I don’t know about your inner monologue when you’re watching porn, but mine ranges far and wide. Recently, it landed on sound. “Those wet slapping noises,” I mused as I watched the performers going at it. “They’re so loud! And the moans are so distinct. I wonder how that happens.”
Although porn is a highly visual form of media, it occurred to me that without sound to back up the video, most porn would lose its magic. And that got me to wondering just how sound is captured, recorded, and edited in sexy film. Which led me down a rabbit hole and into conversations with a number of pornographers.
I was secretly hoping to discover that somewhere out there, a cadre of sound techs devote themselves to manufacturing the sounds of sex using fruit or mud or something, then dubbing in the slick sounds we’re all so familiar with. But, sadly, nobody that I spoke to had ever dubbed the noise of uglies bumping. “The moans and sex sounds are real and not dubbed at all,” says Tasha Reign, an adult performer, director and producer.
I was disappointed to discover that my dream job as a sex-sound re-creator does not exist, but that’s not to say that everything you hear in a porno is 100 percent au naturel. For instance, mics primed to capture the sounds of bodies coming together are not always the best for capturing dialogue. Thus, narration is often used rather than on-set dialogue, and patched in the form of voiceovers. “I have produced a few films where I was narrating throughout the movie and needed to do voiceover work the whole time,” Reign says.
And voice actors are sometimes brought in when the original performers aren’t cutting it: Ms. Naughty, an Australian feminist pornographer and the mastermind behind BrightDesire.com, says that in one of her films, “I dubbed the lines of one character because I didn’t like his voice. I got a guy with a much deeper, [more] sinister voice to do the lines and put them in.”
But directors usually use the vocals provided by porn performers themselves — especially when it comes to sex vocalizations. For many, the sighs, moans and giggles recorded on set are exactly what they’re looking for. Amsterdam-based director Jennifer Lyon Bell of Blue Artichoke Films says, “We always seem to have plenty of on-set great sounds to choose from. I think that’s partially due to my casting strategy; I spend a lot of time finding performers who seem genuinely into each other. So we get a lot of good organic sexy sounds that are not run-of-the-mill.”
However, as you’ve surely noticed, while the moans in porn are certainly real, they’re not always natural. Reign says that on the high-budget sets she works on, performance is key. “As performers, our acts on camera are mostly bigger and louder than anything that would be ‘natural’; that’s because what we do is performance art,” she said.
Speaking of natural… Not all organic sex noises are what most of us would call sexy, and nobody knows more about the less-glamorous sounds of banging than pornographers. When air gets trapped inside the vagina and comes back out in the form of a queef, nobody on a porn set bats an eye. “Queefing is pretty common because the guys are usually big and the girls are getting pounded. There’s a lot of air going in there,” says Jacky St. James of Mile High Media.
Sometimes honest bodily noises can be just what a scene requires. In a recent scene in one of her films, Ms. Naughty reports, “The female performer burps after deep-throating and laughs and says, ‘Excuse me!’ And then later there’s a queef, and she says, ‘What beautiful sounds!’ I’m going to leave that in because it’s lovely.”
According to Jennifer Lyon Bell, typically un-sexy sounds can even enhance the action. In one scene, she says, “I realized in the sound edit that their moans and breathing were getting intensely strange. Finally I realized: They are getting stuffy noses! …People get stuffy noses when they are really turned on, because everything gets engorged! I decided to leave the sound natural — it actually made the scene much sexier, even though I hadn’t known why.”
Most often, however, less-than-sexy sounds are edited out by dialing down the volume on the offending noise. “You find audio to match the moaning and the slapping of the bodies. The slapping of skin has to match the speed of the action,” says Ivan, a director and co-owner of Puba.com.
Then the editor takes that matching piece of audio, patches it over the offending noise… and voila! An untainted stretch of sexy audio!
When it comes to sound editing, it’s all about knowing your audience, says Ivan, whose work tends toward the more gonzo, hardcore end of the spectrum. “If people are buying, say, a New Sensations [a popular porn company] romance,” he told me, “the last thing they want to hear is [a fart sound].” But if you’re into hardcore material from a company like Evil Angel, he says, “You probably want to hear every sound possible.” Ms. Naughty agrees: “There’s a balance between showing the reality of sex but trying to keep it positive towards the performers.”
Interestingly, pornographers regularly hear a variety of bodily noises, “But not farts, strangely enough,” as St. James puts it. That’s a good thing, because while they sound similar to queefs, real farts aren’t welcome on most sets. But that isn’t to say that they never happen.
St. James recalls directing a “very passionate and romantic scene,” at the end of which “this guy farted right as he came! If it was at any other moment, it’d be fine. We’d laugh and we’d move on. But because it was a cumshot, you can’t shoot it again! That’s the one shot you can’t redo.”
Fortunately, the actors were both professional enough to save the scene. The man, she says, “started laughing hysterically, but quietly. He was leaning backward to get out of the shot of the camera because he was laughing and couldn’t hold it in. But the cameras were on the girl, and she held it together. And thank god she did!”
If ever you’ve doubted the professionalism of pornographers, let this story stand as a testament to their abilities. “If he was loud or if she had broken,” says St. James, “that shot would have been lost and we would have been so screwed.”
