This Hollywood Director Is Changing the Lives of the Hard of Hearing

When Larry Guterman was a freshman at MIT, he went to a very loud party. When he woke up the next morning, he heard ringing in his ears. The day after that, the ringing persisted. In the week following the party, the ringing never went away.

“I went to get checked and discovered I had a little bit of hearing loss,” Guterman said.

He always had normal hearing, but after that party, his hearing started to slowly deteriorate. “I was more genetically predisposed to acoustic trauma than most people.”

That didn’t halt Guterman’s plans. After his freshman year, he transferred to Harvard University, graduating with a degree in physics. The Maryland native – who grew up in Toronto and attended Jewish day school there – ended up spending a year at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, where he took courses on the Holocaust and the historical geography of Jerusalem. When he got back to the States, he switched career paths and went to the University of Southern California, earning a Master’s degree in film production.

During one of Guterman’s first jobs in Hollywood, where he worked as a development professional for a producer at Columbia Pictures, he struggled to keep up because of his hearing loss – even with the help of hearing aids, which he got in his early 20s.

Larry Guterman on set.

“My job was to take notes at lunches and meet with agents and executives,” he said. “The meetings were in noisy restaurants and there were times when I couldn’t follow along. I was scrambling and terrified I’d lose my job.”

When Guterman became a director, working on big budget, blockbuster films like “Antz,” “Cats & Dogs,” and “Son of the Mask,” he continued to have trouble doing his job.

“Once, I met with a famous writer, and she had a high-pitched, soft voice,” he said. “The room had a lot of reverb, because in Hollywood, it’s all concrete and glass. It was terrible for hearing loss because the sound bounced around. I met with her, a big famous producer, and my partner for an hour. Her husband was a senior agent at one of the biggest agencies in Hollywood. Everything had to go right. I was terrified because I didn’t understand anything she said the whole time, even with my hearing aids in. I was nodding and smiling. To this day, I have no idea if she knew.”

Guterman continued having a hard time hearing in everyday situations. He had to watch television shows with captions on and ask his wife to explain the jokes on “Saturday Night Live.” He especially had trouble on the phone; when talking to his wife, he had to ask her to repeat herself multiple times during every conversation.

In 2012, he decided to switch gears and try to come up with a solution for people with hearing loss.

“I thought, why not take what the hearing aid does and stick it on the phone we’re all carrying around in our pocket,” Guterman, a father of three, said. “It has wider bandwidth and a more powerful chip than a hearing aid.”

And that’s how he came up with the idea for a new company called SonicCloud.

SonicCloud is software that works on computers, phones, and other devices and helps people with hearing loss hear more clearly. They could watch a video on YouTube, listen to music on Spotify, or participate in a Zoom meeting with their coworkers and be able to hear what’s going on. They could use the software with or without their hearing aids in.

The way SonicCloud works is that when logging on for the first time, the user will take a short hearing assessment to determine their personalized hearing profile. There are a few different sections, including a minimum audibility threshold and loudness evaluation. Once you have your profile in place, you can start to use the software, and switch to one of seven common pre-set hearing profiles based on the type of media you’re consuming or activities you’re doing.

When his team, which included Chief Audiologist Jody Winzelberg and CEO Jean-Christophe Curelop developed the software, Guterman tried out SonicCloud by talking on the phone with his wife for 30 minutes.

“When we were done, I went to her and saw that she was crying,” he said. “She said, ‘We have been married more than 15 years and you always ask me to repeat myself. We talked for 30 minutes and you didn’t ask me once.’”

Guterman realized he had something special on his hands. Soon, his friend, actor Sean Hayes from “Will & Grace,” jumped on board and invested in the company. In two rounds of funding, the company raised $4 million from investors and partnered with SONY, PNC, The Boeing Company, Citi, and Dell Technologies to provide enterprise solutions for workers who are hard of hearing.

“There was a woman who worked at GE and went on virtual meetings with 130 other people,” Guterman said. “She couldn’t hear anything, so after the meeting, she had to ask someone to recap the entire hour-long call for another hour, which was hugely unproductive.”

In 2020, Apple featured SonicCloud on Global Accessibility Awareness Day, and disabled astronauts used the technology to complete zero-gravity flight 25,000 feet above Earth. The software helped to improve speech understanding systems onboard the flight.

Astronauts having fun using SonicCloud technology

“People who have a debilitating disability can now be unbelievably accomplished,” Guterman said. “They never would have gotten so far 50 years ago.”

Guterman’s Jewish values play into his work – with SonicCloud, he wants to make the world a better place.

“To me, being a Jew means being dedicated, focused, and taking responsibility to help others,” he said. “There is also an element of fairness in Judaism, giving people the benefit of the doubt and treating them well. I didn’t shift away from film and get into tech because I want to become a tech billionaire. I had a problem and I wanted to solve it. We found out that it worked and could help other people, so we wanted to help as many people as possible.”

On a personal note, Guterman is excited that his work is making his children kvell.

Larry and his family celebrating the bar mitzvah of his son

“We won an award, and my daughter said how proud she was of what I’m doing,” he said. “How great to get the honor, respect, and pride from your kids and be able to demonstrate that as a way to navigate in the world.”

A Woman Reacts to Using SonicCloud for the First Time