“What I ended up finding on ‘Noah’ was that rain, like water and drips, needed to react to something,” Mr. Henighan said. “It needed to hit a surface, or it needed to hit a certain thing a certain way to give me different textures of rain.”

When he looked at The Times’s images, he heard a soundtrack in his head: Chevys and Fords with V8 engines . Distant sirens. The footsteps of people walking by. And the whipping wind. “A sound person has to be aware of the different eras, and where they are geographically in the world,” he said. In New York City, you hear not just the rain hitting the street but rain hitting marble, granite, cars and umbrellas.