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Who among us hasn’t misjudged something as a teenager? Before he was the Oscar-winning sound designer behind “Nope,” “The Zone of Interest,” “Hamnet,” and now Daniel Roher’s “Tuner,” Johnnie Burn was a young student rinsing out a water bottle in his kitchen. He left it under the tap for an hour or two and, unwittingly, let it create so much pressure that when he touched it again, the bottle exploded, covering him in water and plastic and rendering him temporarily deaf.
“I remember going up to my bedroom and putting Public Enemy on full blast and feeling the speakers move and not hearing anything. Like, I could feel them and was just thinking, at the time, ‘Oh my God, I’ve killed my hearing. That was actually what eventually made me quit Uni and go get a job as a sound person,” Burn told IndieWire.
The loss of his hearing would have been a tragedy for all of us who’ve gotten to enjoy the deft ways Burn has brought audiences inside experiences as wild as aliens hiding in the clouds, as brutal as the background hum of industrialized murder, and as primal as nature. On “Tuner,” he’s gotten to design the soundscape of something he himself experienced after his temporary deafness.
“I had hyperacusis for a couple of months myself after,” said Burns. “I had really sensitive hearing — anything that was above quiet, it was painful. So when I read [Roher’s] script, I had great ideas and knew, to some extent, what that felt like.”
Niki (Leo Woodall), the protagonist of “Tuner,” has a much more intense and permanent case of hyperacusis, which has pushed his life away from being a virtuoso pianist, but his extremely sensitive ears also allow him to crack open a safe by sound alone. When some Israeli gangsters secure Niki’s services, just at the moment his boss and adoptive father figure, Harry (Dustin Hoffman), needs a lot of cash, shenanigans ensue.
Obviously, Burn and his sound team can’t ever actually crank the sound up so loud in the mix that it hurts the way sound hurts Niki. You can’t damage people’s ears. So the attenuation of Niki’s discomfort, making it legible and, in some small way, bringing the audience in to share in it during the sequences we experience from Niki’s perspective, was the big challenge of “Tuner.”
Burn needed to create four different levels of sound, more or less. One where the audience hears the characters the way someone without hyperacusis would; one from Niki’s point of view, where he has no hearing protection; another where he has a set of mini-earplugs in; and the third where he has the huge ear defenders on, which restrict sound.
‘Tuner’ Courtesy Everett Collection“ I got these microphones that you can place inside your ear canal, and recorded myself going about the house with these different positions of hearing protection on in order to understand what you could and couldn’t hear in those different states,” Burn said.
The sound designer and his team really tried to be clinical about differentiating those states of hearing and reinforcing them across the film. “The music in the film, Will Bates’s score and Marius de Vries fantastic orchestrations on the piano, those tell you the emotional state of the characters, whereas I think my role was very much to portray the condition and be quite rigorous about what his point-of-hearing, as opposed to point-of-view, would be in these different states of protection,” Burn said.
Burns felt he could go even further with the rigor and intricacy of the sound design because he was mixing in Dolby Atmos. “When mixing a film, you have to make certain compromises because you think, ‘Oh, someone might be sitting in a corner, and they might hear the rear speaker too much and not the front,” Burn said. “With Atmos, you can be a lot more confident that your mix is going to be represented much more accurately, which allows you to be more daring and more adventurous — that’s what Daniel said, ‘This is a very adventurous mix.’”
‘Tuner’ Courtesy Everett CollectionIn Atmos, every speaker is able to provide full frequency, very sharp high-pitched sounds, and very low, rumbly sounds as well. So exploring that level of immersion is always going to be fun for a sound designer. But what makes the sound of “Tuner” actually exciting and adventurous, to Burn, is that the film embraces sound as an essential part of its storytelling.
“Sound is such a hidden tool in filmmaking still, it seems to me. Images record what happened, and the microphone kind of records the feeling of what happened,” Burn said. “So to have a script that went to such enormous lengths to put you in the position of actually experiencing life in the way this character with this condition does — I read that script, and I was like, ‘Holy cow. Yes, please.’”
“Tuner” is now in theaters.
English (US) ·