How the creators built Rocky’s alien musical tongue for Project Hail Mary

For the movie version of Andy Weir’s Project Hail Mary, the production enlisted language architects Jessie Peterson and David Peterson, famed for their work on Game of Thrones and Dune, to create Rocky’s native speech. Drawing on historic musical conlangs such as Solresol and the modern Moss language, they crafted a three-voice system where each voice can emit one of seven pitches, producing layered sequences that encode words and grammatical structure.

The approach limits the required auditory skill to relative pitch, making the alien tongue theoretically learnable by humans. Additional musical techniques convey nuance, including staccato for precision and slight pitch offsets for sarcasm. While the film presents the language as seamlessly understood, the creators acknowledge the steep learning curve involved in mastering it.