Director and screenwriter Michael Tyburski’s first feature film, The Sound of Silence, premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival and is now available to stream with your Hulu subscription. In Episode 4 of this H8URS Exclusive series, Tyburski describes the process of capturing the distinct atmospheric sounds of New York City for his film.

Stalker

The Sound of Silence revolves around Peter Lucien, a “house tuner” who makes his living solving his clients’ problems by adjusting the tones of their homes. Lucien is a character who “overhears,” and much of his life is ruled by sound. So, for Michael Tyburski, atmospheric sound forms the very backbone of his film. Tyburski was inspired by the films of Andrei Tarkovsky, specifically Stalker. Tyburski admires Tarkovsky’s restraint regarding sound, and his use of silence. This restraint is a key element of Tarkovsky’s unique style; his use of long takes, sparing dialogue, and both visual and aural stillness helps to create the dreamlike atmosphere that Tarkovsky is known for. Tyburski cites this scene from Stalker as a major influence for its use of disconnected sound and image.

Notice how the sounds of the train tracks slowly become more alien.

To learn more about Tarkovsky’s use of sound, check out this video by Alpha-Alpaca-Pack.

The Sound Design of The Sound of Silence

When it came to creating the atmosphere of The Sound of Silence, Tyburski stresses the importance of a good team of sound designers and says that they had a lot of fun “nerding out” on the sound for the film. Throughout the film, Lucien makes reference to the sounds he hears with great specificity, down to the decibel.

Tyburski and the sound designers made sure that any time Lucien mentioned specific tones, the actual sounds in the film matched his description perfectly. This was a priority for Tyburski, as it was yet another way to ensure the audience experienced the story from Lucien’s point of view. This attention to detail in sound perspective reminds me of Inception and how the Edith Piaf song “Non, je ne Regrette Rien” was slowed to match the distortion of time in the dream layers. For a more detailed look into this, check out Old Tin Man’s video here.

The Sound of Silence is set in New York City, and Tyburski was determined to capture the sounds of the city accurately. He wanted NYC to sound strange and unique, and so a 2nd unit sound team was sent out to record the city noises of different areas. As Tyburski notes, different parts of NYC can sound very different (a fact perhaps not enough films account for), so it was important that the unique sounds of each location were captured to avoid a generic aural landscape. To really get the specificity right, Tyburski stressed the use of “microsounds,” such as a car tire rolling over a manhole cover, as opposed to just a loud din.

Sound as Character

Because of Lucien’s unique relationship to sound, Tyburski considered sound itself to be a character in the film, and it was written into the script as such. To further this idea, Tyburski wanted a specific sound effect to be linked to Lucien. After some experimenting with his sound design team, a low rumble was settled on that was designed to be an expression of psychological dissonance. The challenge would be figuring out when to use it, and how intensely. Ultimately it was decided that a subtle hand was best, and they held off on bringing the rumble to the forefront of the score until the climax of the film. This is a fairly unique and quite interesting approach–while it’s not unusual for a sound to be associated with a character, the sound is more commonly a song, such as “California Dreamin’” in Chunking Express…

…or the lullaby in Pan’s Labyrinth.

Communicating with Sound Designers

Tyburski has some solid advice for those wondering how best to communicate with sound designers in order to get your desired result:

Communicate in terms of the texture and emotion you want to achieve.

A lot of film students and other budding filmmakers think that they should talk to sound designers using the technical terms of the trade, and this is often a mistake—it can end up just revealing how little you know, or worse, giving the impression that you don’t trust the designer to know their stuff. It is usually best to communicate in terms of how you want the end result to feel and trust the designer to know how to get there. This is good advice not only for talking to sound designers, but other technical designers on a film, especially if you don’t know the ins and outs of that field yourself. Some other advice from Tyburski on understanding sound:

Listen a lot.

Remember, less is often more.

Tyburski recommends taking the time to listen carefully to the sounds you encounter in your day-to-day life and consider how they make you feel and what you associate them with. Tyburski’s own experiences on The Sound of Silence taught him that subtlety is usually the most impactful approach, and this often means removing sounds rather than adding them.

As audience members, we are often unaware of the impact that the ambient, atmospheric sounds of a film have on our experience of the images. Much like film editing, it’s commonly understood that the best sound design should go unnoticed. But simply because it is more subtle, doesn’t mean that it isn’t just as powerful of a cinematic element as the visuals, and as Tyburski shows, sound itself can be character that guides us through the story.

To learn more about film sound, check out these other great videos.