Sound of Metal
In this film, music exists not as melody but as the very sense that is slipping away
At a glance 🔭💭
Some coordinates adapted from GeoNames (CC BY 4.0) · Pleiades (CC BY 3.0)
The people behind it ⏳🌊
- ComposerNicolas Becker
As sound designer, he shaped the film's musical language by designing hearing itself as sound, in place of a traditional background score.
- ComposerAbraham Marder
He composed the film's original music and co-wrote the screenplay with his brother, Darius Marder.
- DirectorDarius Marder
He took over Derek Cianfrance's long-gestating project, directing it and writing the screenplay.
- Lead actorRiz Ahmed
He trained for a long time in drums and American Sign Language for the role of Ruben Stone.
- Lead actorOlivia Cooke
She played Lou Berger, Ruben's girlfriend and bandmate.
- Lead actorPaul Raci
He played Joe, who runs the shelter, and is known as an actor fluent in sign language, having grown up with deaf parents.
I. The work and the people behind it
(Concept) Sound of Metal began as an idea director Derek Cianfrance had long carried with him. He wanted to film the story of a real metal-band drummer losing his hearing in a manner close to documentary, and the project is said to have drifted for nearly a decade under the title 'Metalhead.' (The Marder brothers) Cianfrance later handed the direction to Darius Marder instead of directing it himself, and Darius rewrote the screenplay with his brother Abraham Marder. Abraham also composed the film's music, so that the brothers drew the same world in both story and sound. (Becker joins) The arrival of the French sound artist Nicolas Becker decisively changed the film's character. Becker was already known for experimental field recording and microphone techniques pressed close to the body, and for this film he chose not to use a conventional score but to design hearing itself as sound. (Manifesto) The result is that Sound of Metal became a film with almost no score. Instead, the very process of sound swelling, shrinking, smearing and vanishing becomes the film's music. The chapters that follow trace how that sound drives the story.
II. Blackgammon, noise on the stage
(The duo) Ruben Stone and Lou Berger tour the United States in a battered trailer as Blackgammon, a two-piece noise-metal band. Ruben plays drums and Lou handles guitar and vocals, and the two of them alone produce an overwhelming sound that fills the stage. (The show) The film opens on a set that feels like one of the band's actual live performances. Pounding low end, distorted guitar and relentless drumming push the audience into the middle of the concert hall. (Backstory) The two are lovers as well as bandmates; Ruben has a past of addiction behind him, and Lou, too, has come through wounds of her own to arrive at this life on the road. The modest daily routine inside the trailer and the explosive noise on stage are set side by side, revealing the balance of their relationship. (Foreshadowing) Yet this clamorous opening is also designed to contrast with the silence soon to come. The louder the sound in the venue, the larger the silence that follows will loom.
Blackgammon's explosive live performance sets the starting point for the film's sonic plunge.
- The opening scene was recorded like a real live show, so the audience experiences the overwhelming low end and the distorted guitar·drums as if standing in the middle of the concert hall.
- The dense lineup of drums and guitar·vocals, just two players filling everything, is said to have been inspired by real noise-rock duos.
- The volume and density of this scene were designed to contrast sharply with the silence that comes later; it is the first signal flare of the film's entire sonic plunge.
- Riz Ahmed is said to have trained for months in drumming and American Sign Language for the role, and much of the drumming is reported to have been filmed as his own playing.
III. The sound disappears
(Symptoms) One morning Ruben suddenly feels one ear go muffled. At the hospital he is told that his hearing is already badly damaged and will only get worse. (Subjective sound) From this moment the film leaves the image as it is and changes only the sound, dulling it as if submerged underwater. The audience hears almost exactly what Ruben hears, receiving his fear and confusion not through explanation but through sensation. (Fear) On stage, in conversation, even in an argument with Lou, sound smears or cuts out entirely without warning. Unable to accept this change, Ruben tries to cling to his old life, and this resistance pushes him toward dangerous choices. (Turning point) In the end Lou decides to leave Ruben at a recovery community for deaf people. The story of losing sound now becomes a migration into a world without it.
The image stays the same while only the sound smears, letting the audience share Ruben's senses.
- At the moment his hearing switches off, the sound turns dull as if submerged underwater, giving the audience nearly the same auditory experience as Ruben.
