I went on an amazing journey with Sam Green, designing and mixing sound for his documentary 32 Sounds, a treatise not so much about 32 sounds themselves but a journey using those sounds to explain and explore bigger questions about ourselves and our relationship with sound.
32 Sounds is unique in so many ways, including how we met and my early participation with Sam as he shot the film and his initial goals for it.
Sam initially set about to make a film whose sound would only use headphones. He had already been exploring the live cinema approach in previous projects when he discovered Simon McBurney’s “The Encounter”, a live theater presentation that used a live binaural microphone and asked the audience to wear headphones to get a greater immersive experience.
This begat the first calls to me because Sam wanted to understand more about immersive audio, not only from a technical standpoint but an experiential one. I was hired initially as a consultant so that Sam could “call me every once and a while” to ask questions
This was a project that I really couldn’t pass up. It explored sound in a much more expansive sense, asking questions about how we listen and the meaning of sound in our everyday lives. These were questions I’ve been asking myself for a career. I was all in.
During that initial phase shooting the film, Sam would call me to not only ask technical advice on how best to record his film but to discuss what kinds of scenes would or would not have impact through the use of sound. From those discussions early in production, Sam would decide to include or not include scenes in the film. That was a deeply satisfying collaborative experience. It was during this early collaboration that Sam met Dr Edgar Choueiri, the professor who discovers the tape recording he made at 11 years old to his future self. He was already a friend and I just knew that they were going to find common ground.
Our early discussion, naturally, focused on the importance of immersive sound and some of the technology that might highlight it. Sam had been aware of Binaural microphones having already seen “The Encounter” and was aware of the power of immersive sound. It was through our discussions about “The Encounter” that Sam saw how vital immersive audio was going to be in telling his story. This opened discussion around how he might capture immersive audio while he was shooting, which he had not considered until our discussions.
I have been preaching for years about the value of capturing production sound immersively, something taken for granted in narrative cinema but not so much in documentaries. I asked him why, when we hear in 360 degrees, do most documentaries record their sync sound with one ….monaural microphone? Usually a shotgun directional mic at that, designed to exclude the sound of the environment the scene takes place in. This seemed to me to breach some fundamental codicil of the Documentary Filmmaker code; to show some version of the truth in their work, to endeavor for verisimilitude whenever and wherever possible. From these discussions, Sam asked production sound to capture shoots with a binaural and/or Ambisonic microphones so that we had immersive audio from the location, rather than faking it in post production. One of the films most memorable sequences in the film, Dr. Choueiri walking around the microphone shaking a matchbox, is a byproduct of these discussions.
During shooting Sam pitched the idea of the Don Garcia sequence (the man who drives around blasting the song IN THE AIR TONIGHT from his car). We both felt that this should be a sonic “set piece” that did everything it could to replicate the sonic and visceral experience he and many other New Yorkers got whenever Don drove by. As he was in early production and was only talking about 32 Sounds as a headphone experience, I told him that we would need to figure out a way to reproduce the subwoofer thumping and pounding that is such a big part of that experience.
Given we were, at the time only going to be a Headphone experience, I saw a real challenge in making the song play viscerally...the way Sam intended it. Headphones are woefully deficient in the bass frequencies so prevalent in the song. We needed a subwoofer. This begat discussions of rethinking the tour and equipment and adding a our own subwoofer in every venue to enhance the headphone experience live.
We also wanted the audience to experience the music blaring out of Don’s car as it bounced and echoed off the city streets, buildings and alley-ways; as one would as if there in person. The team attempted to record that sequence with immersive microphones to capture Don driving around the city to create the verisimilitude we wanted. Unfortunately, these sync recordings failed us. They were polluted with ambient traffic noise and other environmental sounds, like the engine of Dons car, that made the them unusable. In spite of our sincerest intentions to represent a vérité audio track, that scene had to be completely re-constructed from the ground up.
Given that we could not use the original sync recordings from the shoot, I needed to recreate what that environment actually sounded like, in post. This began with using a low quality MP3 of the song, as Don himself probably used from his iPod, rather than a proper clean and beautiful master recording from the record company, as is tradition. I then used a cocktail of reverbs, delays and equalizers to mimic the various locations the sound was played in and approximating their acoustic signatures. This was our most complex sequence to final mix, spending many more hours getting it right and second guessing each other if we had it right at all!
The scenes of avant-garde composer Annea Lockwood espousing her philosophy of "listening with as opposed to listening to” sound are some of my favorites. I love those sequences because Annea puts into words, very poetically, what I live and breath every day with sound. I love that Annea, as an accomplished and lauded music composer, chosen this avenue to express her inner muse. She, like I, sees all sound as music, with intention and emotional potential. While not melodic or harmonic, Annea’s work (as with mine) is no less powerful or composed as that of Stravinsky or Swift. Her works, as mine, utilize intentionality in pitch, meter, timbre, dynamics, frequency coloration and many other attributes of traditional music. You just can’t hum them.
And this is part of the power of 32 Sounds and Annea’s inclusion. It begs the audience to re-think their relationship with sound in ways they were never taught or thought to consider. This is why the the John Cage piece 4:33 is so powerful. I don’t think he meant that clever bit of subterfuge as an “Emperors New Clothes” moment. It simply exists to challenge our perceptions of music and sound and reconsider them.
