Creating the Crucial Sound for ‘The Listeners’ – with Steve Fanagan

BBC series The Listeners follows a woman named Claire who is plagued by a mysterious 'hum' that affects all aspects of her life. Finding the sound of 'the hum' and conveying its psychological effect was a unique challenge for award-winning sound supervisor/sound designer Steve Fanagan. Here, he talks about his journey of designing the hum sound, recording wind turbines, capturing electromagnetic recordings, and exploring the 'feeling' of strange sounds like black holes. He also talks about communicating feeling in sound, designing subjective sound, morphing licensed music to create a subjective perspective, and much more!

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Interview by Jennifer Walden, photos courtesy of BBC; Steve Fanagan

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With the word “listeners” in the title, the BBC series called The Listeners — now streaming on BBC iPlayer — is sure to pique the interest of anyone who loves sound. And with MPSE Award-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer Steve Fanagan leading the post sound team, you know it’s going to be a series worth listening to.

The story of The Listeners follows an English teacher named Claire (played by Rebecca Hall) who starts to hear a strange humming sound that seemingly no one but her can hear. It disrupts her life and her relationships, causing Claire to feel isolated. Her search for the source of the hum leads her to find a group of other hum hearers. Although the group provides Claire with a sense of validation that the hum is real (and that she’s not crazy), it’s cold comfort.

Just as Claire’s experience of the hum is a journey, finding the sound of the hum for the series was a journey for Fanagan and the showrunners. Series director Janicza Bravo and Fanagan had conversations about what it might sound like during pre-production, and then it evolved over the course of post-production in tandem with the picture edit.

Here, Fanagan talks about real world experiences of the hum, his journey of finding and recording source sounds to incorporate into the hum for the show, designing Clarie’s changing perspective of the hum, using sound for the story’s sake (and not just for the sake of sound), designing sound based on subjective descriptions of ‘feeling’ and conveying feeling through sound, working with the show’s live on-set performances, and so much more!

(For those living outside the UK, Tom’s Guide offers a solution on how to watch The Listeners!)

The Listeners | Official Trailer – BBC

In The Listeners series, some characters hear an abstract noise (a low thumping, humming sound) that affects every aspect of their lives – their relationships and how they experience the world. Apparently, this mysterious hum is an actual phenomenon in real life, that affects real people…

Sound supervisor/sound designer Steve Fanagan

Steve Fanagan (SF): I hadn’t heard of the hum before working on the show, but when I did some research, I found out all sorts of things, and the series writer (Jordan Tannahill) talked about an example in Canada called The Windsor Hum that people in Windsor, Ontario, were hearing. One member of a family would hear it but no one else in the family (their partner or their kids) could hear it, so they would be isolated and lost in this noise. Obviously, it was having a detrimental effect on their health and their well-being.

Just the idea that sound can work in that way is so fascinating. We think about sound as a powerful thing all the time and in the work we do, but to think about it as something that could drive someone to distraction, or to the point of high anxiety or depression, because of an environmental sound with no clear source is fascinating. It’s scary.

We think about sound as a powerful thing […] but to think about it as something that could drive someone to distraction […] is fascinating

While we were working on the series this time last year, there was a case of the hum in Ireland, in a place called Omagh. The BBC actually did a documentary about it. For a few months, people were hearing this hum. In this case, they figured out what the sound was and were able to turn it down so it didn’t bother people, but they were unwilling to reveal the source of it, which may have negatively impacted whatever was causing it. So presumably it was maybe a factory or machinery somewhere.

In the Windsor case, it was said to be a blast furnace somewhere in Buffalo, which is across the water in America, but it was permeating its way to Windsor in Canada for whatever reason.

It’s fascinating, the idea that these things can really exist and the rabbit hole it could send you down, which is what we see Claire do in the show. I thought it was so unique in terms of the way that we got to use sound because of story, not because of sound.

