Johnnie Burn didn’t just design the hyperacusis soundscape of “Tuner” — he lived through the kind of hearing sensitivity that drove him away from university and into a sound career. Now, working in Dolby Atmos, Burn built four distinct sound levels to let audi
The first time Johnnie Burn lost his hearing, it wasn’t on a film set.
As a young student, Burn rinsed out a water bottle in his kitchen. He left it running for an hour or two, and the pressure built up enough that when he touched the bottle again, it exploded—covering him in water and plastic and leaving 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.
That experience later became the foundation for his work as an Oscar-winning sound designer. shaping the way he draws audiences into moments as intense and specific as the alien atmosphere of “Nope. ” the industrial quiet of “The Zone of Interest. ” and the sonic world of “Hamnet.” Now he’s tackling Daniel Roher’s “Tuner. ” where the sound design is built around a condition he says he also lived through.
Burn’s temporary deafness wasn’t the only hit. “I had hyperacusis for a couple of months myself after,” he said. “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.”
In “Tuner,” Niki (Leo Woodall) lives with hyperacusis that is far more intense and permanent. It pushes his life away from being a virtuoso pianist. even as his extremely sensitive ears give him an edge—enough to crack open a safe by sound alone. When some Israeli gangsters secure Niki’s services. it happens at a critical moment: his boss and adoptive father figure. Harry (Dustin Hoffman). needs a lot of cash. and the resulting pressure fuels the film’s escalating chaos.
But the sound team couldn’t recreate Niki’s discomfort the way it would actually hurt. Burn said the challenge was straightforward and uncompromising: “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.’”.
To make that “legible” for viewers, Burn and his team created four different levels of sound. One lets the audience hear like someone without hyperacusis. Another places the audience in Niki’s point of hearing, where he has no hearing protection. A third state includes mini-earplugs. The fourth uses huge ear defenders, restricting sound even further.
To figure out what those states really sounded like, Burn said he recorded himself using microphones placed inside his ear canal while moving around the house with the different positions of hearing protection—so he could understand “what you could and couldn’t hear in those different states.”
The film’s sound also needed to do more than mimic discomfort. Burn aimed to separate emotional cues from the condition itself. “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.
That rigor got an extra boost from how the film was mixed. Burn said he could push further because he was working in Dolby Atmos, where the mix is represented more accurately across a theater.
“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.’”.
Atmos also matters for the kind of immersion “Tuner” wants. Burn explained that in Atmos, every speaker can deliver full frequency—sharp high-pitched sounds and low, rumbly sounds—making exploration of that level of surround immersion “always going to be fun for a sound designer.”
What makes “Tuner” feel especially exciting to Burn, though, isn’t just the technology. He said the film treats sound as storytelling itself. “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.
Tuner Johnnie Burn Dolby Atmos Leo Woodall Dustin Hoffman Daniel Roher hyperacusis sound design Will Bates Marius de Vries Everett Collection