There have been many instances of innovative TV sound design in recent years, but it’s hard to imagine there will be another series where it’s more fundamental to every facet of the story and production than is the case with The Listeners. Broadcast on BBC One at the end of last year and available on iPlayer until November 2025, the four-part drama combines field recordings, vivid audio processing, a haunting new score from Devonté Hynes, and existing music from seminal artists including Nick Drake and Richard and Linda Thompson to frequently astonishing effect.
Adapted by Jordan Tannahill from his own acclaimed 2021 novel, but with the action transferred from the US to the UK, The Listeners begins with English teacher Claire – played by Rebecca Hall – becoming acutely aware of a continuous humming noise that is apparently only heard by a relatively small number of people. What follows is a brilliantly unusual and affecting drama from director Janicza Bravo that variously evokes classic psychological thrillers, folk-horror, and even 1970s public information films like The Spirit of Dark and Lonely Water.
Sound designer for the series is Steve Fanagan, whose credits in this role – and/or as a supervising sound editor and re-recording mixer – include Normal People, Swan Song and An Cailín Ciúin/The Quiet Girl. “It was wonderful to get to work on something that is as subjective and crafted as The Listeners,” he says. “I think Janicza is an incredible, visionary director, and that’s apparent in all of her work. She’s a very detailed person so there’s nothing that isn’t thought about, and that idea of meticulousness has translated to the sound work, where I hope that the sound feels deliberate and all the choices are about pushing the story forward. It’s not sound for sound’s sake, but instead something that’s built into the narrative and is justified by the story unfolding on the screen.”
Finessing ‘The Hum’
Inevitably, determining the noise as it appears to Claire was a high priority for the sound design. Research into the real-world phenomenon known as The Hum played a part, but with reports of frequency ranges differing around the world, as well as theories about its causes, there was always going to be a significant creative aspect here. So the starting point was “a conversation with Janicza about what sort of sound this might be, how the character might be experiencing it, and the ways in which it could be used not only to represent the idea of a sound Claire is hearing or experiencing but also how it might evolve and change depending on where she is on her journey in the story.”
So as might be expected, the initial awareness of the sound feels “huge – very distracting and grating, and affecting Claire’s ability to concentrate. It begins to affect her home life so that had to be reflected in a certain way sonically, but as the series progresses and she finds out that one of her students, Kyle [played by Ollie West], can also hear it, you have the first point where she begins to feel some relief – and so the hum becomes something that’s a little more harmonised.”
As the story twists and turns, so does the hum and its position in the overall soundworld. For the actual filming, Fanagan provided a “collection of sounds that could be used on set as a reference point to help [the relevant actors] become distracted in the moment”. Then, during post, the form of the noise continued to mutate with different treatments and processing – reflecting a wider ethos of perpetual revision to the series as it neared finalisation.
“We were always working across the four episodes in post,” confirms Fanagan. “So if there was something we discovered in episode four that we were enjoying and thought was working, we might figure out a version of it that could be planted as a little seed in an earlier episode. And that helped it evolved into this much bigger, kind of transcendental sound.”
Built into the script
But as the first few minutes of the opening episode indicate – when Richard and Linda Thompson’s glorious I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight bursts onto the soundtrack, and Claire and her daughter begin to sing along with it – music is also integral to the sound of The Listeners. Along with other existing tracks by artists including Nick Drake and This Mortal Coil, there is an innovative original score by Devonté Hynes, who has also recorded prolifically under the names Blood Orange and Lightspeed Champion.
“With a lot of the existing music – such as the Nick Drake track [Fly] we hear as the original recording and then played by [Ollie West], who learned how to perform it for the series – it was very much built into the DNA of the writing and the shooting, which was really useful,” says Fanagan.
Then, with the original score, “Janicza and the producers were very keen for me to be involved in the conversations with Dev, so that if he was asking about things that we might be experimenting with from a sound design point of view I could let him know what we were working on, and if he had concerns about frequencies I was hitting that he needed to hit – or vice versa – we could talk about all of those things. This was really useful because the sound design was always evolving with the picture. Sometimes you want it to not be obvious with the design and music where one begins and one ends; at other times you want the two to maybe push against each other because the discomfort of that is useful narratively.”
The close collaboration was also invaluable with Fanagan working mostly in Ireland on the post, Bravo based largely in London, and Hynes in New York. “With the remote working it was important to find a way to facilitate that so that Janicza could keep track of what we were doing,” says Fanagan, who delivered stereo and 5.1 mixes.
A busy 2025 will see films including JIMPA – which marks a reunion with director Sophie Hyde – and Whistle reaching screens, but The Listeners is surely destined to remain a particular career high-point. “To have a story with these incredible performances that allow us to play so much with sound and music was an absolute dream.”
The Listeners is available to stream on BBC iPlayer
