"As Ray Charles went blind as a child, he transitioned to using his hearing to get him through life," explains sound supervisor Karen Baker Landers. "As he was going blind, his mother taught him to count the steps to places he needed to go. He wore hard-soled shoes, which make very specific sounds when they bounce off close walls or open doorways, which we recreated with sound effects and Foley."

But the sound design became far more intense. There is a scene in which the POV transitions from Charles’ mother to Charles himself. As the camera angle changes, so does the sonic environment: the everyday sounds that form a familiar backdrop morph into an environment in which individuals sounds, such as cricket chirps, are magnified and sharpened. "[They are] made more specific," says Baker Landers, who had her husband guide her down streets with her eyes closed so she could experience a sense of sightlessness more personally.

Re-recording mixer Scott Millan (The Bourne Supremacy, The Passion of the Christ), who mixed in 5.1 at Sony Post Production’s William Holden Theater on a Harrison MPC digital console, agrees that decisions by film editor Paul Hirsch shaped the film’s sound by anticipating its use as a way to gently orient the audience. "You can see in the cuts he made that it was a deliberate design," says Millan, who, as post was wrapping, joined Baker Landers as a staffer at Todd-AO. "For instance, a scene was cut in such a way that it uses the mother’s POV to act as the baseline for a sighted person with normal hearing. When the POV would switch to Ray, the audio subtly but undeniably established the transition."

After that transition, audio begins to lead the picture. A teapot is heard to whistle before the camera pans to it, conveying the sense that Ray Charles is hearing it before his mother can. "It’s a wonderful, subliminal effect," says Baker Landers. "The audience understands the perspective subconsciously at first." In fact, in virtually each scene of Charles on camera, he is introduced with a sound effect, such as the ringing of a 1950s rotary telephone, which underscores both the era of his life and how critical sound was to Charles’ world.

Millan accomplished the necessary effects using a combination of volume changes and equalization. A standard sonic backdrop would dissolve into one on which certain key elements, such as the crackle of a fire as Ray’s character draws near, would have specific frequencies boosted along with their relative level. In one eventful scene, the young Charles trips and falls while his mother watches but resists helping him, waiting for him to find his own way. "We shift the sound from one of nonspecific ambience to one of a few very distinct, defined sounds," he explains. "We’re shifting the emphasis from the picture to the sound. It’s actually kind of eerie how well the effect works here."

The sound design rivals the music, which is no mean feat in a Ray Charles biopic. (Charles was around for most of it, recording several new tracks and actually appearing in certain scenes.) Millan and music supervisor Curt Sobel had mostly CDs and other consumer sources to work with – many of Charles’ original masters had been accidentally destroyed or lost over the years- cleaned with a Berringer DeNoiser. What Millan could do, however, was sweeten those tracks when close-ups of band members were called for. "If the picture focused on the guitar player in a band, I had a guitar track we recorded playing the original parts that I could bring up," he says.

Another trick was to sum two stereo recordings together, giving Millan the ability to pan the tracks to follow Charles as he vocally caressed a microphone, adding ambience with Lexicon 960L and TC Electronic Fireworks units. "Many of the [stereo] records would be fairly radically mixed, with a choir hard on one side and Ray leaning to the other channel," he says. "This way, I could move [the vocal] around the mix and still keep the track consistent and not collapse the [stereo] image."