Empathic Sound in Film: The Deaf Soundscape of Sound of Metal

An expanded version of this article was originally published in French in the peer-reviewed journal Images Secondes.

Film can control not only what we hear, but how we hear it. Through a sound design that uses muffling, distortion, oscillations in volume, tinnitus-like overlays and abrupt cuts to silence, countless films and series attempt to convey an experience of deafness, for the benefit of a presumed hearing audience. This article proposes the term “empathic sound” to describe this immersive representation of hearing loss. From horror movies like A Quiet Place (John Krasinski, 2018) to dramas like the Oscar-winning CODA (Siân Heder, 2021) to superhero series like Marvel’s Echo (Marion Dayre, 2023), the manipulation of screen sound to portray the perspective of a deaf or hard of hearing character is rapidly increasing. Though these films and series now often cast deaf actors in their deaf roles (something that was rare in the 20th century, when cripface¹ was standard practice), they are often not “deaf” in a meaningful sense. In almost all cases, they are written, directed and edited by hearing crews and target hearing audiences. As a result, their storylines usually resonate with hearing concerns rather than deaf ones, with tales of musicians who are tragically deafened (often ironically, by noise exposure from the music they love) being one of the most common.

With their focus on so-called “normal” audition and deviations from it, these films and series are fundamentally about hearing. They do not imagine or include a deaf audience. These are major limitations. And yet an immersive sound design that evokes an internal “experience” of deafness can have didactic and affective value. Many early film representations of deafness, such as the melodramatic The Miracle Worker (Arthur Penn, 1962) or the infantilising The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter (Robert Ellis Miller, 1968) and Johnny Belinda (Jean Negulesco, 1948), perpetuate myths about deafness as a hopeless condition and deaf people as preternaturally vulnerable, exotic or innocent. This is even true of many contemporary films, such as the pathologising The Tribe (Plemya, Myroslav Slaboshpytskyi, 2014) and the patronising La famille Bélier (The Belier Family, Eric Lartigau, 2014, source text for the very similar CODA). By contrast, thoughtful use of empathic sound in stories made in deaf-hearing collaboration has the potential to foster greater understanding of the complexity of deaf experiences in hearing spectators, perhaps even creating flow-on benefits for the deaf people who encounter them in the real world. In other words, sound design that immerses the spectator in a positionality other than their own can encourage reflection, challenge assumptions and perhaps even elicit empathy, rather than the pity or objectification which were so common to 20th century portrayals of deaf characters.²

This article explores the techniques of embodiment used by empathic sound design, and asks what the benefits – and limitations – are of films about deafness that recentre sound. It focuses on one of the most striking examples of empathic sound in recent years: Darius Marder’s 2019 Sound of Metal. A drama about a late-deafened drummer that won the 2021 Academy Awards for Best Editing and Sound, the film uses a range of sonic strategies to portray sudden hearing loss and cochlear implantation in ways that invite the spectator not simply to observe, but to experience them.

Narratives of deafness are not the first to play with the spatial dimensions of film sound. Empathic sound is a subcategory of what Rick Altman calls “point of audition,” the sonic equivalent of the point of view shot: “we are asked not to hear, but to identify with someone who will hear for us.”³ In other words, point of audition modifies sound so we share a character’s position in space (for example, nearby sounds are loud, distant sounds are faint, sounds made behind a soundproof barrier are inaudible, etc.) Point of audition sound is common, while empathic sound is more specific. Empathic sound places us in an even more intimate relationship with the character; we share not simply their location, but their body and its subjective auditory perception (which presumably differs from our own).

Sound of Metal follows Ruben (Riz Ahmed) through the first months after he undergoes (implausibly) rapid and profound hearing loss. After an initial period of denial, he spends several weeks in a rehabilitation centre run for and by deaf people, where he learns American Sign Language and earns a place in the local Deaf community. He then sells all his belongings to pay for a double cochlear implantation, in the hopes of regaining his former profession and life. This choice to pursue “hearing” at all costs leads the community to reject and expel him, an unlikely dramatisation that obscures the complexity and nuance of attitudes towards cochlear implants (CIs) in actual Deaf culture.⁴ Yet despite its unrealistic elements, Sound of Metal is also radical in its portrayal of deafness and CIs. Unlike the melodramatic “scenes of cure, of miracle”⁵ seen in most screen portrayals of CI surgery, when Ruben’s CIs are finally turned on, he is dismayed at the result. The “audition” the devices provide is metallic, unnatural, an inconsistent signal that flattens space and makes language especially difficult to decipher. In reality, the brain requires a period of six months or more to adapt to the electrical signals CIs transmit, which bypass the auditory nerve and can eventually provide a certain (partial) form of audition. Yet despite this inaccuracy, Sound of Metal differs from many other films and series, declining audist conventions that depict CIs as “miracle…cures” for deafness, which in turn fuel false beliefs that recipients of CIs no longer require or benefit from sign language. While useful, CIs cannot and will not return Ruben fully to a world of sound.