They handled the concept of this so well, and you executed ‘the hum’ so beautifully. There was that feeling of isolation and the hum being such a personal experience, even to the point where, when they go to the group of “Listeners,” you wonder, “Are they all experiencing the same sound?”

SF: Exactly. It’s such a great question, isn’t it? In the show, Ashley asks Claire that after the meeting. You can imagine this from Claire’s point of view? Suddenly she’s had this moment of peace, this moment of community where she believes that she’s now not the only person who can hear it. Her feeling has been validated in some way, to some extent. And then her daughter Ashley asks, “How do you know you’re hearing the same thing?” And that just slightly invalidates it and puts that doubt there again.

The series was adapted by the writer, Jordan Tannahill. There’s something lovely about an author getting to adapt their own work

The book that it’s based on is a beautiful read (for anyone who watches the series and doesn’t know about the book). The series was adapted by the writer, Jordan Tannahill. There’s something lovely about an author getting to adapt their own work – even though story-wise they change the setting from the US to the UK so just naturally some of the elements change because of that. Still, it’s very true to what the book is and what the book feels like as you’re reading it. So it’s an interesting adaptation from that point of view as well.

The book is a first-person narration told from Clare’s point of view, but she’s actually writing the book after she’s experienced everything. So it’s not a moment-by-moment chronicle as it’s happening, but her looking back on it and reflecting. That gives you an interesting, niggling feeling as a reader where you’re thinking, “Can I trust this account? Is she telling me the truth? Is this is she a reliable narrator?”

The book is a first-person narration told from Clare’s point of view […]When they adapted it, they figured out a way to make that part of the TV show

When they adapted it, they figured out a way to make that part of the TV show as well, which is fascinating. I’m always blown away by the way adaptation works and how you can take something that is a first-person perspective from a novel and somehow maintain it, even though naturally in cinema or TV it has to expand outwards because you can’t just be in someone’s head the whole time.

But by grounding it in Claire’s experience (and Rebecca Hall’s performance as Claire), I think you get the same effect in a really mesmerizing way. I say that with detachment; just as a viewer, I was astonished by how they had done that.

Was that something you and the showrunners talked about for ‘the hum,’ that we’re only going to hear it from Clarie’s perspective? That we’re only going to have her experience of it?

SF: That was definitely a big part of it, but it would be dishonest of me to say that we had it all figured out from the get-go. With something like this, the idea has to evolve with the picture.

Janicza had this really interesting reference from a NASA YouTube clip.

Janicza Bravo, who directed the series, and I had a conversation in pre-production. That was essentially my job interview at the time. I had read a couple of scripts, and we talked about them. We began to discuss what ‘the hum’ might be and what it might feel like. Janicza had this really interesting reference from a NASA YouTube clip. It was the sound of a black hole, which you can listen to here. I guess what it’s based on is some sort of visual information that they translated into sound. It’s a really beguiling, really haunting sound. She didn’t want ‘the hum’ to sound like that, but she wanted it at times to feel like that, which for her was quite frightening. What the hell is that? What am I hearing? This is scaring me. This feels otherworldly.

She didn’t want ‘the hum’ to sound like that, but she wanted it at times to ‘feel’ like that

The other reference we discussed at the time, which wasn’t related to sound but more to feeling, was the Todd Haynes film Safe — just the idea that you have this character (played by Julianne Moore), who gets more and more isolated as the film goes on. She’s not being believed in terms of what she’s feeling or experiencing.

Those two references and that feeling were our starting points for thinking about the sound of ‘the hum.’

I thought it would be useful to have some sounds for playback on set…

Next, I thought it would be useful to have some sounds for playback on set, so we talked about a few things in that initial meeting. I had been thinking about the idea of hypersensitivity to sound – the idea that maybe a few home appliances are slightly malfunctioning, like an air conditioner that has a click or some sort of irregular movement in it that you can’t quite tune out due to its irregularity. In the script and in the book, they talk about this idea of feeling like there’s a truck idling outside. It’s that type of low staccato rumbling. It’s not a flat sound. It’s something that has movement in it and therefore is harder for us to tune out.

