Star Wars: Sound Designers Reveal The Jedi Tree Chant From ‘The Last Jedi’

In many ways, The Last Jedi shattered preconceived notions about the Star Wars saga, while in other ways, included subtle cues that tied into the deepest parts of the series’ mythology. One of the ways in which the film honored the past was by utilizing audible connections to the history of the Jedi with barely audible chants emanating from the tree on Ahch-To that contained ancient Jedi texts. The film’s sound designers, Matthew Wood and Ren Klyce, recently confirmed that, during the chants, the audience is hearing snippets of the Jedi Code.

“One of the areas was kind of cool and it’s very subtle, but a lot of the stuff [that] is poignant is when Rey is first getting called back to the tree, she hears like a call out,” Wood shared with SlashFilm. “And so that’s something we worked on with [writer/director] Rian [Johnson] and [editor] Bob Ducsay and Ren created the sound design for that, which was really effective and it kind of brought it down to a real quiet moment.”

“The story group at Lucasfilm came up with a sort of chant we could do. So we had all those voice actors [come and chant] this thing and then Ren took it and kind of twisted it around and made it […] draw her back to the books there in the tree,” he added. “So that’s a nice collaboration of loop group, editing, sound design, great mixing there and Rian and Bob and everybody’s guidance to come up with like how that’s going to be.”

Wood went on to confirm exactly where the words for the chant came from and their connections to the saga.

“That thing is called the Jedi Code,” Wood confessed. “Leland Chee from the Story Group at Lucasfilm gave me the Jedi Code and it’s in Legends right now, but it’s like a four-sentence thing that we used about peace, knowledge, serenity and the Force. Emotion.”

“There’s peace. There’s Force,” Klyce added. “There’s a lot of words in there that is… And then there’s the negative one. There’s no this, there’s no that. And it’s like a chant. It’s like the book is speaking. And it’s cool. The fabric of the sound is not just people making random noises. It’s actually thought out, written dialogue.”

The Jedi Code was mentioned in the prequel films, yet didn’t appear in full until the 2015 novel Dark Disciple. The Jedi Code is as follows:

“There is no emotion, there is peace. There is no ignorance, there is knowledge. There is no passion, there is serenity. There is no chaos, there is harmony. There is no death, there is the Force.”

We shouldn’t expect to hear the Code recited in Episode IX, given the destruction of the Jedi Order, yet we wouldn’t be surprised if it makes an appearance in Johnson’s upcoming trilogy of films, which could potentially be set in the early days of the Jedi Order.

The Last Jedi is in theaters now.

[H/T SlashFilm]