With the word “listeners” in the title, the BBC series called The Listeners — now streaming on BBC iPlayer — is sure to pique the interest of anyone who loves sound. And with MPSE Award-winning supervising sound editor/sound designer Steve Fanagan leading the post sound team, you know it’s going to be a series worth listening to.

The story of The Listeners follows an English teacher named Claire (played by Rebecca Hall) who starts to hear a strange humming sound that seemingly no one but her can hear. It disrupts her life and her relationships, causing Claire to feel isolated. Her search for the source of the hum leads her to find a group of other hum hearers. Although the group provides Claire with a sense of validation that the hum is real (and that she’s not crazy), it’s cold comfort.

Just as Claire’s experience of the hum is a journey, finding the sound of the hum for the series was a journey for Fanagan and the showrunners. Series director Janicza Bravo and Fanagan had conversations about what it might sound like during pre-production, and then it evolved over the course of post-production in tandem with the picture edit.

Here, Fanagan talks about real world experiences of the hum, his journey of finding and recording source sounds to incorporate into the hum for the show, designing Clarie’s changing perspective of the hum, using sound for the story’s sake (and not just for the sake of sound), designing sound based on subjective descriptions of ‘feeling’ and conveying feeling through sound, working with the show’s live on-set performances, and so much more!

(For those living outside the UK, Tom’s Guide offers a solution on how to watch The Listeners!)

The Listeners | Official…