So I put together a couple of folders of sounds for Janicza and she picked several for playback

Another idea was that of an anechoic chamber and hearing the blood pumping in your ears or stethoscope recordings and things like that. Those were the first things we began to experiment with. So I put together a couple of folders of sounds for Janicza and she picked several for playback on set.

It was a really interesting long-term way of exploring the sound of ‘the hum’ and what it might be – not quite saying that this is it or this is it, but rather, does this feel right? And if it feels right, then maybe we’ll explore other things that sound like that or other things that give us that same feeling and see where we can take it.

It was a really interesting long-term way of exploring the sound of ‘the hum’ […] not quite saying that this is it or this is it, but rather, does this feel right?

I was in a very fortunate position with the production; they put aside a bit of budget so I could take days here and there to go do some recordings or just experiment and try to figure out what the sound might be. This happened between pre-production and filming, before we started sound post. We built up quite a large library of recordings.

The one rule we discussed early on – that Janicza was quite keen on – was that we didn’t synthesize the sound. It wasn’t an electronic source, like a keyboard, or guitar, or something musical. Instead, we were taking field recordings and trying to figure out how to make hums out of them. Or, I’d record things that inherently had a hum quality. Then, we’d experiment with them and see what we could create.

The one rule we discussed early on […] was that we didn’t synthesize the sound.

It was quite a long journey to find sounds for the hum. And as you pointed out, it’s not just one sound that’s used for the whole series. It’s something that ebbs and flows and evolves. Janicza’s direction on that was that Claire is on a journey with this. What starts as something that’s tormenting her becomes something that eventually leads her to a transcendence. So there’s the whole journey to track from that start point of it being a torment to that endpoint of it leading to transcendence and everything in between.

There are several points in the story where we return to the torment. She makes some breakthroughs with it, but we return to the torment because the breakthroughs often don’t lead anywhere and she goes back to feeling isolated and alone. It was interesting to try to figure that out.

We began the sound work while they were cutting the picture so the sound evolved in tandem with the picture edit.

We began the sound work while they were cutting the picture so the sound evolved in tandem with the picture edit. That gives you the luxury of the picture influencing the sound and the sound influencing the picture. It’s not just the sound team working on the sound. The picture department would ask, “What if we tried this?” It becomes this lovely collaboration where the full possibility of what the sound design can be is explored. Several different people were involved, which was useful for this because it was a long journey and something that evolved over time.

We had all four episodes open and we’re working on them in parallel.

We had all four episodes open and we’re working on them in parallel. When we got to the end of a pass on Ep. 4, that had an impact on the previous episodes. If we used something in Ep. 4, was there somewhere in Ep. 1, Ep. 2, or Ep. 3 that we could hint at it? There’s a bit of a breadcrumb trail throughout, recurring motifs and themes that are building and sometimes falling apart and then building up again and expanding. And so it was a fascinating journey from that point of view.

Let’s talk about your field recording. In the show, Claire and Kyle try to track down a potential source for ‘the hum.’ They visit a wind farm and 5G towers. Were these also places you explored just to see if there was an interesting sound there to help you create ‘the hum’?

SF: Yeah, totally. I had a couple of days where I went to a wind farm — two separate wind farms, actually — and that was really interesting. They’re mesmerizing structures in and of themselves. They’re so huge.

The first day I went up was quite cold, but not necessarily a massively windy day. So the turbines were moving, but they weren’t moving super fast. It was interesting just to hear the ebb and flow of that. When I was right underneath the blade, I could hear it cut the air a bit because it was so still and they’re so huge. It makes this high/mid-frequency, almost tearing, piercing sound. And they do this thing where they cycle into an electrical hum (it kicks on and kicks off), that’s quite like a generator sound. So that was interesting to explore.

I returned on another day when it was windier. When they’re at high speed, it’s a totally different experience. The blades are moving fast and the sound is truly physical. You feel it in your chest. As the blade whizzes past you, there’s this sharp cutting sound that happens. It was great to record them in those two different states.

