The least-discussed serious craft in cinema. What sound designers actually do, with examples from Apocalypse Now to Dune.
Most viewers, asked who made a film, will name the director. Most can name the lead actor. Many will know the cinematographer if the film is visually striking. Almost no one outside the industry can name the sound designer.
This is a problem, because sound design is doing roughly half the work of making a scene land. Mute any of the films listed below and watch how quickly your emotional response collapses.
The sound designer is responsible for the entire non-musical audio component of a film: dialogue, foley, effects, ambience, and the relationships between them. On a major production, the sound designer leads a department that may include sound recordists (capturing audio on set), foley artists (recreating physical sounds in studio), ADR engineers (re-recording dialogue), sound editors (assembling the audio elements), and a re-recording mixer (balancing everything for the final mix).
The composer is responsible for the score. The sound designer is responsible for everything that isn't the score, and for how the score fits among everything else. The distinction matters because what most viewers experience as 'the music' is, in many films, actually sound design — a textured background of hum, drone, ambient layering — that the composer has not written.
The first feature-film sound designer to be credited as such was Walter Murch, on Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979). Murch had been a sound editor for Coppola since The Rain People (1969); the 'sound designer' credit was invented for him on Apocalypse Now to acknowledge a role that the industry had not previously formalised.
Murch's opening sequence — Captain Willard's hotel-room breakdown in Saigon, intercut with helicopters whose rotors transition into the ceiling fan's blade — is the foundational text of modern American film sound. The transition between the helicopter and the fan is so smooth that the audience often does not consciously register the moment of crossfade; what they register is the dissolution of the boundary between Willard's interior state and his exterior surroundings.
Murch's book In the Blink of an Eye (1995, expanded 2001) is still the most-read text on film sound and editing. He went on to win three Oscars for sound and editing across his career.
Ben Burtt designed the sound of Star Wars (1977) and, later, of WALL·E (2008). His task on Star Wars was to invent an entire sonic vocabulary that didn't exist: the lightsaber hum (a combination of an old film projector's motor and the buzz of a 1950s TV picture tube held near a microphone); R2-D2's voice (synthesised and processed Burtt-voice samples); the Wookiee growl (mostly bears).
On WALL·E, Burtt designed the title character's voice — a series of beeps, mechanical sighs, and small rattles that audiences emotionally read as a personality. The 40-minute opening sequence of WALL·E is dialogue-free; Burtt's sound design carries the entire dramatic load. This is why WALL·E is studied at sound-design programmes more than almost any other contemporary animation: it demonstrates the limit case of sound replacing voice.
The most-discussed recent trend in film sound design is the emphasis on the lowest registers of the audio spectrum. Mark Mangini and his team's work on Dune: Part Two, Richard King's work on Oppenheimer, and the entire sound team's work on Christopher Nolan's Tenet have all pushed the use of sub-bass — frequencies below 60Hz — to the limit of what theatrical sound systems can deliver.
The Oppenheimer Trinity-test sequence is the canonical example. The detonation is heard as silence — Nolan and King hold the audio out for forty seconds while the audience sees the explosion — and then arrives as a shockwave whose dominant frequency is below the threshold of conscious hearing. The body feels it before the ear identifies it. The technique is the sequence's argument.
The downside, much-discussed in 2023 and 2024, is that home audio systems do not reproduce sub-bass. A film designed to be felt in a theatre is, on a laptop, simply quieter. The recent shift toward low-end sound design is partly an argument for the theatrical experience as opposed to home viewing.
Foley artists recreate physical sounds in a studio, synchronised to picture: footsteps, fabric movement, glass clinking, doors closing, fight impacts. The craft is named after Jack Foley, the Universal Pictures sound man who developed the modern technique in the late 1920s. Foley artists work in small soundproofed studios with surfaces of different materials — gravel, hardwood, snow, mud — recorded in real time as they watch the picture.
Modern foley is done largely because the production-sound recordist cannot capture clean enough audio of foot movement, fabric, and small physical action in a real shooting environment. The location is too noisy. The foley artist's job is to invent — quietly, in studio — the sonic texture of a scene that the on-set recordist could not capture.
What's striking about contemporary foley is how much of it is convention rather than naturalism. The 'sound' of a punch in cinema is, almost always, a heavy thump that no real punch makes. The 'sound' of a knife being unsheathed is a stylised metallic ring that real knives do not produce. Cinema sound has, over a century, developed its own vocabulary of plausible exaggerations that audiences now read as 'realistic' precisely because cinema has trained them to.""
The re-recording mixer's job is the final stage. The mixer takes the score, the dialogue, the foley, the effects, and the ambience, and balances all of it against itself for a particular theatrical environment. The mix can save a film whose elements weren't quite right; it can ruin a film whose elements were excellent.
Skip Lievsay (the Coen brothers, since Blood Simple) is one of the most-respected mixers in contemporary cinema; the warm, slightly compressed tonal signature of a Coen brothers film is, in part, Lievsay's. Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom, Lora Hirschberg, and Tom Fleischman are the other major figures of the current generation.
If you're new to thinking about film sound: pick three films you've watched before, mute the dialogue and music, and re-watch a five-minute sequence in each with attention to the rest of the audio. The shower scene in Psycho. The opening of WALL·E. The Omaha Beach landing in Saving Private Ryan. The amount of work the sound design is doing will, in each, surprise you.
For longer-form reading: Murch's In the Blink of an Eye, David Sonnenschein's Sound Design: The Expressive Power of Music, Voice, and Sound Effects in Cinema, and the academic work of Michel Chion (particularly Audio-Vision). For watching: The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing (2004) covers sound briefly; Sound! The Story of Film Sound (a number of documentary versions exist) is more specific.