Giel van Geloven cuts chickens in half to mimic the sound of a beheading scene

Sound collector Giel van Geloven is always looking for silence. He searches for points furthest from the highways, and from the airplane routes. To listen. “On vacation I regularly put on my brakes, I open all the windows: Guys, sorry, just listen.”

Silence is never really silence, he says. Silence is made up of all sounds that are otherwise drowned out. Like insects. Or the softly swaying grass in the wind. In the sound studio of the Film Academy in Amsterdam where he teaches, he enthusiastically lets out wind through the 7.1 surround listening system (eight speakers): „Here I am at night on a tower, forty meters high, in the middle of the pandemic. Wind force five. Can you hear the wind blowing around us?”

Giel van Geloven (Veldhoven, 1972) is a sound designer. He provides the sound for films and series. No, he’s not the sound person swinging a fishing rod microphone around during the recordings – that’s a different profession. When the recordings are complete, the sound designer makes the sound design of a film in his studio. He kneads the dialogues, the ambient sounds and the music into one whole. Essential for the experience of a film or series, he says. Van Geloven did the sound of series like Dutch Hope, A’dam – EVAand Ramses. And movies like brothers, Simon, Matterhorn, Yes Sister, No Sister.

Van Geloven started in music, but came through a light internship bag 3 into the film world. “I spent three weeks in an aerial platform with those 12kW lamps.” During lunches with the sound engineer, he decided his future lay in sound.

dry canary

Van Geloven prefers to work with the sound recorded by the sound person during the filming. They fit the images best. But that sound usually needs processing: it needs to be cleaned up, and sounds need to be added to it. Everything you hear in film is invented. Simple example: if you see a canary in a movie, it is usually a fake canary, because those birds have a tendency to chirp through the dialogues. In the studio, Van Geloven then adds a canary from his own collection: „A nice dry sounding canary that you can later place in a room.”

If the actors are hard to understand, he can have them re-do it in the studio, in the dubbing. Van Geloven: „What we are now dealing with is that actors start talking more and more unintelligibly, a lot snake to use. The classically trained actors spoke a little clearer.” And don’t forget the sound effects. “In Dutch Hope several people were beheaded. I stood at half past nine in the morning sawing through a raw chicken, to imitate that sound. Then you also hear how the saw goes through the bone. But it didn’t sound rancid enough, so I rummaged in a tub of prefab macaroni to add that sound.”

The sound person recorded many additional sounds for him, such as the sound of a weed barn. Dutch Hope takes place in the Groningen cannabis trade. Van Geloven: “You hear lamps, heating elements, fans, and deep undertones that should cause discomfort to the viewer.” How does he know what a weed shed sounds like? “What kind of sound and feeling does a scene need? That’s my starting point. What it really sounds like is not that interesting.” Because the sound person did not always have time for extra sounds, Van Geloven himself also visited with his mini-recorder. „I recorded the empty meadows, the silence of the Groningen landscape. And I have included all the cars that appear in the series separately. I kept letting a runner drive by on the dike in another car.”

A bird that whistles through it can simply be removed with software

With the sound of a film or series you help build the dramatic arc of the story, says Van Geloven: “The sound helps determine how the viewer experiences the scene, which emotions it appeals to. That often happens unconsciously.” For example, you can also subtly make clear what kind of character you see with sound: „Suppose you have a tough character, really one bad ass, then you can give him heavier footsteps than his weaker opponent. You can hear his belt tinkling a little more, he is wearing heavier sounding material.”

The sound designer builds up the soundtrack in layers: dialogue, effects, foley, ambient, music. He always starts with the dialogue montage. “Make sure that they sound fresh, are intelligible, cut out distracting elements.” Van Geloven: “I often let the actors come back for breath. In a dialogue on set, the camera focuses on the speaker. But you cannot hear the breath of the one who listens. So I’ll add that later.” Breath is important, he says: “When a person walks through a dark house in a thriller, breathing adds a lot of tension.”

Then the other sounds an actor makes, such as footsteps (foley). And the ambient sounds (ambient). That can being birds in a forestthe noise under a highway bridge, but also the sound of rippling waterThen there are the effects (shots, claps) and the music.

If the recording sound shows defects, “for example because that beautiful farm where they film is just below the runway of Schiphol”, Van Geloven can repair it with the iZotope RX program. “You can simply remove a bird that whistles through it.” He shows how that works on the computer. First he lets an Amsterdam tram drive past, which rings as he turns the corner. Then he cuts out a certain frequency, and the bell is gone.

sound shop

Van Geloven also sells collections of sounds that he has recorded himself. He has collections of dogs, sirens, house birds, or household noises (door, drawer, water tap, etc.) on offer. As a viewer, Van Geloven is annoyed by the archive sounds he hears. He often recognizes the same, American sounds, while the film is set in the Netherlands or elsewhere. “Always the same honking truck. Then I think: ah, that one is from the Hollywood Edge Library. Or from the Premier Edition Library.” According to him, it is the laziness of the makers: it is easy to stocksound from the well-known sound libraries. „Most big libraries are quite old, that’s why you hear those sounds so often. For about fifteen years you have had indie libraries. People like me, who record things that are nice and fresh.” The Netherlands has about five of those small companies that offer fresh, local sounds. “It’s nice to share your work with other sound designers.”

He started his own sound shop SoundFuse eight years ago: “I often just didn’t have the right siren. I don’t just want a driving away siren, but also a passing siren. Not just one up close, but also one from twenty meters away.” In Brabant he found someone who collects sirens. He mounted twelve different ones on a car, and then let them drive by endlessly on a quiet country road. This is how his siren collection was born, for sale for 90 euros. Another hit is his dog collection (79 euros). He borrowed those dogs from acquaintances and took them to the sound studio. “Then I would stand next to them and just look at them, which makes a dog uncomfortable. After a while you get the craziest expressions. I also had a dog that started to squeak terrifyingly when you pet him. It sounded like he was being mistreated.”

In addition to the large and small libraries, there is also crowdsourcing in which the subscribers provide the sounds themselves, and in return are allowed to use those of others. “It is very useful for students, because it is free.” He shows such a website, which he supplies himself, with departments such as ‘doors’, ‘car doors’, ‘wind’, ‘city’, ‘water’, ‘rain’. “You go to the strangest places. If I was recording in a meadow, the farmer naturally comes to ask what I’m doing. Then suddenly I am taken to the farm: ‘I have cows, will you take in my cows?’”

How Amsterdam sounds

“Sound is never enough,” says Van Geloven, “so I’m always hungry for new sounds. The sounding world is constantly changing, a car today sounds very different from one from the eighties. Just the car doors. So you have to keep looking for new sounds.” He often goes out, also to just listen to how the Netherlands sounds. “It makes you sound. And with that knowledge you can build new sound worlds later on.” He almost always has a pocket recorder in his pocket. “Once in the evening I was walking to the station in Alkmaar, and then I heard three drunken guests chattering in the distance. Record right away! Always comes in handy. Go and imitate that with actors – don’t do it.”

The lockdown was a golden period for him. For his collection he needs isolated sounds, without extraneous noises. Now he could walk through the empty Amsterdam city center and record the ticking of a traffic light, for example, without people and traffic. For the series A’dam – EVA he tried to capture Amsterdam in sounds. “What does Amsterdam actually sound like? What distinguishes the city from Utrecht? I think it’s the filth.” Always noise, he means: reversing garbage trucks, shutters closing, ring-necked parakeets, screaming seagulls in the Red Light District. “To recreate that world full of sound dirt in the studio is crazy.”