How to Sound Design a story about a musical icon without his music.

The Duolingo French Podcast tells fascinating, true stories that aim to help French learners and francophiles worldwide improve their listening and comprehension skills.

Martine Chaussard is a trilingual audio producer from Montréal, Canada. She is a sound designer and mixer on the Adonde Media team that produces the Duolingo French Podcast with the language-learning platform Duolingo, and she had to tackle an exciting challenge with a recent episode.

By: Martine Chaussard

When I was told I would be mixing and sound designing the story of Arnaud Askoy, a man who upended his life to become a Jacques Brel impersonator, it felt like I had won the audio lottery. Cue the dreams of a score that would transport listeners to the legendary Belgian singer’s Port d’Amsterdam to smell the frites and mussels. Dreams of a story that would allow them to feel the dramatic desperation of a man pleading for his lover to not go away (oh, the heartbreak!) in Brel’s most famous song, Ne Me Quitte Pas.

There was just one problem: we didn’t have the rights to Jacques Brel’s music. That meant we couldn’t use his original songs, or the famous covers by Nina Simone, Frank Sinatra, David Bowie, and countless others, or even recordings of Arnaud impersonating Jacques Brel. So our team was left with what I can only describe as one big audio pickle: how do you mix a story centered around the legacy of a famous singer without ever (ever!) using his music?

Here are a few of the things we learned from this experience:

1. Confer with your team (or your peers!) to strategize. And I mean all hands on deck. The first thing we did was to get our Executive Producer, Managing Editor, Producer, Production Manager, Audio Engineer, and I on an hour-long call. Román Frontini, Production Manager, explains: “Once we knew where we stood, we were able to come up with several ideas and back-up plans. Having people with different talents, perspectives & backgrounds creates a space where every idea becomes a potential solution to the problem. People are able to build on top of the ideas of other teammates and one thing can turn into something completely different and unexpected.” Ultimately, working as a team meant no one would be left alone to solve the problem.
2. Assemble a list of music options. We knew what music we couldn’t use, but we were also very aware of the fact that this was, after all, the story of a man who falls in love with a singer and decides to devote his life to music. Because of that, music would need to be a character too in the story. Laurent Appfel, our Mastering Engineer and a talented composer, put together a shortlist of music options that became available before I started mixing, pieces that could evoke a passion for music and capture Jacques Brel’s style and aesthetic. Laurent says, “The key factor in the music finding process was to get as close as possible to French identity while avoiding clichés. Yet, we knew we were set in Paris, especially in Montmartre and the Métro de Paris so some instruments were almost unavoidable. A French accordion waltz instantly takes you there.”
3. Back to the basics: think about your scenes. We went back to the story structure to make sure we all had a clear understanding of what the big inflection points were. Martina Castro, the podcast’s Executive Producer, says: “For each scene, we identified the point of view the story was being told from — and we tried to really take the listeners there through sound. For example, when the listener was inside Arnaud’s head as he describes falling in love with Brel’s music, we played with the EQ and added reverb to muffle the music a bit. When Arnaud performed for the first time in front of the Paris metro, we built a scene where our listeners witnessed the moment from the outside: layering ambient sounds of people walking on sidewalks on a busy street. Then, when Arnaud prepared to go onstage for the first time, we were with him inside his head again. We heard his heart racing, his deep breaths as he tried to calm himself down. Then, a precisely timed deafening silence that captured the exact moment he walked into the spotlight.” If we could pull it off, the audience wouldn’t even miss the music, because that wasn’t the point of each scene.
4. Engage your protagonist. In the Duolingo French Podcast, storytellers generally recount events they experienced. Each episode feels like a true tale, which allows us to be creative with sound effects. In this case, we asked Arnaud to record himself humming and whistling, doing voice and breathing exercises. This allowed the listeners to get a subtle glimpse of his performing style and of his musical self, to complement his first-person, spoken account and breathe more life into the story. Natacha Ruck, the podcast’s Managing Editor, says we were incredibly lucky because “Arnaud has such a great voice, and once we thought of the process (learning to sing) rather than the product (the song) there were great sounds we could collect. We used his voice to tell the story of his singing, his growth as a performer. Process is a great story and it actually strengthened the story arc to also tell it through sound. It was a little bit like B-roll in a movie.”

In that process, Natacha says something delicious happened. “When we started looking for more sounds for the concert finale, there was a beautiful intimacy in hearing him backstage, clearing his throat. Something as simple as his breath, the sharp nervous intake of air… The release when he surrenders to his audience. All these sounds, these human sounds, with his own resonant recognizable voice… they create a bond.”

One last note: we felt it was important to be honest with the listeners. At the top of the show, we clearly stated we were not able to get the rights to Brel’s music for the episode. We encouraged listeners to visit the show’s website to find links to Brel’s music and videos of Arnaud to see him perform.

And the real icing on the cake was at the very end when we closed with Arnaud singing one of his own songs. In this way, we built a narrative tension around actually getting to hear him sing, and the finale delivers on that unspoken promise.

You can listen to the full story here.