Don’t Sell Out the Power of Sound
Don’t Sell Out the Power of Sound
George Lucas famously said that sound and music are 50 percent of the entertainment in a movie and while the exact figure might be disputed, there’s little doubt about the power of sound to tell a story.
That belief has guided the decades-long career of Peter Kurland, a four-time Oscar-nominated sound mixer whose work has shaped some of modern cinema’s most memorable films. His journey into sound wasn’t a straight line—but once he found it, he never looked back.
Career beginnings
Although Peter Kurland had made home movies as a teenager and dabbled in theater production after leaving school, a career in movie sound didn’t occur to him until the very first project he did professionally. This was the 1983 TV movie Living Proof: The Hank Williams, Jr. Story, for which Kurland was hired as a production assistant despite, in his own words, his limited experience of film. “I’d never heard of a NAGRA (audio recorder),” he recalls.
A year later he was a boom operator on Blood Simple, the start of a four-decade (and counting…) creative partnership with Joel and Ethan Coen. Kurland has recorded and mixed sound for all their productions since O Brother, Where Art Thou?, including The Big Lebowski, The Man Who Wasn’t There, The Ladykillers, Burn After Reading, Hail, Caesar! and Inside Llewyn Davis, as well as the brothers’ solo directing projects The Tragedy of Macbeth, Drive-Away Dolls, and 2025 release Honey Don’t!
“I found the whole process of working on set to be fascinating. There were a lot of technical challenges which I threw myself into, but more than anything I just really liked the people I was working with. That’s what hooked me in.”
He also mixed Walk the Line, Punch-Drunk Love and many Barry Sonnenfeld films including The Addams Family and Men in Black.
The role of a sound mixer
As production sound mixer, Kurland’s job entails capturing the performances on set with a team that includes a boom operator, a utility person, and often a playback person.
“Once my work is done the sound goes to picture editorial where assistant picture editors are pulling extra lines from the recordings, doing preliminary cuts for screenings, and helping the picture editor to select the takes.
“If I do my job right the dialogue editor doesn’t have quite so much work to do, but often they do. Once their work is complete the process goes to the post-production mixers who take all of the materials that I’ve recorded plus the work the sound effects and dialogue editors have put together, before ending up on the mixing stage to create the final movie.”
The power of storytelling through sound
“Sound can convey so much in a movie that would otherwise be very tedious for an audience were it all to be laid out visually,” says Kurland, the four-time Oscar-nominated sound mixer and President of the Cinema Audio Society (CAS). “You can learn things about story or character or create a mood in sound that would not be anywhere near as effective if you simply saw them on screen.”
He has been fortunate to work with directors for whom sound is a big part of the preparation process. Since the Coens write as well as direct, they consider the sound content of the movie in their writing. “The sound or the music track or other sonic elements are in their scripts, which gives us a really good guideline for what we’re trying to do. If it’s not in the script then they’ve already played the scene in their head so when we’re on set they are very clear about which lines we need and which are going to play under a voiceover or under music. That attention to craft makes the process very efficient and allows us to be a lot more creative in what we do because we know exactly what they want.”
For example, much of the nail-biting tension in No Country for Old Men (2007) stems from what we hear of the sociopath Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), such as the sound of his weapon and movements in a motel room, while his prey are hiding in another room.
“If we showed you what was happening the scene would be nowhere near as compelling,” Kurland says. “In another scene the slow unscrewing of a lightbulb is equally full of tension. That was a sound effect added in post. It’s so subtle it took me several viewings to notice but without it your fear and anticipation is not the same.”
Sound designers are expert at creating sounds for something that doesn’t necessarily exist. This happens a lot in science fiction, and Lucas could have been thinking about the work of the legendary Ben Burtt (who brought the sound of the lightsaber to life) when he made his statement, but it is equally applicable in a drama.
