Here’s How a ‘House Tuner’ Fixes the Emotional Resonance of Homes
A woman and her partner keep having the same fight over and over again in the kitchen of their one-bedroom apartment. A man feels too depressed to get out of bed every morning. A woman is so consumed with anger that she can barely see straight. All of these people might consider some sessions with a therapist. Or, if they live in the fictional New York City of the new film The Sound of Silence, they might instead retain the services of a house tuner.
Cowritten and directed by Michael Tyburski, The Sound of Silence, which opened this month, centers on Peter Lucian (Peter Sarsgaard), a self-described house tuner who has crafted a profession out of his uncanny hearing abilities. He visits people’s homes and fixes any discordant chords (produced by, say, their electrical appliances), ameliorating the inhabitants’ emotional issues in the process. His track record is glowing until he meets Ellen (Rashida Jones), an exhausted, listless client whose apartment (and therefore mood) he can’t seem to mend. His professional failure leads to a larger examination of his sonic worldview and the efficacy of his scientific methods. Here, Tyburski discusses the origins of his house-tuner character, his fascination with sound, and his love of prewar apartments.
ELLE Decor: How did you come up with this story?
Michael Tyburski: I grew up in a log cabin in the Vermont woods, a very quintessential country lifestyle far from New York, not so much geographically, but spiritually. Moving to New York, it’s very loud, I was just hyperaware of that. I constantly think about sound and how it’s affecting us. I was also intrigued by odd sound phenomena and, historically, how we’ve dealt with sound. There’s all this great anecdotal stuff I came across in research—in the Middle Ages, for instance, the Catholic church banned certain tones from being played. They associated them with the devil. That, along with certain strange things about the way humans dealt with sound, filtered into the idea of this character. If we as humans have decided that sounds can affect our emotions, here’s a guy who can hear a certain way and maybe tweak that and even help you. And this character we called the house tuner seemed like a good access point, a conduit to make people aware, whether you subscribe to the theories or not, of sound and how it might be affecting us.
Were there any real-world examples of an actual house tuner you stumbled upon, or was this pure fiction?
The job of a house tuner is fictional. There were a few things that helped inspire it. There’s this one guy—I’ve never met him, I’ve only read about him—and I found his very Web 1.0 website at one point. He’s an acoustical engineer who works in New York City. He also goes into people’s homes with recording equipment, some of which we modeled Peter’s after. He works more for litigious reasons—like if one neighbor is suing another over a noise complaint, he comes in and measures the decibel level. And then I also really liked the archival clip that opens the movie and comes in again later; it’s from 1929, when a city health department started worrying about sound levels, since there were construction noises and automobiles were becoming more present around that time. So they set up this group—they called themselves the Noise Abatement Commission—and I loved how seriously they took their work, which was literally just measuring decibel levels; the decibel had just been invented at that time. So it was this new point of data collecting. And that was nearly a hundred years ago, so the prospects have only gotten worse. So even though the house tuner is fictional, people have been seriously and scientifically thinking about sound for so long, especially in New York City, that it’s not so far from reality.
Why did you choose a profession that has him going into people’s homes?
We loosely touch on his theory in the movie—he calls it the G Major theory. He found that there’s a dominant chord in the city. In his research, he needs access to all the neighborhoods to collect that data and realize the predominant chord feature in that neighborhood—as in, OK, all of these apartments along this block are one note, then that means the chord equals this. So going into homes is his way of collecting data. But even though he’s kind of dry and methodical and seems like he’s cut off from the world, he has the ability to hear a certain way and he likes the idea of helping people, and there are a lot of people out there who need help.
How did you come up with the setting of Peter’s personal environment?
We had a short version of the film and that character lived up in Washington Heights, in Manhattan but in far northern Manhattan, somewhat removed from the city. I like the idea of him being in the city, but cut off in a way. And I thought a basement would be great since it’s cut off from street level. I love that in New York today, there are all these remnants of the Cold War era—they had these fallout shelter signs, they’re all over the five boroughs. None of the shelters are operational anymore—they’re mostly used for storage space—but I loved that he was kind of living among the past, beneath a layer of New York City but also in these places that were pretty devoid of sound. We scouted locations and found some great former fallout shelters; one was in an abandoned elementary school in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, near where I lived. I liked the thought of him being in this womb-like environment. He’ll have Persian rugs and warm lamps, but also at the same time have that cut-off entry point to the city. Inevitably, we couldn’t get that school, but we built something from scratch based on what we’d found there. It was our one stage in the movie—it was in an old rope factory along the East River.
And what about Ellen’s apartment? It appears to be on the Upper East Side.
We didn’t shoot on the Upper East Side, but the idea was that she lived in that part of Manhattan, near this park we did shoot in, Carl Schurz Park, where Gracie Mansion is. For her apartment, I wanted the polar opposite of Peter’s: aboveground, letting in daylight, cooler tones. I just like that prewar look where the moldings, the door hinges, the details, look a certain way, even though it’s essentially a bland apartment. And this is very subtle in the movie, but I loved the concept that anyone who lives in Manhattan is living in an apartment under many layers of paint because of its previous tenants and landlords.
So she’s someone who’s stuck living in the past. There’s this idea that she lived there with an ex-partner, and she may have moved some furniture around, but there are still those traces. I believe in ghosts of a space, not in a paranormal way but in the way that you’re living among walls with a lot of history. So that was really key in developing her space.
It definitely has a sense of being emotionally haunted. In his work, Peter is tuning out the effects of high technology, and the equipment he uses actually feels quite low-tech. Can you talk about the contrast between the digital world he’s in and the equipment he uses?
Certainly he’s using a lot of dated, more analog tools. But I didn’t want to be precious about that. I was interested in Peter’s philosophy, which is similar to my own—I’m a guy who keeps an old VCR in my office closet because I like being able to physically rewind tape and go through media, and Peter started off that way. And even though the technology has evolved into more digital tech, his stuff still works. It might not be the fastest. But he still gets the results he needs. One of these tools is called a spectrum analyzer. That was one of those examples we found on that acoustical engineer’s website. And we were like, well, if this guy is still using this in 2018, then Peter could be using it in a contemporary New York. In the film, his assistant wants to move things along quicker, but to him it’s a marathon, not a sprint. And he’s of the “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” philosophy.
Overall, what message is the film presenting about the relationship we have with technology in our personal and public spaces? Are we controlled by it? Or is it something whose effect we can change?
There are a lot of ways we cope with the supposedly uncontrollable around us. The message is that there are outside forces that are affecting us. Whether or not they’re controlling us, I suppose that’s subjective. But I do believe there are ways we can cope with this. Peter wears these custom noise-canceling earbuds when he’s in the city, because that’s his way of dealing with the cacophony of sound at street level. And I think we probably all have little ways of dealing with things, like when ambulances go by. There’s not a lot you can control when you live in an environment like this. But you can at least cope with it.
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