Podcast Q&A With Emmy-Nominated Sound Designer Jeremy S. Bloom
Meet Sound Designer Jeremy S. Bloom…
Today we’re sharing an interview with Brooklyn-based, Emmy-nominated sound designer Jeremy S. Bloom. Jeremy’s work focuses on crafting immersive story-driven soundscapes for podcasts, interactive installations, films, and theatrical productions internationally. He is a staff sound designer for WNYC Studio's critically acclaimed podcast “Radiolab” and previously contributed sound design and original music for the award-winning Queer podcast "Nancy" and comedy hit "Two Dope Queens."
Jeremy was sound designer for his most recent project, comedy radio drama “Hot White Heist.” The Audible Original follows a crew of misfits from across the LGBTQ spectrum as they attempt the stickiest heist in history: stealing a hidden supply of sperm samples from the US government. It has an all-queer cast including Bowen Yang, Cynthia Nixon, Jane Lynch, Margret Cho, Abbi Jacobson, Alan Cumming, Tony Kushner, Bianca Del Rio, and more, and premiered on June 16th at the Tribeca Festival for Pride month.
Here’s our Q&A with Jeremy S. Bloom
What's your favorite podcast out right now?
It feels odd for me to say this but, without a doubt, it's Hot White Heist. Where can I start? The series is a full heist film with action, intrigue, high-speed chases, and espionage... but depicted entirely through audio, without any visuals. In it, a group of Queer folks (Played by Bowen Yang, Cynthia Nixon, Bianca Del Rio, and many more) plot to steal the sperm of former U.S. presidents from a super-secret government facility under the Seattle Space Needle to fund their own Queer island utopia… Having a hand in making it was an incredibly fun, creative challenge, but if I shift to speaking as a listener, it remains my very favorite. It is truly unique and it's so refreshing to hear a dose of smart, Queer comedy after all the serious news and events of the last year and a half.
You did sound design for Audible's Hot White Heist -- do you see your role as more artistic, technical, or as a mix of both? And do you find that there is room for your personal touch on a project?
There are some who use the term sound design as a stand in for the technical crafts of technical mixing and sound engineering. There are others who use it to exclusively mean the creation of raw original sound effects. They aren’t wrong. Mixing and creating the original sounds of a secret bunker, laser fields, car chases, cold storage units, helicopter landings and more were certainly a large part of my role, but I also see sound design as that plus so much more. On Hot White Heist, ultimately I oversaw the development of the show’s sonic aesthetic much like how a production designer might work with a director to develop and execute a film’s visual aesthetic.
I personally see sound design as using three main skill-sets to help facilitate informed creative choices in service of a story. The first is technical craft, the skills and tools you need to actually execute those choices. Those might be mixing, synthesis, recording arts, sound editing, or any other technical skill. The second is composition: The way we can aesthetically organize and curate sounds to fit as cohesive pieces of a whole. The third is storytelling or communication: how we collaborate, translate emotional qualities into sonic qualities, lead a team, or interpret a script. Where these three skills intersect, for me, is what makes the role of a sound designer unique.
So my role as a sound designer is also all about facilitating artistic conversations, supporting my collaborators to make their best informed choices, translating conversations about emotion and character into craft, helping people do their best work, and more. The thing I take the most pride in is when collaborators end a process with an increased understanding of just how powerful sound can be, and how fun the process of crafting it is. I think it’s those priorities that have helped me find work designing sound not only for podcasts and films, but also for immersive exhibits and interactive projects. Some of the technical specifics may differ medium-to-medium, some aesthetic expectations may differ genre-to-genre, but the root principles of storytelling with sound are universal, be it a Queer heist audio drama, UI sound design for Google, immersive exhibits at The Statue of Liberty, doc films like “Hail Satan?”, and beyond!
Which scene in Hot White Heist are you most excited for people to listen to?
Every scene is special and a great deal of thought and work went into them all. Building the sound of a drag club during COVID was a particular challenge and it was important to me as a Queer sound designer to depict these spaces in an authentic way, so I'm excited for people to hear that. You'd think that creating action or chase sequences would require the most effort and attention to detail, but ultimately the act of sonically constructing a drag club is equally demanding. These clubs are challenging to record in the real world since there's almost always loud music playing that we need to discard for practical production purposes. Stock crowd sounds available on the internet are far too often exclusively voiced by thirty-something year old white folks, lack femme voices, might be sports-oriented, or at best are simply aspecific. Typically we'd address this issue by recording a "loop group" of actors who improvise more specific crowd voices, but getting a large group of actors together in a studio wasn't realistic for us during COVID.