In one of the places I went, there were lots of turbines close to each other. At the other site, there were not that many turbines and they were quite separated so you could focus on recording just one. There are a couple of moments in the show where Claire and Kyle are standing under one. It was great to recreate that feeling, having stood under one myself.

The 5G tower was really interesting because if you stand by one, there’s not a massive amount of sound coming from it. You might hear some sort of electrical low-level signal, but nothing discernible. So for that, I did a bunch of electromagnetic recording which is a very strange experience. You put an electromagnetic mic against almost any electronic device and it will convert whatever it’s doing into different pitches of sound.

So, for instance, if you put an electromagnetic mic on a USB hub, suddenly it’s screaming high-frequency noise. The same is true for an iPad or a synthesizer or a TV screen – basically, anything that’s plugged in and is powered on. It was interesting to explore some of that sound that’s around us that we’re not hearing.

In a way, it informed a bit of the psychology of the sound for the show. I was able to use that version of sound on something like the 5G tower or use it to augment the idea of Claire being hypersensitive to those pitches being emitted from a light bulb or a fridge hum or something in her environment that generally she would have tuned out on an ordinary day. But because she’s become so aware of sound, suddenly she’s hearing those things. That felt like an interesting avenue to explore and play with.

Other sound elements for ‘the hum’ came from winds, stethoscope recordings, and bowed metal.

Other sound elements for ‘the hum’ came from winds, stethoscope recordings, and bowed metal. I recorded a lot of appliances, doing things like turning the fan oven on and then recording that sound from the wall outside the room to see what it felt like coming through the wall. There’s this idea in the show that the sound that Claire is hearing is always beyond reach. She can’t find the source. It’s not necessarily something in her 3D space. So finding anything we could do recording-wise to emulate that, or in some way hint at that, felt important.

Those low-frequency sounds capture that feeling well because they’re not directional. Those sound waves spread out to far-reaching places…

SF: Yeah, it’s so hard to know where that low-end is coming from. You feel it and you hear it but it’s hard to locate the source.

It feels like it’s all around you and it’s very hard to think about anything.

I remember at one point while we were working on the show, my neighbor was power hosing their driveway with a diesel engine power hose. It was quite close to our house and the whole house just felt like it was vibrating. It feels like it’s all around you and it’s very hard to think about anything. It was much like how Claire felt as well, particularly in Ep. 1. She not only feels isolated because she’s the only person who can hear it but hearing it almost isolates you from thinking about anything else or doing anything else. It’s like being in pain. It’s very hard to think about anything else when your whole body is just going, “Get me out of this situation.” It felt like a really interesting psychological way to think about her condition and how she might perceive everything else in her environment.

You said you were given a reference of what a black hole sounded like, but Janicza didn’t want that sound, specifically. She wanted the feeling of that sound. Just like your experience with the diesel power washer, you can’t necessarily record the sound of your house vibrating. You just have to somehow recreate that feeling. That’s an interesting thing that sound people do…

SF: I think the best thing that can happen at a spotting session, or in a conversation with a director, an editor, a showrunner, or anyone working creatively on a show, is not to talk about what the scene should sound like, but how it should feel. What we’re trying to figure out sound-wise is what’s available to us in the palette of this particular show that allows us to express that feeling.

the best thing that can happen at a spotting session […] is not to talk about what the scene should sound like, but how it should feel.

The Listeners was that amped up to 10. My approach to that is to grab onto something that I’ve experienced in my own life and think about how it felt, and then figure out what I was hearing at the time and how I was hearing it. Then I see if I can apply that in some way to the character and the situation that’s unfolding on screen. It’s endlessly fascinating and at times frustrating and brilliantly challenging for sure.

One of the lovely things about sending work early and often is that you get incremental reactions.

