues who, even though they themselves had not seen the town’s dead bodies, nevertheless have deep-rooted anxieties about infections run amok; on the cue sheet labelled ‘The Piedmont Elegy’ Parts I and II, these pieces of music have lengths of, respectively, 0:57 and 2:24, but on the album the sonic material is presented as a single item lasting 2:22. Similarly, twice in the film, first (at the 1:17:58 mark) when the two scientists who have been microscopically scanning the satellite’s surface first discover a peculiar speck of debris, then later (at the 1:47:33 mark), after the deadly spawn of this minuscule speck has at last been assigned a codename based on the sector of the skyscape from which the satellite seems to have descended, Mellé illustrates the researchers’ much-concerned reactions with music labelled ‘Andromeda’; according to the cue sheet, the first instance of this dire-sounding music, impactful even though its sonic essence is subordinated to dialogue heavily laden with technical language, lasts an unusually long 6:02, and in its second instance, offered in circumstances hardly more optimistic, it lasts 1:56; on the album, the ‘Andromeda’ music that contains the sonic essence of both of these dramatically crucial film cues has a duration of just 2:33.

The title of the second of the album’s eight tracks, ‘Hex’, corresponds with nothing listed on the official cue sheet, and careful listening suggests that the main content of this richly textured music in fact occurs nowhere in the film score. The liner notes for the album, authored by Universal Studios publicist Harold Mendelsohn and surely based on information provided by the composer himself, state that the ‘Hex’ music is ‘heard during the sequence depicting the search for Andromeda through the scanning microscope’ (Mendelsohn Reference Mendelsohn1971), and an enthusiastic reviewer of the CD re-issue declares that the ‘brilliantly conceived’ ‘Hex’ motif – characterised by ‘six other-worldly flutes’ that ‘resonate and join with a mid-register pulsing rhythm and pizzicato bass adorned with an electronic rendering of a harpsichord with shimmering metallic effects’ – enters the film whenever the scientists visually contemplate the alien entity’s ‘purity of form’ (Lysy Reference Lysy2020). Doubtless drawing upon this erroneous yet nonetheless published information, the Artificial Intelligence robot that lately has taken control of the Google search engine assuredly informs us that the ‘Hex’ music is repeatedly heard in scenes ‘where the Andromeda organism is being studied under the electron microscope’ and that it ‘specifically underscores the moment when the crystal is bombarded with X-rays and begins exponential replication’ of itself’.Footnote ⁵

Actual human intelligence – of the sort that involves a functioning brain and a keen set of ears applied to repeated listening to the relevant portions of the film – informs us that this is simply not the case. Composed and committed to a master tape long before the film’s dubbing sessions took place, Mellé’s not insubstantial ‘Hex’ music may well have been intended for footage of the sort that the AI robot so eloquently describes; it may also well be that, as often happens in the making of films, for one reason or another this perfectly worthy music was at the last minute consigned to the cutting-room floor. In any case, it seems at least possible that one of the ‘Hex’ track’s sonic elements – not the dark mix of low-register flute sonorities that marks the start of each of its three main sections, and not the high-register keyboardish tinkles that close them, but, rather, the sibilant ‘throb’ that several times over the music’s course waxes and wanes – was recycled in some of the shorter cues that Mellé composed, perhaps under considerable time pressure, relatively late in the post-production process.

In the album liner notes the 3:57 ‘Hex’ track is described, glossily but not inaccurately, as being made up mostly of the intermixed and ‘altered electronically’ sounds of no less than six flutes peppered with articulations based on the noise of ‘buzz saws’ (Mendelsohn Reference Mendelsohn1971). In similar fashion, the liner-note author describes the title music as ‘a rapid-fire display of counter rhythms and polymeric excitement’, employing ‘ten electronically processed pianos in the low undulating section[s]’ as well as ‘rhythmic accents’ derived from sounds recorded in ‘a bowling alley’. About the album’s other six tracks, Mendelsohn rhapsodises quite a lot but offers little solid musical information. writing only that the ‘Piedmont Elegy’ music uses ‘electronic piano and string basses as [its] principal voices’, that the ‘Desert Trip’ track makes use of an invented instrument that Mellé called the Percussotron III, that in the ‘Xenogenesis’ music there is heard ‘an amalgam’ of sounds produced not just electronically but also quite conventionally by ‘contrabass, percussion and electric piano’, and that the ‘Strobe Crystal Green’ music features, along with a ‘pizzicato bass’ and ‘electronically produced’ bass clarinet passages, ‘a single [Percussotron] performance by the composer [himself] without benefit of overdubbing’ (Mendelsohn Reference Mendelsohn1971).

