The Sound of ‘Severance’ Is Way More Than Office Space
If something has felt increasingly off from the very first reveal of the MDR office at the beginning of “Severance,” that is entirely by design. But there’s an art to crafting invisible unease — and in maintaining that sense of unease as our understanding (well, our wild suspicions) of Lumon Industries has changed over the course of the Apple TV+ series’ run.
Supervising sound editor Jacob Ribicoff and re-recording mixer Bob Chefalas own a share of the responsibility for the ineffable presence of Woe, Frolic, Dread, and/or Malice inside the walls of Lumon. It is often their emphasis on specific sound design and foley elements that make small mundanities feel so strange and potentially threatening; differences in how music and dialogue play inside the severed floor versus outside of it also contribute to our sense of claustrophobia or the bewildering openness of the outside world.
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So the IndieWire Craft team reached out to Ribicoff and Chefalas to ask them not just for the specific sound cocktail mix that makes the “Severance” elevator transition between “Innie” and “Outie” so visceral — though they were kind enough to give it to us — but a wider view of how they approach sound inside of Lumon, and how they’ve slowly cranked it up while in conversation with each episode of the Apple TV+ series.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
IndieWire: Part of what’s so wonderfully creepy about Lumon’s Severed Floor is there’s this really sterile feeling paired with strange, throwback computers/tech that sound very distinctive. How do you approach that balance?
Ribicoff: For the kind of background whirr, start-up, and shut down of the computers, I came up with a historic gumbo of computer sounds mixed together and then played very low. For the refining sounds, there were some classic 8-bit beeps and whooshes. For the keypad typing, we were able to have a keypad from the shoot shipped to the Foley house and we continued to record that per episode in sync and matched to production.
IndieWire: “A historic gumbo” feels like a very Lumon approach. If you had to pick one or two, what feelings are most important to get across about the MDR office through sound?
Chefalas: Even though the MDR office is a very large empty room, we want it to sound isolated and airless. Very little reverb and quiet enough to hear the sounds of the computers. For the “Innie” world, a lot of the production movement is replaced with Foley so it can be mixed into the proper environment.
IndieWire: Does anything tend to get more emphasized in the Innie or the Outie worlds in terms of the level of atmosphere in the mix, how you approach sound effects, Foley, etc.?
Ribicoff: There’s no question that the Outie world breathes in full airy, windy, realistic, dynamic surround, whereas the Innie world stays pretty LCR [left-center-right panning] and claustrophobic. But for the “Innie” world in both seasons, there is a gradual progression towards weirder, more dynamic, surreal environments as each season moves toward conclusion.
Chefalas: With the Innie world, we lean on the sound of the Foley very much. Especially in hallway scenes where we had to remove most production footsteps and replace them with Foley. The balance of dry Foley and its reverb would constantly change depending on the location.
Ribicoff: One of the really enjoyable and rewarding aspects of working with Ben [Stiller] and his picture editors has been the degree to which they have leaned into and elevated the Foley for storytelling and to underscore the physicality of the characters — like the many wild running sequences through Lumon corridors. Bob used all his best tricks to push footsteps through loud music cues during the mix. Amazing!
IndieWire: The mix really does feel like the perfect balance of the music with the physicality of the footsteps. I imagine you have a library full of atmospheric whooshes for the elevator transitions from Innie to Outie, too.
Ribicoff: Well, there are basic elevator sounds — doors and motors ascending and descending. There is the “fritz” sound, which you hear when the character’s eyes close and flutter while they are “transitioning,” which is a combination of high-pitched beeps and sharp static spikes cut in sync. There is the elevator ding, which comes from an airplane alert tone. Then there are suction-type whooshes, which really help with the zolly shots zooming in and out on the characters’ faces. That’s it. Oh, and sometimes a low-impact hit when the elevator lands at the end of the sequence. No two sequences are quite the same.
IndieWire: That’s so cool. I’m curious how you think about any difference between what sounds get emphasized when we’re in Innie versus Outie mode, especially in places we might not necessarily notice.
Chefalas: For the dialogue mix, I tend to favor the boom mics on the Outie world and let the atmosphere and all the movement be heard. With the Innie world, the boom mics can make the rooms sound too large and they need to be carefully dialed in.
IndieWire: I’d also love to hear about how you’ve collaborated across departments throughout the show’s two seasons. Do any interesting decisions come out of those conversations?
Ribicoff: I mainly worked with Geoff Richmond, the supervising picture editor, and Ben. We had an initial spotting session before Season 1. At the beginning of Season 1, I had the idea that the room tones for different parts of Lumon could be derived from the sounds of breathing, either human, animal, or monster, and could have a swirling quality — because Lumon is like this evil host feeding off the lives of its employees. Ben and Geoff very wisely tempered that idea and said, “Let’s start ordinary and get more surreal strategically as the story unfolds.”
Also, they often asked me for a collection of sound effects they could cut with while shaping a given episode before the sound team formally came on. The show is so vividly drawn that some of my best conversations were with the episode itself.
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