One of the lovely things about sending work early and often is that you get incremental reactions. At the start of a job, it might be trying to figure out the barometer for what that feeling sounds like or feels like to them. You’ve got your interpretation of it, you feel like you’ve got it to a good place, and you send them a work in progress. It’s as simple as asking, “You wanted this scene to be warm. Does this sound warm to you? It feels warm to me now.” And they might say, “Oh, it feels too warm or it feels not warm enough.” So you begin to gauge what their barometer for those feelings. By passing the work back and forward, hopefully, you develop something that gets closer and closer to the thing that they’re looking for – what they’re chasing and you’re chasing for them.
We have such a limited language for sound. So on every job with every collaborator, it’s about establishing a language that you can use to discuss that show specifically and develop and figure out as you go.
 

That’s so true. We describe sound using words, like ‘warm,’ that are emotional and subjective – terms that aren’t universal…

SF: It’s so interesting, isn’t it? And it’s at the heart of this show in a way because Claire is telling people how she’s feeling and what she’s hearing, and their immediate reaction is to say, “I can’t hear it so you mustn’t be able to hear it. It’s in your head. It’s not in the real world.”

Sound-wise, in terms of the evolution of ‘the hum,’ when they have their first conversation about it, ‘the hum’ becomes softer.

As people, we struggle so much to communicate feelings and trust feelings and express them and understand them. And it’s really at the heart of this show. I suppose with the journey Claire is on, the fact that she finds kinship in this inappropriate teacher-student relationship with Kyle, makes sense. She’s been pushed to a limit where the people closest to her doubt her. When another person says to her, “Hey, I can hear that too,” that brings a feeling of relief and validation.

Sound-wise, in terms of the evolution of ‘the hum,’ when they have their first conversation about it, ‘the hum’ becomes softer. We tried to do something less dissonant because it was a moment of resonance between the two of them. That informed our approach across the episodes so that in similar moments the dissonance of ‘the hum’ would become harmonic or resolved. It was a way to reflect their state of mind and the journey that she was on.

You can hear that when Claire and Kyle have their own listening session. The feeling is almost transcendent. The sound becomes almost joyous and spiritual – not something disturbing or bothering to them…

SF: Until that point, Claire has been fighting ‘the hum.’ But by the end of Ep. 3, she’s gotten to a point where she wants to give herself over to it. She wants to believe what the group of Listeners believes, to feel what they feel – allowing it to overcome you is like taking control of it in a way. That it can become this transcendental thing was so important.

It was an absolute dream to work on what that might sound like and feel like.

It was an absolute dream to work on what that might sound like and feel like. Again, lots of people were involved in that process, Janicza especially, and the showrunners Chelsea Morgan Hoffmann and Rachel Dargavel, and Nathan Nugent, who was one of the editors very involved in the sound and was part of the design and the mixing. It was something we evolved and worked on.

Somewhere in the recesses of my mind as we were working on it, I kept thinking that if Claire has this moment where it is transcendent, could it be like just before a sonic boom – something is vibrating the air and disturbing the environment to such an extent that it breaks through? I suppose it feels like there’s something inherent in ‘the hum’ that like. When they come out of that state, they’re not sure how long they’ve been in it. So does it dispense time? It felt like it had to be powerful enough to express that. What a joy of a challenge to play with that, to attempt to express and develop that with a bunch of really talented people who were helping to navigate my way through it.

A bit later in the show, Claire’s experience of ‘the hum’ goes beyond transcendent into hysterical. Can you talk about how you pushed ‘the hum’ even further?

SF: We hit a certain peak at the end of Ep. 3, which continues into the beginning of Ep. 4, but it begins to take a bit of a turn. It begins to feel a bit like they are in hysterics during the Listeners’ group session. You can tell there’s something dangerous about this, right? And it begins to permeate Claire’s ability to perceive reality as the episode progresses.

Sound-wise, we started to think about all of the hums that we had used in the show, figuring out a way to collage them and ebb and flow through them.