3.2. The film score

Wise’s The Andromeda Strain has a duration of 2:10:10. The three-page official cue sheet – dated 22 March 1971, one day after the film had its first showing in New York – lists twenty-three items attributed to Mellé (see Figure 4).

Figure 4.

Universal Studios’ cue sheet for The Andromeda Strain.

The longest of these, as mentioned, is the 6:02 first iteration of the music labelled ‘Andromeda’ that is heard early in the ninth of the film’s fourteen reels. Other relatively long cues previously mentioned include the 2:29 main title music, the tripartite 1:24 ‘Desert Trip’ music in the fourth reel, the 2:24 second iteration of the ‘Piedmont Elegy’ music in the sixth reel, the 1:32 ‘Xenogenesis’ music in the eleventh reel, and, in the twelfth reel, both the 1:56 recapitulation of the ‘Andromeda’ music and the 1:47 ‘Strobe Crystal Green’ music. Longish cues not previously mentioned, both of them heard in the film’s fourteenth and final reel, are the 2:45 ‘The Central Core’ music that excitedly accompanies the de-activation of the research facility’s self-destruct mechanism and the 2:10 ‘601’ music (named for a coded signal for ‘system overload’) that in the film’s epilogue provides a barely audible underscore for the chief scientist’s warning to governmental officials that just because the so-called Andromeda strain no longer poses a threat (due not to anything the scientists did but only to a fortuitous mutation that the scientists simply observed) hardly means that similar threats might not arise in the future.

Granting that the content of the three-page cue sheet as reproduced above may not be clear unless the reader magnifies the image, I offer here a partial transcription of the cue sheet that itemises not just cue titles and their durations but also the specific reels in which Mellé’s music is or is not heard:

A mere glance at this listing is probably enough to give anyone the not inaccurate impression that Mellé’s music for The Andromeda Strain is more abundant in the film’s second half than in the first. This impression is made all the more clear by a graph that shows the distribution of Mellé’s cues over the film’s entire duration (see Figure 5).

Figure 5.

Chart showing the distribution of Gil Mellé’s music over the entire duration of The Andromeda Strain.

That the film’s longest stretch of music – the Reel IX cue labelled ‘Andromeda, Part I’, represented in the graph by the thickest of the red-coloured vertical bars – begins almost precisely at what Pythagorean-minded analysts might call the ‘Golden Mean’ of the film’s duration is perhaps just coincidence. What seems hardly coincidence is the fact that this extended musical cue, even though it very much plays under dialogue – marks the film’s turning point, that is, the exact moment when two of the sequestered scientists realise, with unconcealed horror, that what the Wildfire team has been dealing with is not a germ or a virus but, rather, a still inexplicable entity that seems to replicate itself by drawing energy from whatever it neighbours.

The obvious climax of The Andromeda Strain happens shortly before the film’s end, when, amidst alarms and laser blasts from robotic sentries, one of the team members heroically climbs up through the research facility’s central core and, with seconds to spare, deactivates the facility’s self-destruct mechanism. (It is important to note that by the time of this late moment in the film, as in the novel to which the screenplay closely adheres, the so-called Andromeda strain has mutated, quite on its own, into something that no longer poses a threat to earthly organisms but which nevertheless, as had just been demonstrated in the film’s ‘Polygran Incident’ scene that depicts the demise of a military pilot who for the sake of yet another ‘look-see’ flies over the originally infected town, has a seriously corrosive effect on plastic; it is only the corruption of some of its plastics-based seals – not its sensing that a possibly dangerous contaminant has invaded its environment – that causes Wildfire’s electronic brain to automatically shift, as it had been programmed to do, into its self-destruct mode.) With a racing underscore and loud bursts of diegetic noise, the film’s ‘Central Core’ episode, both in presentation and placement, holds very much to the ‘grand finale’ model established by decades’ worth of cinematic thrillers. It could be argued, however, that the film’s true peak had occurred some thirty minutes earlier, in the visually brilliant yet musically quiet scene that features the first of Mellé’s ‘Andromeda’ cues.