Sound of Metal explores Ruben’s understandable grief in the wake of unexpected hearing loss, but it resists traditional portrayals of deafness as straightforwardly tragic.⁶ Though the film is phonocentric, its ultimate vision of deaf experience is nuanced and complex. Through three essential scenes, the film’s empathic sound shows Ruben’s journey from hearing loss to what Deaf studies scholars H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray call “Deaf gain.” This concept reframes deafness, shifting the focus from the “loss” of “hearing loss” to the range of linguistic, cultural and sensorial “gains” a deaf perspective can bring:

To many in the deaf community, being deaf has nothing to do with “loss” but is, rather, a distinct way of being in the world, one that opens up perceptions, perspectives, and insights that are less common to the majority of hearing persons. The biological, social, and cultural implications of being deaf are not automatically defined simply by loss but could also be defined by difference, and, in some significant instances, as gain.⁷

In its representation of Deaf gain through empathic sound, Sound of Metal thus has the potential to shift hearing perspectives on what deafness can be and mean.

Scene 1: Hearing Loss

Sound of Metal begins with Ruben and his bandmate and romantic partner Lou (Olivia Cooke), who have been together since meeting in drug rehabilitation four years prior. Their band, a successful doom metal duo named Blackgammon, features Lou on vocals and guitar and Ruben on drums. They are touring their intense, discordant music across the US in their RV, which is also their home. Empathic sound design first appears ten minutes in, while Ruben and Lou are setting up for a show. As Lou chats with the venue staff, the camera closes in on Ruben, perching over his shoulder, his right ear in the centre of the frame. The ambient volume abruptly drops, the chatter growing muffled, as a sharp tinnitus sound pierces in. In this moment, to quote tinnitus scholar Mack Hagood, “we are auditing [the character’s] blasted aural perspective.”⁸ It is clear that we have entered Ruben’s head, where something has just ruptured.

Sound of Metal

In the following scenes, the ringing subsides but the muffling and low volume persist. Ruben seeks out an audiologist, who tells him the hearing loss is likely the result of accumulated noise exposure from music. Afraid Ruben will relapse due to the stress, Lou calls their sobriety coach, who locates a rehabilitation centre for the deaf. As we shift between Ruben and Lou’s perspectives, the soundtrack oscillates between empathic and “objective” sound. We thus witness a double rupture: that of Ruben’s hearing, and that of the spectator’s sonic relationship to film tradition. Mary Ann Doan describes this as a fabrication inherent to the medium:

The cinema presents a spectacle composed of disparate elements – images, voices, sound effects, music, writing – which the mise-en-scene, in its broadest sense, organizes and aims at the body of the spectator, sensory receptacle of the various stimuli… Classical mise-en-scene has a stake in perpetuating the image of unity and identity sustained by this body.⁹

These scenes disrupt Doan’s “image of unity and identity” that filmscapes typically construct. They expose the myth of “objective” hearing and show how sensory perception is by definition subjective. Sound is filtered not only through the ear but the mind of every individual, including every audio-spectator, who brings their own linguistic, neurological, mental and cultural baggage to the sonic data transmitted to them. This decentres the hegemony of hearing perspectives; as Bauman and Murray write, “instead of conceiving deafness as a deviation from a norm of hearing, it may be seen as one particular way of being that is no less human, or no less valid, than any other.”¹⁰ 

Scene 2: Vibrations

Sound of Metal’s early scenes of empathic sound are distressing and isolating for Ruben. Yet once he arrives at the rehabilitation centre, glimmers of Deaf gain begin to emerge. The centre is located in a bucolic village, where each resident has daily chores and responsibilities (Ruben’s is to “learn how to be deaf”). Next door is a school for deaf children, where Ruben is invited to study ASL (American Sign Language), a language he discovers to be ideally adapted to his new identity, allowing him to forge new relationships and gain new knowledge. One day, as the class watches a dance performance that both Ruben and one of the other students find unstimulating, neither of them used to appreciating dance without audio accompaniment, the teacher asks Ruben to take the student outside to play. They wander through the playground and stop at the slide, Ruben sitting at the bottom while the boy lies on his stomach at the top. The boy begins to knock absentmindedly on the metallic surface and Ruben joins in, the two forming a playful call-and-response. At this moment, empathic sound returns, the volume dropping very low as the taps become muted and refracted. The camera lingers on Ruben’s hands as he begins to drum in earnest, tapping out an intricate beat. The boy presses his cheek to the slide, placing his palms flat on the metal, fingers spread, absorbing the music as reverberations. Like the two deaf characters in the scene, we witness Ruben’s drumming less as sound than as vibration, a tactile sensation received through multiple body parts (skin, bones, nerves) far more than the ears.