For the big group at the end, Janicza always had this idea that when more than one person is engaged in this group “meditation,” it becomes more powerful. We see it at the beginning of Ep. 3 with the rest of the group, which Claire didn’t join. She’s separate from them. She can’t quite give herself over to it, but the rest of them are in this ecstasy. Its power is greater because there are a number of them doing it at the same time. Later in Ep. 4, when Claire gives herself over to it in the group, there is the risk that it goes too far.

Sound-wise, we started to think about all of the hums that we had used in the show, figuring out a way to collage them and ebb and flow through them. Also, we started introducing distortion and harmonics and things that were disruptive and potentially felt dangerous, like that stuff is spinning around your head a little bit.

And for every swell, there’s also a bit of a terror distortion that’s happening. You know that if this goes too far, it’s going to be bad.

Did you mix the show as well? Or did you work with other re-recording mixers?

SF: The schedule changed slightly, so, unfortunately, I didn’t get to final mix. Re-recording mixer Michelle Cunniffe came on board toward the end of my time on the show and took over. We worked in parallel for a while, which was really great. The process on the show was very much that we were temp mixing all of the time so that we could send good stuff back to the cutting room.

Re-recording mixer Michelle Cunniffe came on board toward the end of my time on the show and took over.

The dialogue and ADR was handled by supervising dialogue editor Louise Burton. She would cut scenes and send them to me, I’d do temp mixes and send stems to the cutting room. Then, I’d send stuff back to her with my work done on top of it, and we would continue to conform and evolve that material through the process.

By the time Michelle came on board, we had a lot of work done in terms of temping, including using distortions and delays where we might just usually have reverbs and more conventional processing.

Michelle took that on and did her own thing with Janicza, Chelsea, and Nathan on the mixes feeding in notes from the execs as well.

For my last few weeks on the show, we got to spend some time in a mix theater, not pre-mixing or final mixing, but just working through episodes

For my last few weeks on the show, we got to spend some time in a mix theater, not pre-mixing or final mixing, but just working through episodes with Janicza, Chelsea, Nathan, Michelle, and myself. We were tackling broad notes and playing with things, so as I was nearing the end of my time and Michelle was taking over, she had a full understanding of what we had been doing and was immersed in the notes that we were getting and was completely part of that process. We tried to figure out a seamless way to do it so that the work could be maintained yet Michelle could then do her own thing on top of that.

The show was mixed in 5.1 and stereo (as per BBC delivery). As much as I love Dolby Atmos, I still love 5. 1. We were using the immersive surround capabilities a lot in the show.

There are some really nice sound montages in the show, where the sound isn’t completely married to the picture. Claire is lying in bed, going down a rabbit hole of research, trying to find out what ‘the hum’ could be. Can you talk about creating this montage of research, and the extension of these ‘reports’ over the scenes that follow it?

SF: I liked that sequence. That was a lovely idea that existed early in the picture cut and was something we got to play with and expand on in the sound design.

The idea in the script and in the story is that she is looking at YouTube videos and other online sources, researching what the hum might be. If you were to search online now for ‘the hum,’ it’s incredible the amount of self-published information you’ll find out in the world. On any of these algorithmic platforms, once you start searching for something, it will keep showing you more and more things related to whatever you’re looking for, and ‘the hum’ is no exception.

we recorded a whole collection of people – both in loop group and also just friends and family – reading some scripted lines of what we felt someone may say […] concerning ‘the hum’

During production, they had actually cleared some clips that Claire was watching on her phone in the show. Then we recorded a whole collection of people – both in loop group and also just friends and family – reading some scripted lines of what we felt someone may say on a YouTube video or vlog or on TikTok concerning ‘the hum.’ We were looking for a wide variety of voices, accents, and ages. We wanted as many people from as many different locations as possible, the idea being that she’s tapped into this global online community of people who can hear this thing.

How it was written, shot, and edited expresses Claire’s fugue state as she’s going down the rabbit hole, and the algorithm is giving her more and more information and connecting her with more and more theories about what this might be. She can’t sleep and decides to go for a walk, and she’s still hearing all of that rattling around in her head. We get that very subjective experience of Claire as she tries to parse the misinformation from the real information.