- Nicolas Becker is said to have recorded sound with special microphones and contact mics pressed against the body, achieving a texture closer to the accounts of people who live with hearing loss than an ordinary filter effect would.
- The treatment in which dialogue and ambient sound smear at once is the passage that most clearly shows the film's stance of having no score in the conventional sense.
- This sequence is often cited among the reasons the film won the Academy Award for sound.
IV. The shelter, a community of silence
(Arrival) Set in the countryside, this shelter is a community where deaf people in recovery from addiction live together, led by a man named Joe. Joe has lost his hearing too, and he tells Ruben that to stay here he must first learn how to remain within this silence. (Everyday sounds) Dialogue and music fall away, and in their place small noises — a spoon striking a bowl, footsteps, a door opening and closing — are magnified and heard with clarity. These sounds effectively take the place of melody in this stretch. (Sign language) Ruben learns American Sign Language and spends time at the children's school, gradually settling into the rhythm of the community. Conversations carried by hands and faces instead of sound fill the screen. (Inner conflict) Yet he still feels this silence only as loss, and in a corner of his mind he keeps searching for a way back. The peace the community offers him and his lingering attachment to the old world pull taut against each other.
V. Temptation and the implant
(Decision) Ruben decides to sell his trailer and gear to pay for cochlear implant surgery. It is a choice that collides head-on with the community's teaching of 'acceptance.' (Rupture) Joe tries to dissuade him, but Ruben presses ahead and finally leaves the community to have the operation. The stability he found in silence begins to waver again. (The implant) When the device is switched on after surgery, the sound he hears again is not the sound he knew. It is closer to a rough, metallic, somehow broken digital signal. Rather than restoring his lost hearing, the cochlear implant hands him an entirely different and unfamiliar sense. (Reunion foreshadowed) Carrying this strange sound, Ruben sets out to find Lou, and the story moves to the place where the two face each other one last time.
The sound at the moment the device switches on reveals not recovery but the beginning of an unfamiliar signal.
- The sound at the moment the cochlear implant switches on was deliberately made rough, metallic and digitally broken in texture.
- Becker is said to have drawn on the accounts of real cochlear implant users, honestly rendering in sound the fact that the device cannot fully restore lost hearing but only translates it into an unfamiliar signal.
- Betraying the dramatic moment of recovery the audience might have expected, it condenses into a single sound the film's stance that technology is no cure-all.
VI. Paris
(Reunion) Lou is now living in Paris, France, at her father's house. Ruben goes all the way there to find her, and for the first time in a long while the two sit face to face again. (Another world) Inside this house there is once more the sound of a piano and of people talking. It is 'sound as landscape,' heard for the first time in a long while, somewhere between the clamorous stage and absolute silence. (Misalignment) Yet the sound of the cochlear implant Ruben has obtained and the life beside Lou that he longed for do not fold neatly onto each other. A subtle distance surfaces between the two of them, and between Ruben and the world he tried to reclaim. (Threshold of choice) Rather than giving Ruben an answer, this meeting leaves him with a question. From here the film slowly begins to reveal what it was he truly wanted to reclaim.
The piano and voices, returned after so long, offer a warmth that contrasts with the earlier silence.
- The Paris reunion scene is a space filled with piano and conversation, offering a warmth that contrasts with the silent sequences before it.
- Returning once more to 'sound as landscape,' this passage evokes the texture of the world Ruben had briefly left behind.
- The song Lou sings in this scene, in its restrained tone, hints at the change in her heart.
VII. After the silence
(Return) After leaving Lou's father's house, Ruben sits alone on a bench in the street. The noise of the city still flows into his ears through the cochlear implant, strange and rough. (Choice) There he takes a certain action. This is the moment that sets the meaning of all the sound and silence the film has built up in an entirely different place, and from here on it is best left for viewers to see for themselves. (Afterglow) What is certain is that after this scene the film returns to complete silence. That silence does not sound like loss. Rather, it sounds like the first sound Ruben has chosen for himself. (Close) Sound of Metal ends on this final silence, never letting go, to the very last, of the principle it has kept from the start - that music is not melody but sensation.
Street noise cuts off in an instant into complete silence, showing that the film refused a score to the end.
- The final scene is built so that street noise continues and then cuts off in an instant into complete silence, and this silence conveys the emotion of the ending in its most condensed form.