As noted above, director Robert Wise requested from Mellé a score that had less in common with conventional film music than with sound effects. Accordingly, Mellé provided the 130-minute film with a half-hour’s worth of material that at least in three instances has so much the quality of sound effects that the casual listener – that is to say, the typical movie-goer – might be hard-pressed to think of it as music.Footnote ⁶

All three of these sonically ambiguous instances occur early in the film, and each of them for just a few seconds (in the Reel II cues labelled ‘Communique’ and ‘D.C.’, at the 5:15 and 17:16 marks, in the Reel IV cue labelled ‘The Situation Room’, at the 32:38 mark) stridently accompanies the presentation of textual information of the sort that screenwriter Nelson Gidding, in the 28 May 1970 final version of his ‘cinescript’, describes as resembling ‘a teletype printout, in white letters’, that ‘CLATTERS across a black band at [the] bottom of [the] frame’ (Gidding Reference Gidding1970: 6, 20, 44). Had director Wise assigned the making of these quasi-printouts’ noise to the sound crew headed by James Alexander, the results – as with all the hisses and hums and whirrs and clicks associated with the research facility’s high-tech machinery, and as with the jerky rat-a-tat that accompanies (at the 9:52 mark) a close-up view of an actual teletyped message – likely would have been convincingly realistic but neither impactful nor memorable. By instead giving the assignment to Mellé – and one can only wonder if this was perhaps at the composer’s request – Wise injected into The Andromeda Strain a subtle yet potent element that seems to have gone unnoticed, or at least unmentioned, even by the most ardent of the film’s many online fans.

The just-mentioned teletyped message whose black-lettered content is plainly visible not just to the film’s audience but also to whatever unseen filmic characters might be looking on is in fact very much relevant to the film’s barely started narrative, for it specifically names the individuals who are to be recruited in the case of a ‘wildfire’ emergency. In marked contrast, the three texts whose bold white letters, as per Gidding’s instructions, flash from right to left across the screen have nothing at all to do with the narrative; seen only by the film’s audience, these texts’ terse content serves only to establish the locales of discussions (one of them at an Air Force base, two of them in Washington) by assorted bigwigs. As scored by Mellé, however, these extra-diegetic texts seem to be already infected by the mysterious whatever-it-is that the scientists only later in the film manage to identify. Hardly mere clatterings, all three of these brief cues within their thick percussive textures very much contain what Mellé later would suggest was the single most important element of his Andromeda score, an element that was not ‘a musical sound in any sense’ but just ‘a pulsation’ that would ‘communicate to the audience [the idea] that the virus’ even though unseen was nevertheless ‘in the vicinity and [thus] posing great danger’ (Larson Reference Larson2005: 26).

Whether based on electronically generated sounds or transformations of noises recorded at a bowling alley or a lumber yard, Mellé’s ‘pulsation’ motif – always irregular, and not so much percussive as raspy – is clearly audible in all of the cues that in the film’s second half support the scientists’ microscopic examination of the alien substance, and it emerges quietly, and thus ominously, at the conclusion of the film-ending ‘601’ cue that accompanies the chief scientist’s post-crisis debriefing. In this late-in-the-film music, of course, the motif has semiotic significance, its symbolism having been solidly established in the extended first ‘Andromeda’ cue, during which an ‘unmistakable heartbeat’ sound becomes ever louder as the camera zooms in on the projected microscope image and then ‘ceases when [the camera] cuts away’ (Winters Reference Winters2008: 16). But early in the film this ‘pulsation’ motif, sounded aplenty in the title sequence and then recapitulated in the three scene-marking cues, has no specific meaning. Whereas filmgoers equipped with full knowledge of everything that transpires in the Crichton novel might suspect straightaway what this motif suggests, filmgoers not so equipped likely hear these ‘mechanical typing sounds’ (Niebur Reference Niebur, Getman, McCorkle Okasaki and Ware2022: 238) only as a sonic irritant. Impossible to ignore, and perhaps most jarringly evident in the ‘Communique’ cue that just minutes into the film introduces the scene at the Air Force base, the ‘pulsation’ motif in the first half of The Andromeda Strain illustrates not the source of the problem at hand but only the fact that a problem exists. More than anything else, it is Mellé’s deft handling of this most simple of ideas not just late but early in the film that gives the entirety of The Andromeda Strain its director-desired ‘edge and nervousness’ (Leeman Reference Leeman1995: 200).