It was great to be able to build this collage of voices and how they would just ping around in her head afterward. It’s a very surround experience.

At the same time, as she’s walking around her neighborhood, she’s looking at electricity pylons and 5G towers, thinking about some of those theories that she’s been hearing. She’s like a detective in the middle of a mystery trying to figure it out and so she’s following some of these leads.

It was great to be able to build this collage of voices and how they would just ping around in her head afterward. It’s a very surround experience. If you get to see the show 5.1 or if you watch with headphones on, the sounds are overlapping and panning and playing as though to emulate the idea of thoughts swimming around in your head.

We experience that subjective POV again after Claire’s hearing test. Some of the lines she heard during the test replay in her thoughts…

SF: That came from picture editorial and then we got to play with it a bit in sound design. We were playing with some distortion and playing with offsetting voices and just taking the brilliant idea they had and embellishing it, or finessing it. But those ideas were very much built into the story and came out of editorial. It’s always lovely when there are these sound riffs that they’ve thought about and worked on that we then inherit.

if you have a visual and a story point to anchor a sound to then suddenly it can branch out into all sorts of possibilities.

That’s the beautiful thing with sound – if you have a visual and a story point to anchor a sound to then suddenly it can branch out into all sorts of possibilities.
But without that initial anchor or that initial pre-planned idea, it’s almost impossible to reverse-engineer stuff like this. There’s something about sound synced to picture that’s so important for us as viewers to believe what we’re watching. So the fact that they thought that up well in advance and had planned for it and had it built in – even pre-clearing those clips – just gives us this lovely anchor for that idea. And then we can really go big with it.

Music plays a big role in the film. Claire and her daughter sing together in the car, Claire uses it to block out the sound, etc. Can you talk about the licensed tracks and the score, and how that impacted your sound design?

SF: Again, there was lovely pre-planning involved. So in Ep. 1, there’s that moment with Claire and Ashley in the car driving to school. They’re listening to a Richard and Linda Thompson track that had been cleared. So it was actually on playback in the car for real on the day they shot, and they’re singing along to it.

it was actually on playback in the car for real on the day they shot, and they’re singing along to it.

What I’ve always loved about that sequence is that it shows you what their relationship is and what Claire is losing later in the show when she’s feeling distant from Ashley because of ‘the hum.’ There’s something in that moment of them hanging out and singing the song together with abandon – just having this lovely moment together – that you realize what’s at stake here. It’s the reality of that relationship. It’s lovely that music can do that and be part of that.

For them to have cleared the track and have it as playback was so valuable. There are a couple of other examples in that episode, like when Kyle plays a Nick Drake song on the guitar after theater rehearsal. He’s playing that song. It’s something that was pre-planned and he learned how to play it on the guitar and it’s him playing it live. He has a couple of moments in the show where he plays guitar for real.

And the singing during the dress rehearsal is also happening live. Later on, we see them actually performing the play for an audience, and he’s playing guitar. Everyone on stage is miked up and singing live. The rest of the band is on playback.

in the mix, to have the flexibility of multi-track pre-records plus well-recorded on-set live performance was brilliant

They had a lot of really clever, really researched, and well-planned ideas to make those sequences feel authentic. It’s happening in the space. There’s a lovely moment during the musical performance when you see some of the audience slightly wincing at the pitch of the singing. It’s live and it’s real and it’s a school play so of course it wouldn’t be perfect. Details like that I just admire so much – the filmmaking, the direction, and the thought that went into it. If it was perfect, it wouldn’t feel real.

Also for us in the mix, to have the flexibility of multi-track pre-records plus well-recorded on-set live performance was brilliant.

There are two other musical places worth talking about. One is, again, in Ep. 1, during Clarie’s dinner party. There’s a song in the background by an artist called Betty Swan. As Claire leaves the group and goes to the kitchen, that song begins to warp a bit in the background and she begins to hear what maybe is ‘the hum’ or maybe it’s just hypersensitivity to sound. But at that point, we’re playing a very subjective moment for her with that song.