The beauty of listening with as opposed to listening to is powerful, not just on an intellection and/or experiential level but the power it has in making us aware of our own contribution to the soundscape of the worlds we live in. Perhaps in so doing, we become more aware of how we might be part of the problem or solution in the sounds we create or perceive.
One of the most amazing sequences is Dr. Edgar Choueiri hearing himself at 11 years old sending a message to his future self. That came about as a consequence of our discussions about immersive sound and the research he was doing in the field. Fortuitously, Dr Choueiri and I had met several years earlier. We were introduced by a mutual friend who had heard about the spatial audio work Edgar was doing at Princeton and felt that we had a lot in common regarding the narrative potential of immersive sound as well as it’s utility outside the academic community. Edgar and I hit it off and I became an advisor to his audio research and development company, Bacch labs, which has built, among other things, realistic Binaural over loudspeakers technology and the tools to mix with it in practical, non laboratory environments…like movies and streaming.
That Dr Choueiri is featured in three vital scenes is a testament to his importance to the film. First, I think he does a lovely job of de-mystifying immersive sound while simultaneously teasing us with its visceral impact, as he walks around an unsuspecting audience with his matchbox. Second, Edgar shares a deeply personal moment as we watch him listen to his 11 year old self speak to him from the past. Edgar had to ask the crew to stop filming at one point because he did this in real-time before the cameras and he got emotional. That beat speaks so eloquently to the power of sound. How lucky were we for this confluence of events to take place when Sam decided Edgar should be in the film. Finally, we watch Edgar play with his young son in the backyard while running around the unflinching gaze of Johann Kristoff, the binaural dummy head, as it takes in a simple human moment.
One of the unexpected joys of this film is how powerful sequences like Sam hearing the phone message from his deceased brother and Dr Choueiri hearing his younger self are and how they resonate with audiences. That is to say, I continue to get emails and texts from friends and audience members who were so moved by those sequences that they went home to uncover long lost boxes of their own families movies, tapes, and messages. Both Sam and I have been thrilled to see how much of an impact this little reminder has had on other peoples real lives. Wow, the power of cinema.
I often ask audiences if they had to choose between an audio recording and photograph as the only way to remember a lost loved one, what would it be? The majority choose sound, I think, because of this unique visceral power of sound. It’s more than just hearing, you feel sound, whether it’s the thumping your chest takes with the boom of an explosion or fluttering in your ear from an intimate whisper.
How interesting, too, is it that your hearing faculty never stops, it doesn’t blink, like your eyes.
Another unexpected joy was working on the Harold Gilliam fog horn sequence. This was fun for me because, long before 32 Sounds, I was already a nerd for foghorns for their pure sonic poetry. Harold had something much more high-minded in terms of their significance to the community and their collective sense of place. I just love the sound of them and had been collecting Foghorn sounds for years. We were very fortunate to have a collection of them from Doug Hemphill, who had made them when he lived in San Francisco as well as newer recordings made that we commissioned while we were finishing the film.
Audiences have all had emotional connections to various moments in the film. One of the most profound for me was the mating call of the Moho-Braccatus sequence. Many find this sequence one of the most memorable and tragic. For me it’s a simple expression of the fragility of nature and our connection to it without being preachy. But who cannot relate to a bird, or a human, sending out their mating call and not knowing it will never be returned? I think it’s easy to miss another important moment in this sequence. While we are all empathizing with the bird, we might miss that the librarian who curates that collection has chosen that sound as deeply meaningful to her. It speaks to the power of sound and sounds in ways we never think about.
Sam and I did a drive-time talk show for 32 Sounds where listeners were encouraged to speak about their “Moho-braccatus”, the sounds in their lives, however mundane, that elected something other than a cursory response. The range was amazing from the sound of a creaking cabinet that reminded one listener of his grandmothers kitchen (and all the warmth that came with it) to another listener who grew up in the city, who was frightened by the cricket-laden ambiences of the suburbs. We all have the mnemonics and 32 Sounds does a beautiful job of making us more aware of them.
Ultimately, we would spend only about two to three weeks on the sound edit and another week on the final mix. Yet, having intended originally to only mix a headphone experience, Sam and I would end up making four distinct release versions of the film and the sound track
In version one, Sam tours 32 Sounds as a Live experience where he does live narration AND live music with JD Sampson, our composer and the mix is only the prerecorded music and sound effects that is played back with picture in the theater. In a second version, we present 32 Sounds with live narration and all of the music prerecorded, in a third version we present all the audio prerecorded which requires the audience to wear headphones for the entire performance. These three versions have been touring the US and the world for a short time and gathering some word of mouth when a local distributor asked Sam if he could make it into a Cinematic/Theatrical experience utilizing traditional exhibition technology, with no live component, so that the film could show at any cinema. This was our fourth and final version and mixed some time after the first three versions.
Sam and I are both fond of the Live versions with Headphones if for no other reason than they explore a unique and new way of entertaining and engaging the audience. As a sound Nerd, and I speak for Sam as well, I love that we made a live theatrical presentation that uses Binaural audio to create an immersive experience that cannot be had in traditional cinema exhibition. Sam should get some kind of award recognizing this unique accomplishment. That being said, the theatrical 7.1 sound mix is pretty great and many peers have indicated their preference for it. Because the headphone experience uses Binaural technology, something traditional cinema with speakers on walls cannot, we are able to achieve some very cool audio effects like full 360 degree immersion as well as the intimacy of proximity, an aspect of hearing that cannot be reproduced with open air speakers.