“On No Country for Old Men, sound mixer Craig Berkey had the idea that wind would be a character in that movie,” Kurland relates. “We spent all day, every day on set trying to fight the background sound of the wind to record dialogue; because we were shooting in New Mexico, the wind was very loud. We got as clean a recording as we could and then Craig went and put wind back in everywhere! He wanted a specific wind that helped tell the story. For me that explains a lot about sound design, which is figuring out how to make the sound suit the movie and not necessarily just be what really happened on the day.”
AI and the future of sound work
However, the position of sound professionals at every level—from production and post-production mixers or re-recording mixers and foley to sound editors, technicians, and microphone boom operators—is under threat from cheaper, faster AI-driven alternatives.
“I have strong but mixed views on AI,” says Kurland, who also works with IATSE to protect the interests of its members, which include sound professionals. “Doing something faster and more efficiently sounds good on the surface but not if that means eliminating jobs. The work of people who give so much care and dedication to how they clean or replace dialogue can now be replicated by a machine that has no inherent sense whatsoever about what the feeling of that scene is.”
“On the other hand, I understand that there are certain kinds of dialogue that can’t be saved through judicious sound editing but can miraculously be recovered through AI because software can be trained to recognize the human voice or to remove things that aren’t the human voice.
“The technology can be incredibly fast. I’ve seen examples where an AI can be fed the script text and replace it with a vocal performance that sounds just like your actor in seconds. Plus, it’s a clean recording from the start with no need for post. AI can even learn the timbre and phrasing of somebody’s voice to the extent that there’s no need for ADR.
“The critical question for me is whether the output contains the human nuances that it would have had from recording the actor’s performance. If we automate the dubbing into English of a foreign language movie, do we risk losing the lived performance of the actor? At its extreme, AI can make people sound artificial since all the emotion and character is lost.”
The bottom line for Kurland is that a single-purpose AI that can help sound professionals do their work better and which can preserve performance in a non-destructive way are tools to be embraced.
“However, if we are simply using AI for speed or to reduce crew and therefore purely to save cost, then we are going to lose something major in the process.”
Meeting uncertain times
With the whole industry convulsing from the twin shocks of COVID and the 2023 strikes amid general economic downturn, the impact of lower budgets and of productions shifting overseas are additional issues that weigh on Kurland’s mind.
“It’s certainly a challenging time, and since CAS represents sound professionals internationally, we take a holistic view of the situation,” he says.
“The current debate about domestic production versus foreign production is a painful one because it is not a zero-sum game. People in the U.S. are not losing their jobs as a direct result of people in other countries gaining those jobs. Actually what’s happened is the overall level of production everywhere has reduced and the budgets for all productions have shrunk regardless of where they are made.”
He says job insecurity is a real concern, especially for freelance personnel. The situation is forcing some people to leave the industry or to retire earlier than they had originally planned.
“That said, there are still many people working and there’s still a lot of content being made. Tennessee, where I live, has never been busier with shows and the reason is because of the robust tax incentive here.”
Productions are increasingly relocating to where they can access the best financial package, and that becomes a problem if a certain city, state or territory has an established crew base then work moves away because another state or city offers a more attractive rate.
“In Atlanta, for instance, there are several thousand people dependent on projects coming into the state to shoot and when those productions don’t land it becomes a real problem for them to pay their bills and make a living. Productions seem less interested now in who the local crew are or even what the locations are like and instead prioritize anything that squeezes the most dollars from a government.”
Educating the next generation
As President of CAS, Kurland is able to evangelize the greater understanding and appreciation of motion picture sound. “That involves a lot of education,” he says. “We hold social events like film screenings with Q&As, family-friendly events, membership meetings, and educational meetings on topics of interest to our industry – including on the impact of AI. We co-produce The Sounding Board and we’re proud of the CAS Awards, which honor truly inspiring work.”
He continues, “To me there’s nothing more enjoyable than what I’ve been doing in sound for more than 40 years. I’m always proud of the work that I do and of the crews that I do it with. There’s really no replacement for the experience of helping to create a lasting record of a story or a legacy work of art. You don’t get too many chances to do that in life. So, if you really love the work I would certainly encourage young people to pursue their dream – just don’t go into it expecting a big paycheck.”