What hearing loss looks like in “ Sound of Metal ”

Creating an audio tape for a movie about a musician losing his hearing is more complicated than it looks. The filmmakers behind the new drama “Sound of Metal” wanted to immerse audiences in the experience of its main character, Ruben (Riz Ahmed), a punk-metal drummer who is forced to look at his life differently as he becomes deaf.

Judging by the overwhelmingly positive reviews, the filmmakers pulled off this difficult feat. In the New York Times, Jeannette Catsoulis praised “an extraordinarily complex sound design that allows us to borrow Ruben’s ears”.

The film (streaming on Amazon) often places us through Ruben’s aural perspective as he navigates his new reality. (It’s worth watching with headphones or a good sound system.) “I’ve had many conversations with people who have lost their hearing and no two people experience is the same,” said Darius Marder, co-writer and director of the film. “But one thing that is pretty much true for all deaf people is that they don’t completely lose sound. It is not silence.

Instead, Marder and his sound designer, Nicolas Becker, wanted to capture those low-frequency vibrations and other tones. The approach has been adapted at different points in Ruben’s experience. In separate interviews with Zoom, Marder and Becker focused on three scenes as they talked about some of the techniques and ideas they used to tap into Ruben’s hearing experience, including putting microphones in skulls. and the mouth.

One of the first times there’s a noticeable change in Ruben’s hearing comes before a performance, as he sets up the merchandise table with his girlfriend and girlfriend, Lou (Olivia Cooke). At one point, he feels a high-pitched ringing tone, then the voices are muffled.

Ahmed’s response at this point is not just to act. The filmmakers had headphones made to measure for the actor so that they could give him the high frequency sound they had created.

“It reacts to a very physical process,” Marder said. “And that process gives way to white noise in Riz’s ears in real time that doesn’t even allow her to hear her own voice, which is a very specific experience, of not being able to hear her own voice. This is what causes a loss of balance and a real loss of control. “

This moment indicates to audiences that the film will take a much more first-person approach, which we will often listen to through Ruben’s ears. The sequence continues with the band’s performance, when Ruben is seated on the drums, the loud beats slowly merge into low, distant tones.

In the following sequence, Ruben gets up in the morning to realize that his hearing loss has become more pronounced. The sound here too is low and rumbling, somewhat cavernous and very internal.

This internal feeling is a specialty for Becker, who has created immersive and personalized sound experiences on many projects, from the astronaut drama “Gravity”, for which he has put on a spacesuit to understand the sound inside, to the disaster film on the high seas. “The Command”, for which he spent two weeks recording underwater in a submarine.

“If I can put people in a real ambient sound environment, I can create something very specific,” he explained. “It’s about how you associate sound with the memory of your body.”

Becker said that a year before the filming of “The Sound of Metal,” he invited Marder to Paris to visit an anechoic chamber, designed to get rid of sound and reverberations.

“After 10 minutes you can hear your tendons, the pressure of your blood,” Becker said. “You reach the physiological limit of your hearing system. “

Deepening this body-sound connection and evoking Ruben’s auditory experience involved what Marder called a “real choking experiment.” Becker microed the insides of the preserved skulls and helmets to experience that sensation of being enveloped. He also used stethoscope-type microphones, as well as microphones that go into an artist’s mouth to create an audio mix of how Ruben feels the sound from within.

A disorienting treatment

Later in the film, Ruben receives cochlear implants. In this scene, he meets an audiologist, who helps adjust the devices. She adjusts them in different ways, with each result being more pronounced but still accompanied by hissing distortion, like a radio dial not reaching quite the right frequency. The audiologist explains to Ruben that it is not the sound as he remembers it; rather, the implants make his brain think he is hearing.

Narratively, the film makes a connection between the sounds that Ruben makes as a drummer, which may sound distasteful to some listeners, and the sound coming from the implants, which Ruben now finds unpleasant.

“You had to go up that line to be uncomfortable but not unbearable,” Marder said of the audio for that scene. To do this, the sounds have been heavily processed; each sound layer also had to be processed individually, with filters placed on each element. Then these layers were scattered around the channels of the mix “to create the experience of a loss of balance, ”Marder said. “Because one of the fascinating aspects of this hearing experience is not only that the sound sounds different, but also that our brains don’t understand directionality. So all of a sudden that surround sound, you’re lost in it.