"Were You Listening to Me, Neo?": Sound Design in The Matrix

Sound Design in The Matrix

Ask anyone to name the most memorable part of the Wachowskis' 1999 cyberpunk mindbender The Matrix and they'll probably recall the rooftop battle.

It plays out like this, as if I even need to remind you: heroic hacker Neo (Keanu Reeves) unleashes a spray of ammunition at an evil shape-shifting Agent, who dodges the gunfire with ease and then shoots back. The iconic moment happens when Neo decides to evade the lead by doing a mean Urdhva Dhanurasana, at which point a visual effect called "Bullet Time" is employed. The camera abandons its previous static shots and begins to dolly around the protagonist. Time slows, but uniquely. The action is in slow-motion while the camera continues to move at a normal speed. You, the viewer, are suddenly omnipresent, circling the activity, watching from every angle the path of the bullets and the millimetres by which Neo narrowly avoids them. Finally, two of the bullets graze him and everything snaps back to normal. The camera returns to traditional medium shots and close-ups; the action resumes in real-time.

The visual imagery of this scene is ingrained in the collective mind of popular culture, as it should be, because it's so goddamn cool. But what about the scene's "sonic imagery"? What would the Bullet Time battle be like if it was silent? What role does sound play in its power and effectiveness?

Sound designer and supervising sound editor Dane A. Davis began working full-time on The Matrix, which shot for nine months in Australia, upon near-completion of principal photography in July of 1998. He began his process long before that and didn't finish working until one week before the film's release the following March. That is to say, the work of the sound designer took a longer amount of time than the actual shooting of the film itself. If you've seen the movie, it's not difficult to understand why. The action-packed blockbuster jams into 136 minutes extravagant gun wars, massive pieces of machinery, a grab bag of martial arts, and villainous sentient computer viruses, all intermingled with poignant dialogue (there is no spoon!). What might be more unbelievable is the fact that every sound in the film was created from scratch.

The first thing Davis needed to do, like any sound designer, was to clarify the objectives of the director. He had last consulted with the Wachowskis in the early stages of the project, nearly three years before production began. Hoping to meet with the pair again and confirm that he was still on the right track, Davis flew to the busy Sydney set from his Los Angeles-based facility, Danetracks. He managed to secure only a short hour of questions and answers, but found that the siblings would "never go into specifics in terms of the origin of the sound", only about its function and impact. What Davis did have to work with were the script, storyboards, and daily footage, from which he gained insight about the Wachowskis' futuristic vision. When he returned to his West Hollywood studio, he began gathering raw materials and appraising his extensive sound library. And then, the construction of new sound began.

According to interviews, the film's sound department chose clarity and creativity as their approach, while Davis in particular aimed for the extreme and the unknown. This philosophy of innovation and experimentation would parallel perfectly with the groundbreaking content of the film. Set in the year 2199, The Matrix is about a world that doesn't exist, run by people who don't exist, and filled with technology that doesn't exist—yet, everything is supposed to seem incredibly real. How, then, does one conceive what this world sounds like? For starters, the digital world is a very significant component of the story, so it naturally needed to be a prominent part of the audio. One concrete concept was that the Wachowskis wanted electricity to be infused within the film, which Davis quite literally used as a framework for his design.

For the Nebuchadnezzar, the movie's gigantic ship-like hovercraft propelled only by electromagnetism, the sound team needed to create the noises of a powerful vehicle that had no engines, no exhaust, and no combustion. They rented a six-foot-tall Jacob's Ladder (a high voltage arc perhaps most commonly seen in old sci-fi movies and, on a much smaller scale, middle school science fairs), ran 60,000 volts through it, and recorded it thirty different ways. For each of the hovercraft's ten propellers, Davis used pitch-shifted, forward-reverse loops of the noise made by the enormous arc, with each sample cyclically accelerating and decelerating to produce one huge, electric mass. The same technique was applied to the shocking scene featuring the Power Plant, a horrifically expansive human bioelectricity farm. It's difficult not to be distracted by a bald, pale, naked, slimy Keanu Reeves bursting out of a wet egg, I know, but try to listen closely. The rhythmic cycle of electricity generated by the Jacob's Ladder was used again as the basis of the sound, but dozens of additional electric elements, such as Tesla coils and transformers, were recorded to build the throbbing pulse of the Power Plant.