My latest article over at Skywalker Sound lands as I chat with sound designer and supervising sound editor Jon Borland and delve into the soundscape of Marvel’s Daredevil: Born Again.
“One of the offhand comments that really stuck with me with Matt’s superpower is that he can take a beating,” Borland continues. “It’s not that he can do the coolest kicks or the coolest punches, it’s that he can get back up and keep going. It’s about finding those realistic and brutal-sounding punches and trying to figure out how to orchestrate them in a way that makes you feel that. Once we got that scene tackled, the rest of the show made sense. We used that as our anchor and went from there.”
There is elaborate work behind the sounds that the audience hears, with the pulse of the sequence passing from words to music to sound effects and back again. But central to the whole aural experience of Born Again is Matt’s heightened senses and how he navigates the world as a blind man. As Borland explains, that layer of the soundscape is absolutely key to the show.
“When I first got the project, I found a book called Being Matt Murdock by Christine Hancock. She wrote the book from a scientific approach, looking at the source material, which are the comics. What would it be like to be Matt Murdoch? Based on the comics, he can hear many miles away, and where an average person can perceive a change at six decibels, he’d be able to hear a change in zero decibels. He can feel the ink on a page, so even though it’s not Braille, he can still read it. Given all of that, what would it be like to have all that information coming at you all the time? The amount of skill and discipline it would take to hone it and be in the moment to hear what you need to hear is incredible.