I got to experiment with […] this stereo mix of the song, to make it more abstract, pull it apart, and try to piece it back together as a slowed-down nightmarish version.

Later in the episode, there’s a sequence that we always refer to as ‘the nightmare’ that happens just before Claire’s first conversation with Kyle about ‘the hum.’ She’s feeling particularly isolated. Her husband started staying in the guest room so that his sleep wasn’t disturbed by her not sleeping. So, the song is scoring that moment and Janicza wanted to make a warped, strange version of it. I got to experiment with that, spending a few lovely days in the sandbox figuring out what I could do with this stereo mix of the song, to make it more abstract, pull it apart, and try to piece it back together as a slowed-down nightmarish version. It was a way of reflecting her perception of sound and what happens to you when you haven’t slept for a long time. Nothing feels quite real. Nothing feels like it’s moving in real-time anymore. Everything feels a little bit edgy and harsh and warped. It was great to play around with that in a needle drop as well.

What have you learned while working on the sound of The Listeners?

SF: It was such an interesting, different project to work on with opportunities to experiment with things I had never experimented with before. There’s something very important about having time on a project. So to have had Element Pictures (who are the producers) and their post executive Moira Murphy afford me some experimenting time and some development time away from the project while they were filming was really invaluable. It allowed me (without time pressure) to go and explore things.

The most important thing on any job is your collaborators, and the most important aspect of the collaboration is your communication with each other.

The most important thing on any job is your collaborators, and the most important aspect of the collaboration is your communication with each other.

I feel so lucky with the sound team that I got to work with on the series. Louise Burton, our dialogue and ADR supervisor, was just so great to collaborate with. She was constantly sharing material and taking it back from me, conforming it and sending it back to me – just always up for that kind of workflow where you don’t have control over what you’re working on because sometimes it’s with me and then sometimes it’s going back to her and it’s changed and evolving. For us to just have that trust in each other, and to have that open collaboration, was super valuable.

The dialogue is such a massive part of sound design.

The dialogue is such a massive part of sound design. Often when we talk about sound design we don’t think about dialogue. We think about effects and foley and things like that. But the dialogue in the show, our closeness to Claire, and all of the nuanced, detailed ADR we worked on through the process, all of the breaths that actors performed for us in ADR that we were then able to use as design or as a distorted detail as her reality collapses or shatters were really important.

It was great to work with Caoimhe Doyle and The Foley Lab, to have their detailed and nuanced work. They did some really incredible design work for the turbines and I have no idea how they made it. They some how manipulated props and manipulated mics and gave us lovely details for inner ear hearing, that kind of blood pressure in your ears sound. I was sharing bounces of what I was doing with them, which they were playing off, and figuring out what they could add to that. Having that open collaboration and constant communication between us was so important.

Having great collaborators who you can trust and who trust you is the biggest lesson I get from every job.

The brilliant thing about filmmaking is that it’s always a team of people and in the sound department it’s always a team of people. Having great collaborators who you can trust and who trust you is the biggest lesson I get from every job. You get to the end of the job and realize that somehow we all came together and created that. Hopefully, it’s for the betterment of what we’ve been working on, and hopefully everyone’s happy with how the work sounds.

I love that The Listeners is a show about how challenging isolation can be and feeling like your experience is your own and it’s lived inside a bubble, but that ultimately our conversation about the show is a celebration of the collaboration it took to tell this story…

SF: I love that. We started this conversation by discussing a feeling – how you think a feeling should sound, and does that match how I think a feeling should sound? Trust builds up when communication is good, and ideas get passed back and forth. Hopefully, by the end of a project, we’ve gotten to a place where none of us individually could have gotten to. Collectively, we’ve pooled our ideas, our energy, and our experiences and hopefully found something unique.

A big thanks to Steve Fanagan for giving us a behind-the-scenes look at the sound of The Listeners and to Jennifer Walden for the interview!

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