“Redefining what it means to create”: CU Boulder alum aims to revolutionize sound design

Imagine a scene in an old Western movie where the camera follows a sheriff driving an old pickup truck on a dirt road.

The scene then cuts to the sheriff stopping the car on the road, opening the door and stepping onto the dirt road in his leather boots. He reaches for his holster and pulls out a revolver, points at the camera and shoots.

All of these sounds in the scene are important and carefully curated: the sound of the old truck, the dirt road, the leather boots and the revolver.

“All of these things have context, and that sound is what we’re focused on,” University of Colorado Boulder alum and sound design startup CEO and founder Isaiah Chavous said. “We’re focused on footsteps, door creaks, environmental noise, room tone and transitions.”

Chavous and his cofounders have raised $1.8 million to fund their sound design startup company called Noctal. Noctal is a platform that uses artificial intelligence, or AI, to automate the sound design process for content creators and filmmakers.

The investment firm Caruso Ventures invested the majority of the $1.8 million, joining other investors including Media Empire Ventures, X’s, formerly known as Twitter, head of original content Mitchell Smith and Major League Baseball player Tony Kemp.

“I think these guys could emerge as the leader in applying AI to sound effects,” said Dan Caruso, Caruso Ventures managing director. “And if they do that, they will have a huge impact. There’s going to be a lot of job creation.”

Noctal works by identifying the action sequences and events that take place in a video and then accurately placing relevant sound files where they need to go based on the on-screen events.

James Paul, Noctal’s chief operating officer and co-founder, said the traditional process of developing sounds in movies is extremely time-intensive. Paul has more than 10 years of media experience working in physical production in Hollywood on films, including the 2016 Ghostbusters movie, and is an active member of the Producers Guild of America.

Paul said the process requires a person sitting in a chair watching hours of footage and marking where sounds need to go on a timeline. For example, marking when the sheriff’s truck begins to drive away and when his boots hit the dirt. Then, it requires going into folders, bins or the field to record the sounds.

“Using our platform, it automates a lot of that by extracting each of those different events,” Paul said. “The best way we see to use AI is like a creative augmentation. You’re still going to switch things out here and there, but it speeds up that process of having to watch all that footage.”

Before founding Noctal, Chavous was a student at CU Boulder. He was student body president, helped co-found the Center for African and African American Studies, co-founded the first-ever police oversight board on campus and received an award from the Colorado Senate for his work with eliminating prison labor contracts with the university.

Six days after he graduated in 2021, he moved to California. Chavous led business development and partnerships at an augmented reality game company, working with industry icons such as Lewis Hamilton, Snoop Dogg, Michael Bay, Elton John and Grimes.

He said his time at CU Boulder helped him grow and develop important skills, including team management and budget management.

“That in and of itself led to being able to create plans you can actually execute under timelines that would be considered impossible, which is the entire objective of building a startup, which is (that) you’re under time constraints that most people would say is impossible with limited resources,” he said. “… and also having conviction over a vision.”

Caruso said that when everything in sound design is done by hand, typically, there are one to three main sounds in a scene. But if AI helps, it can help identify background sounds as well, so there are five or six sounds in a scene instead.