‘Being the rhino’: inside the sound of World Unseen

Just half an hour in the company of Paul Sumpter will leave you laughing, astonished and… well, pretty jealous actually. You’ll also be deeply impressed by his rhino impression and highly entertained by the contents of his cupboards. But we’ll come to that later.

Paul is the founder and Creative Director of The Futz Butler . Based in London, he describes his company as “professional noisemakers”, which is a far more fun (and perhaps accurate!) way of saying that they are a music and sound production studio. Their day-to-day work varies, but essentially, they use sound and music to tell stories – whether that’s for a feature film, adverts or even the sounds you might hear when you’re using an app. And he acknowledges that this is something people often find difficult to fully understand because soundscapes aren’t the immediate go-to when we think about telling stories. “Often people find it quite difficult to express what they want with sound, and music is very abstract,” Paul explains. “They think in visual languages when they are telling their story.”

When designing our World Unseen experience, this was something we were keenly aware of. Translating the silent power of each image into unique audio landscapes was necessary to add a new dimension and important nuance to each story. Take Muhammed Muheisen’s ‘A Smile in the Rubble’ , which depicts refugee children playing. The familiar sounds of the laughter and voices of children drives home Muhammed’s words as he describes the joy these children find despite their situation, and how this image came to be. And this is really something to contemplate – what role does sound play when bringing such stories to life? And how does that affect the way that blind and visually impaired people not only enjoy the art on offer, but navigate the spaces where the art is shown? Whether that’s in person or online.

This is something that Paul and his team concentrated on in some detail. Because the sound of World Unseen was delivered in three ways – online, through headphones and as separate exhibition audio, played as visitors move through each space. This, in the least technical language possible, is tricky stuff. For example, the exhibition venues are, of course, places where sound can travel. It was a challenge for Paul and his team, who were effectively “glueing together photo sound worlds” seamlessly within large rooms, populated by many people. Their skills meant that the sound across the entire exhibition is cohesive, clear and creates a smooth transition from image to image – even accounting for different levels of hearing acuity.

But we know what you’re thinking… tell us about Paul’s rhino impression! Well, we’ll come to that, but it has to be said that there is sheer ingenuity involved in the way he and his team ‘collect’ noises. “The most innocuous things make the most interesting sounds,” he smiles. And by this he means that The Futz Butler’s studio cupboards are literally filled with… stuff. He heaves a box from a shelf, and it is full of the most unlikely objects. A silicone cake tin (the sound of feet on a treadmill). A plastic iPad case (the ‘snap!” of someone pulling on a rubber face mask). Rubber tubing (generally very handy). “A skill that you have to develop is decoupling the sound that's being generated from the thing that generating it,” laughs Paul. “If you can do that and forget that it's being made by a detergent bottle or whatever, that's when you can get really creative.”

For example, we turned an ultrasound of Karen Tripass’s unborn baby daughter into an elevated print and Paul’s accompanying audio brings this tactile moment powerfully to life, both in person and online through the gentle liquid sounds that an unborn baby might hear. It’s amazing what you can do with a glass water dispenser: “It had a little bit of water in the bottom, and I put a mic inside it. Then I gently rotated it around to move the water a little bit and pitched it down three octaves, so you get that kind of liquidy feel,” Paul explains. “Then you filter it off – like you do when you're hearing something through a wall – and add loads of reverb and it sounds spacious.”

*Video courtesy of The Futz Butler

The beauty of The Futz Butler is that they create their own sounds. Library audio is available, but that’s a compromise they are not willing to make – and certainly not for a project that requires the attention to detail that is at the heart of World Unseen. So, this meant that when they needed to create the sound of the last male northern white rhinoceros, as photographed by Canon Ambassador, Brent Stirton… In fact, let’s let Paul explain: “You move and perform, and you sort of be the rhino.”

Pretending to be a white rhino is all in a day’s work for Paul who, as you can see in the video, got on all fours without hesitation. “I had some shredded paper, a rubber glove and a wire wool brush and then you mimic the sound of footsteps – the paper sounds like dry grass. If you use your fists rather than your hands, you get more of a weight to it.” After that comes the vocalisation. It takes practice, but Paul has ‘rhino’ down to a fine art. “We make breathy sounds but pitched down to the size of the animal. Then we vocalise what's actually happening – a range of scratches behind his legs or the rhino is in pain. So, you're acting as the rhino without making it cartoonish, which is always a challenge.” Sadly, not a sentence many of us will get to say in our professional lives. But, then, we don’t all work for an award-winning sound studio.

Even for Paul, though, World Unseen was a different kind of undertaking – one that was special. “It was a real privilege to work on a project where sound is very much at the centre of delivering the story, but also to do something that has that real purpose,” he says. “This is important to people.”

Discover a World Unseen in our online exhibition.