Ultimately we ended up surgically reconstructing an entire drag club environment from the ground up by asking our amazing Queer cast to improvise relatable conversations they themselves might have in an exclusively Queer space. Gossip, call-outs to the performers, laughs, reactions, and more. Our incredible editor Dan Timmons and I sifted through hours of material and found ways to place these sounds in conversation with one another. Most importantly, we found ways to build them in reaction to the drag performer's banter. Foley genius Joanna Fang put on her sharpest stilettos and performed the sound of the queens marching across a hollow wooden stage. We processed the music and performers as if you're hearing them through a terrible PA system. When all was said and done, Alan, a bar owner himself, said "Damn, that's a place I want to hang out in!" and I knew we succeeded!
Which gear did you use for Hot White Heist?
Because the show was created during COVID, we had to think really hard about the tools we could use to facilitate a remote workflow. Audio editor Dan Timmons and I spent weeks of pre-production planning this out. We started by knowing we'd be using Protools|Ultimate. I know Dan through my work doing sound design for film, and in that world Protools serves an industry standard lingua-franca. I, along with Dan, our foley artist Joanna Fang, foley mixer Connor Nagy, our voiceover studios, and any other potential collaborators are all Protools users. We kept all the work synced via Dropbox, our raw recordings organized into a giant database in Soundminer. We handled revisions using Frame. IO a popular online platform for handing revisions in the film\TV industry. I used a Makenoise 0-Coast semi-modular synth to create lasers, electronic interfaces, and more. The acoustics of our various environments were built with a combination of Audioease’s Altiverb and Indoor as well as Cargo Cult’s “Slapper” delay. We also used some more esoteric plugins like GRM Tools, Goodhertz Lossy, Megaphone, and more for some of the more niché design work.
There's a whole second set of gear worth mentioning though, which are some of the foley props that make up so many sounds you hear on the show. Our foley artist Joanna Fang hand curated footwear per-character which you hear consistently throughout the show. The main character Judy's heels figure prominently in the show. The sound of the special vials being stolen by the team was created with a tall shot glass I bought in a thrift store for two bucks and a metal tactical flashlight sliding against each other after a lot of experimentation and broken glass on the floor of my studio.
I recorded many of the unique sounds and ambiences you hear in the series with a Sony PCM D100 and USI-Pro mics mounted to the handlebars of my bike. That includes alarm sounds at Brooklyn's shipping port and low flying NYPD helicopters training at Floyd Bennett I happened by one day.
What did it mean to you to work on a show about a group of LGBTQIA+ contemporaries with an all-queer cast?
It means a lot to me. I am Queer myself and actually came to work on the show after Hot White Heist's producers heard my work on WNYC's Nancy, a narrative show featuring Queer stories and conversations. Nancy was an ear-opening experience for me and I learned so much about my own identity through working on the show, but it wasn't until Nancy ended that I really understood how powerful it was to contribute my work to Queer stories created by Queer teams. The script of Hot White Heist came my way during the height of the pandemic, and I remember being delighted by how Adam Goldman manged to write an unabashedly Queer story that exists entirely outside of the classic coming-of-age or hookup tropes that have defined nearly every piece of Queer media until recently. Working with such amazing talented Queer people leads to a story which is informed by all our difference experiences, and also most importantly builds meaningful community along the way.
Tell us more about your work at Radiolab.
At Radiolab I work with head of Sound Design and friend Dylan Keefe to write some of the music and cinematic sound design moments you might hear on the show. One day I might be making the sound of a soviet submarine rising to sea level, and on another I might be writing music to evoke the difference between hot and cold temperatures. Working at Radiolab is a lot like studying at Hogwarts, every day I have the chance to learn something new about the world. It's interesting because at heart, the challenge between Radiolab and Hot White Heist is the same: How can you exclusively use sound to clearly communicate complex ideas? On Radiolab that often means using music and sound to diagrammatically communicate scientific ideas. On Hot White Heist that means using music and sound to clearly communicate the complex action that is traditionally depicted visually in a movie like Ocean's 11 or James Bond.
Where can we find out more about your work?
www.jeremyb.com or on twitter at @jeremy_s_bloom
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