Sound of Metal

Sound of Metal’s title is a double reference: to Blackgammon’s heavy metal music, and to the tinny signals that constitute cochlear implant “sound.” Yet this scene shows us a third “sound of metal”: the tactile contact with a simple steel slide that offers Ruben a reconnection with drumming. In the following scene, we see him teaching the children to drum on overturned buckets, timing the beat with their eyes, cultivating an internal rhythm and feeling the reverberations through their bodies. Subtly, incrementally, Ruben begins to build a new sensory toolkit defined less by deficit – the inability to hear – and more by plenitude – the Deaf gain of seeing, feeling and sensing differently.

Scene 3: Silence

Soon after, Ruben undergoes his operation and must wait six weeks between the surgery (which severs the auditory nerve) and activation. At this point, the empathic sound shifts from Ruben’s 80% hearing loss, with some faint residual audition, to complete silence. The effect is jarring; as Deaf scholar Louis Daubresse explains, it is exceedingly rare for total silence to feature in film for more than a few seconds.¹¹ When the CIs are eventually switched on, a new metallic soundscape emerges, more abrasive and disorienting than the empathic sound of earlier scenes. The volume increases, and Ruben can interpret some words, but the overall effect is alien and overwhelming. Impulsively, he books a flight for Paris, where Lou has been staying with her French father during Ruben’s treatment. He arrives the day of a party, where he struggles to follow the interactions around him. When Lou’s father convinces her to sing along to his piano accompaniment, the sound design alternates between a conventional recording of the performance, and Ruben’s fluctuating and disconcerting perception of it.

The following morning, crestfallen and lost, Ruben wanders the streets of Paris, his CIs activated. As he sits on a park bench, he takes in a city scene that is brimming with sound: piercing police sirens, crackling traffic noises, children’s grating shouts, a clanging of church bells that feels more violent than melodic. The cacophony continues for several seconds, overstimulating, intrusive, dissonant. Then Ruben tears the (magnetically attached) implants from his head and total silence rushes in. But this silence is not solely an absence, a lack. As Ruben continues to gaze around, the beauty of the scene washes over him. The church becomes a sun-dappled picture rather than a source of shattering noise. The children’s play transforms from a distraction to unintrusive background movement. Decoupled from its auditory stimuli, the city becomes a scene of tranquillity. This is not a forced silence but a chosen one, an enveloping presence that can soothe and nurture. Ruben closes his eyes and the camera lingers on his meditative expression for well over a minute, in silence, until the view fades to black and the film ends.

Sound of Metal

This is not a straightforward moment of healing for Ruben; it is also one of bittersweet reflection, and perhaps of regret for the surgery. It is unclear what role ASL, CIs, music and speech will play in Ruben’s future. But it is clear this is a turning point for him, one which, to quote Bauman and Murray, opens up the potential for a new “way of being that is no less human, or no less valid, than any other.”¹² Though it relies on its spectators having at least some hearing, empathic sound has the potential to immerse non-deaf audiences in deaf “way[s] of being” that extend far beyond negative deficit models. Deafness is not monolithic, total silence on film is rare and empathic sound can only ever convey the sensory perception of specific individuals. Yet rather than simply recentring sound to emphasise the absence of it, Sound of Metal’s empathic soundscape can give non-deaf audiences a glimpse into the possibilities of Deaf gain. This embodied, sonic witnessing destabilises hearing assumptions and teaches us how all sensory perception is not only physically, but socially and culturally informed.

Acknowledgements

This article was originally published in a longer, French-language version in the peer-reviewed journal Images Secondes, part of a special issue on disability in film edited by Barbara Fougère-Danezan and Romain Chareyron. The research is funded by the Australian Research Council through the DECRA project Sign on Screen (DE230100070), a deaf-hearing collaboration on the representation of sign language and deafness in film and television hosted by the Australian National University. I am particularly grateful for the generous and exciting feedback on this research received at the Deaf Studies en question seminar at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris, in June 2025.

Endnotes