Adolescence opens with 13-year-old Owen, played by Jamie Miller, getting arrested for the murder of a female classmate and taken by van from his home to a police station. The start of the journey is soundtracked by Owen’s sounds — his sobs, his banging on the window and calling for his dad.
Then those sounds are seamlessly displaced by a percussive ticking, and a female voice, singing plaintive notes. Adolescence doesn’t call attention to it, but the voice belongs to Emilia Holliday, who plays Owen’s victim, Katie Leonard.
She has no dialogue in Adolescence — she appears only in grainy CCTV camera footage. But her singing gives Katie a voice, from beyond, recalling her lost promise. She also serves as a kind of telltale heart for Owen, who is haunted by what he’s done and can’t take back.
The scene represents the flawless coordination between the sound and music in Adolescence, as well as the commitment of supervising sound editor James Drake and composers Aaron May and David Ridley to give voice to the real adolescents of Adolescence, one of Netflix’s most-watched and critically acclaimed shows.
The British four-episode limited series was created by two middle-aged men — Stephen Graham, who also stars, and Jack Thorne — and directed by another, Philip Barantini.
But it sounds like the passions and struggles of youth — because Drake, May and Ridley, all of whom are in their 30s, were so committed to centering the sounds of the very young.
The Sounds of Adolescence
Sound design and score blend beautifully in Adolescence, in part because Drake, May and Ridley have worked together before. They all collaborated on Barantini’s 2021 feature film Boiling Point, which also starred Graham.
Just as Boiling Point unfolded in a single, continuous shot, so does each episode of Adolescence. The lack of edits gives Adolescence a grounded sense of in-the-moment urgency, and tragic inevitability. Drake, May and Ridley were careful not to overdo sound, lest any artificial element undercut the show’s immersive tone.
Viewers feel that we, like Owen, are living through the irreversible. The sound collaborators were acutely aware of the need not to undercut that feeling, or to let audiences off the hook with the kind of excessive orchestration or fussiness that could end our suspension of disbelief. At one point, the show wrings intense emotion from the simple, understated sound of rainfall.
“The wonderful thing is that the material that we’re working with is so well-planned and thought through and finessed,” says Drake. “From the sound edit and sound design side, it was sometimes about filling space and keeping tension, keeping a mood the same, perhaps just helping to engage the audience at times.”
The composers took a similarly naturalistic approach. In Boiling Point, all the music was diegetic, coming from a radio in the kitchen where Graham’s character works. The music in Adolescence is mostly non-diegetic, meaning the audience hears it but characters do not. But it is still closely tied to the young people at the center of the story.
This is especially true of a devastating reworking of Sting’s “Fragile,” sung by an adolescent choir at the end of the second episode.
The inspiration came in part from The Langley Music Project, a recording that Barantini shared with the composers early on. In the 1970s, Canadian music teacher Hans Fenger recorded young students in British Columbia’s Langley School District performing songs by David Bowie, The Beach Boys, Paul McCartney, The Eagles and others.
They became a pop culture fascination when they were released as a 2001 album, The Langley Schools Music Project: Innocence and Despair. Listeners were stunned by their commitment, rawness and beauty.
May and Ridley assembled their own adolescent chorus, enlisting students at Minsthorpe Community College in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, the school where the second episode of Adolescence was filmed. (While U.S. community colleges are typically for people of late teens and above, Minsthrope is typically for students ages 11 to 16.)
“There’s something about kind of young, untrained adolescent voices singing together, which is stunning and moving,” says May. “There existed a choir of like 15 students, but they managed to audition extra students. I think we ended up with a 38-strong choir, and we went for two days and rehearsed them with Dave, who, in a wonderful turn of events, used to run children’s choirs in China.”
Also Read: FYCit Wants to Help You Keep Up With Award Season Events
The inclusion of students who had never been in a choir before gave the group a powerful innocence, as did the atmosphere in which they recorded.
“We were so lucky that there was a slightly out of tune, battered old grand piano in the corner of the village hall,” says Ridley. “We felt like we were just pulling ace cards when we arrived there.”
They recorded at the village hall with singers as young as 11, some of whom “were brand new to the school, had no idea, hadn’t been part of it,” says Ridley. “I think they were just trying to get out of school for a couple of days.”
But they were perfect. They sounded like the children onscreen because in many cases they were the children onscreen: In addition to singing, many of the teens and pre-teens served as extras.
Drake also recorded the students’ speaking voices to create the soundscape of the school.
“In between each takes and rehearsals, I would go around to the ADs and be like, ‘Can I get a group of kids and a chaperone?’ and we would run off to a quiet part of the school or school field, set up mics, and then get them to do just a whole bunch of things — shouting, having them to chant, ‘fight, fight, flight,’ or just to walk down corridors and have a chat.
“There’s some just lovely little nuggets you’ll just hear just pass by your ear as you’re moving through a corridor,” he notes. “They they did such an amazing job and such a better job than we probably would have gotten if we brought actors in, or tried to bring them into a studio to fake it. … It’s just an amazing library of just real kids from that school chatting.”
But no voice is more haunting than Holliday’s, as the voice of Owen’s voiceless victim.
“We never get to see her say anything, but her voice follows through the whole series, so that you get a sense of her,” says Ridley. “We’re trying to call to mind a feeling of her being present, and maybe Jamie feeling her presence slightly. But I think that is quite subliminal.”
Adolescence is now streaming on Netflix.
Main image: Jamie Miller in Adolescence. Netflix