- Many critics single out the sound treatment of this final shot as a bold decision, and it is frequently cited.
- The end credits roll to 'Green', a song written and sung by Abraham Marder, and only after the final silence does melody at last return.
Lesser-known stories
Several outlets reported that the film's music failed to earn a nomination for Best Original Score at the 2021 Academy Awards, not as an ordinary snub but because the music branch did not recognize it as eligible at all. This is understood to be because it did not meet the Academy's eligibility criteria for original scores at the time (the requirement on the proportion of original music). Instead, the film won the Academy Award for Sound, shared by a team that included Nicolas Becker. That Nicolas Becker spent a long period working with hearing-related institutions to create the sound of deafness, and recorded a wide range of sounds with special microphones placed against the body, is known in fair detail from numerous interviews. Accounts differ somewhat from outlet to outlet, however, on exactly how he narrowed his own experience of hearing in the process. Paul Raci, who plays Joe, grew up with deaf parents, signs American Sign Language as a native tongue, and spent many years performing with a deaf theater company. That a career which had drawn little attention before this role became widely known through the film is often mentioned as an example of how much the accidents of casting can contribute to a work's authenticity. Nothing in the finished film reveals that it began as a project Derek Cianfrance had held onto for nearly a decade under the title 'Metalhead'. He originally intended to direct it himself in a form close to documentary, but as other work crowded it out he eventually handed the direction over to Darius Marder and kept his name on it only as the originator of the story.
Terminology notes 📚🔎
Sound design
(In film·musical theater music) The work of planning and placing every sound a film needs - footsteps, wind, mechanical noise, even silence, everything apart from dialogue and music - . Just as a classroom might set a rule that two claps mean it is time to be quiet, a film designs in advance which sounds the audience will hear and when, and so tunes their emotions. Sound of Metal is cited as a rare case that puts sound design itself in the place of a score. (Elsewhere) The term 'sound design' is also used in making games or apps, where it refers to creating sounds that signal a function, such as clicks and notification tones.
Binaural recording
(Literal meaning) Binaural comes from a Latin word meaning 'of two ears', and refers to recording in a way that mimics exactly how a person's two ears hear. (In film·musical theater music) When microphones are placed at the ear positions of a mannequin modeled on a human head, listening on headphones makes it feel real whether a sound is coming from the left or the right, from near or far. It is like the sense that lets you, eyes closed, tell where someone at the back of the classroom is calling you from by the sound alone. With this technique Nicolas Becker sought to carry the world Ruben hears straight into the audience's ears.
Point of audition (subjective listening perspective)
(In film·musical theater music) Just as a frame showing what a character sees through their own eyes is called a 'point-of-view shot', presenting sound as that character hears it is called point of audition. It is the same principle at work in cartoons or games, when the sound suddenly goes muffled the moment the hero dives underwater. Sound of Metal builds most of the film from Ruben's point of audition, so that the audience lives through the changes in his hearing in their own bodies.
Diegetic and non-diegetic sound
(Literal meaning) Diegetic derives from a Greek word meaning 'within the story'. (In film·musical theater music) Diegetic sound is sound the characters themselves can hear - a song on the radio, a band playing at a concert - while non-diegetic sound is background music that only the audience hears, not the characters. The whistle that actually blows in gym class is diegetic; the music laid under a tense scene is non-diegetic. Sound of Metal often blurs the line between the two, so that subjective sounds such as the ringing in Ruben's ears come across like background music.
Foley
(Literal meaning) The term is named after Jack Foley, the sound technician who established the technique. (In film·musical theater music) The work of separately recording, in a post-production studio, sounds that are hard to capture on set, such as footsteps, the rustle of clothing and objects knocking together, and laying them over the picture so they sound true to life. It is like a cooking show recording the sound of a knife chopping on its own and adding it so it rings out unusually crisp. In Sound of Metal, Foley sounds such as the clink of spoons and footsteps at the shelter effectively take the place of melody.
Leitmotif
(Literal meaning) German for 'leading motive'. (In film·musical theater music) A technique of repeating a short melody paired with a particular character or emotion, so that the audience calls that character or situation to mind just by hearing it. It is like knowing whose video it is from the intro alone when a favorite YouTuber opens every video with the same music. In Sound of Metal, instead of melodic leitmotifs, particular textures of sound, such as the ringing of tinnitus, recur and play the same role.