In several scenes in “Uncut Gems,” what draws the most attention is a mundane sound, amplified but not overdramatized — the whoosh of the revolving door at a fancy Midtown office building, the slamming of basketballs against parquet courts, the cold click of utensils striking dinner plates, the wobbly hum of a helicopter landing.

The music cues were chosen for their temporal specificity — mainly, unruly hits of the early 2010s, when the film is set — but also their unique clangor: the narcotized boasts of “The Morning,” sung by the Weeknd; Rich Homie Quan’s herky-jerky yelp on “Type of Way”; the stuttering Maybach Music Group drop. And the score, by Daniel Lopatin, is both primal and astral, the searing noise that fills up all of the dead air (not very much, to be fair) and that serves to nudge everything else just a little bit louder.

The Safdies’ characters are often more vivid with their vocal tone than with their words. Sandler injects his familiar meandering whir of a voice into a more hostile context: How he bends it is as important as what he says. Late in the film, when he reunites with his mistress (Julia Fox), they cuddle up and lick their wounds — they sound like mewling kittens. Other actors with smaller parts appear to have been chosen for sonic reasons. The jaggedness of Idina Menzel’s laugh (she plays Howard’s wife) is a nervous thrill, and Mike Francesa, a professional shouter on WFAN for three decades, plays an aggrieved bookie, convincingly deadpan and casually loud.

Throughout the film, these voices are put in direct competition with a variety of other noises, a reminder that we’re always competing for attention, not just with other people, but with the unplanned and ubiquitous distractions of everyday life. In one of the most robust scenes, Howard is on the phone with his doctor receiving colonoscopy results while mere feet away, Demany (Lakeith Stanfield), who brings clients to Howard, is rifling through Howard’s office safe looking for watches he’d stored there, and lashing out when coming up empty. The doctor conversation is drowned out by the frictive banter between the two men, which is drowned out by the rustle of stuff being hastily shoved around. The scene would be just as effective with no visuals.