Avatar: How Friendship Forged the Sound and Music of The Last Airbender

This article is presented in partnership with Nickelodeon and appears in the Den of Geek x Avatar: The Last Airbender special edition releasing in mid-July.

For two decades, the lush songs and sounds of Avatar: The Last Airbender have immersed viewers in the fantasy world of the groundbreaking animated series. However, you might be surprised to learn that the captivating compositions weren’t originally devised in a lavish rehearsal space or a plush corporate recording studio. 

As series co-creator Bryan Konietzko explains, the Track Team—featuring composer Jeremy Zuckerman and sound designer Benjamin Wynn—developed Avatar’s iconic sonic landscape in a small front room of the humble Burbank house where Konietzko and Wynn roomed together in the early 2000s.

“We didn’t even have any doors, and I was in the living room watching TV, eating peanut butter and jelly or soup or something, and I heard ‘DUNN DUN DUN DUNN’ [Konietzko hums Aang’s theme]. And I just went, ‘That one! That’s it!'” reminisces Konietzko. “I heard it and I just knew right away that’s a melody like a Star Wars theme, something you can just hum.”

Mirroring the powerful bond between the heroic characters of Team Avatar, friendship is the true source of strength behind the majestic sound of ATLA. Konietzko first visited the Wynn family home during his years as a student enrolled in the Rhode Island School of Design. There, he was introduced to a young Ben, the brother of Konietzko’s college friend.

“One Christmas break they came home and Bryan met me as a little punk,” recounts Wynn. “Fast forward a number of years, I end up going to California Institute of the Arts and don’t know anybody there. My brother’s like, ‘Oh, you should reach out to Bryan.’ Fast forward a bit more, we end up being roommates while I’m at CalArts and he’s working at Nickelodeon.”

Also in attendance at CalArts was Zuckerman, pursuing a master’s in Composition/New Media. The two CalArts students shared an interest in pushing the sonic envelope, often finding themselves at the university’s avant-garde performances alongside Konietzko.

“My focus was computer music and the processing of sound,” explains Zuckerman. “I met Bryan through Ben because Bryan would come to these performances. In some crazy way, he saw that it would work for Avatar. I have no idea how I made that leap in his mind. But he was like, ‘I like the way you think about sound and music. I don’t want a seasoned media composer. I want someone who’s gonna think of it differently.'”

Zuckerman worried that taking on the ATLA assignment would mean “betraying my own philosophy,” as he confesses. But he had a partner in crime in Wynn, and the experimental artists had recently formed their own ambitious soundtrack and sound design production service, calling themselves the Track Team.

“One day, Bryan comes home and says Nickelodeon wants him and Mike [Dante DiMartino] to pitch a show. And so they start thinking of the concept and drawing characters on our kitchen table,” remembers Wynn. “And then another day he comes home and says, ‘They want to make it. Do you and Jeremy want to do the music and sound?’ I remember just being like, ‘Sure.’ He was like, ‘No, seriously, it’s going to be a lot of work. Are you sure you want to do this?’ And I was like, ‘Sure.’”

He knew what Jeremy and I were capable of, more so than maybe we did. I was 24. and I was a bit overconfident, at least outwardly. But when we started working on the show, we had never done anything like it. It became a process of invention by necessity in terms of the tools and the techniques. Looking back, the show has a lot of heart in that way.”

The partners originally intended to split composition and sound design responsibilities equally. However, the show’s grueling production schedule halted that plan shortly after it was hatched, with Wynn opting to take on worldbuilding by designing the soundscape of the four nations as Zuckerman handled the music.

“I was so green,” Zuckerman admits. “I hadn’t done a show. I’d done a lot of commercials but I hadn’t done anything longform with recurring and developing themes. It was seven days a week, 14 hours a day for pretty much the whole time until we had a break. I didn’t know if I could pull it off because it was just such a new world to me. That’s not what I planned to do—I expected to make strange, esoteric compositions and have no money.”

The Track Team shared studio space for the entirety of the first season, working inside a mother-in-law unit behind Zuckerman’s rental. Breaks from work consisted of playing horse at the basketball hoop or seeing how many consecutive frisbee catches they could secure, invariably hitting their neighbors’ cars in the process. Then it was back to the studio, where Zuckerman would channel influences like Tōru Takemitsu and Krzysztof Penderecki into his synthesized MIDI strings while Wynn experimented with digitally manipulating random noise makers and slide whistles to create the aural landscape of the animated series.

“I just like to look at my friends and see their potential and be like, ‘I think you can do this. Give me your best,'” says Konietzko. 

Zuckerman and Wynn’s potential was fostered with great care, blossoming within the production framework created by DiMartino and Konietzko. Although the Track Team’s responsibilities separated within the first season, and their working spaces separated by the second, their simpatico sensibilities continued to thrive under the freedom afforded them. 

The fandom responded in kind, growing ever larger over the ensuing decades. Now, the music of the show is performed by a symphony to adoring audiences at Avatar: The Last Airbender in Concert, an immersive experience that began drawing passionate crowds in Fall 2024. The orchestral events have proven to be profoundly moving for the storytellers and musicians behind ATLA, who’ve attended many of the performances. A plethora of future tour dates await attendees across North America and Europe from Fall 2025 to Fall 2026, with tickets available at avatarinconcert.com. 

“I really credit the fanbase for making this happen. That’s why these concerts exist, you know? I just feel really grateful and amazed that all these years later people still want to hear it. But it’s a beautiful story,” insists Zuckerman. “I know people love the music, and the music is good, but I think if the story wasn’t amazing people wouldn’t care. So a huge part of it is that people love the music because the story’s just so good.”

“I went to the one in San Francisco and the one in LA, and I’m finding myself incredibly emotional,” Wynn shares. “It’s a whole spectrum of me remembering the individual decisions that I made in that scene for that one sound or for that one thing. Remembering us in the room doing it together and the thoughts that were going through my head when we did it. That’s crazy to me. I mean, this is almost half of my life ago at this point. But more so than that, just the fact that it seems more popular than ever really blows me away. And being in a big room full of people who are incredibly invested in the show, it’s really emotional.”

For all that they’ve been through together, the three remain great friends. At the time of our interview, Konietzko marveled about the notifications stacking up in his text thread with Zuckerman and Wynn, 70+ messages deep as they opined about a new guitar pedal. It’s this kind of innocent camaraderie and endless curiosity that fueled their original collaboration and holds great promise for the future of Avatar as it moves into its thrilling third decade.