by Sam Green’s last film “A Thousand Thoughts” was a documentary about the Kronos Quartet, but his challenge was to get people to “hear” the film because everything is about the visual medium.
When it came to his next project, “32 Sounds”, the Oscar-shortlisted documentary feature, he set out to tell a story specifically about sound and the listening experience. Green assemblages of 32 different scenarios in an attempt to challenge the way listeners think about sound.
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In one scene, Foley artist Joanna Fang is in a studio drumming her feet and pulling on ropes as she imagines what it would look like to fall a pine tree in the snow. Elsewhere, audio pioneer Annea Lockwood shares decades-old recordings of underwater river sounds. In another, Phil Collins’ hit man blasts “In the Air Tonight” while driving through Brooklyn.
In many of the scenes, sound designer Mark Mangini worked with Green to build the film’s soundscape. At its heart, the binaural microphone is a character in itself – crucial to creating immersion. In other cases, Green and Mangini rely on archival recordings.
At the opening of the film, Green invites the audience to put on headphones to fully experience the world of “32 Sounds”. He and Mangini discuss how the film came together and why wearing headphones is the best viewing experience.
James, where did this idea start for you?
Sam Green: The previous film I made was about the Kronos Quartet, a great musical ensemble. It was a very difficult film because you half listened to their music. But, if you open your ears, it’s amazing.
The challenge with that was to get people to open their ears, which is difficult in cinema because it is a visual medium. And then I connected with an audio pioneer who shared her recordings and was smart about sound, and those underwater recordings were a gift, so it was a good start.
I think audiences are becoming more discerning about the audio experience, do you agree with that?
Mark Mangini: That must be true. I’ve seen it in the sound community and in the movie community because we all hear our friends trying to find a good movie like “Dune”. After all, they want to hear a “good sound”, and I don’t remember hearing that 20 years ago.
Green: Given the number of interviews Mark does, I feel that the sound designer was kept away in the past, but now he does a lot of press.
Mangoes: Well sound can tell stories in many effective ways. It’s an idea that isn’t taught in film school, instead, you learn about microphones, kilohertz, speaker dispersion patterns, and a lot of techie garbage,
The opening encourages the viewer to watch through headphones, and there are various film mixes, but why specifically headphones?
Green: It was a big problem for us. We did a headphone mix using binaural mics. We bought 500 sets of FM transmitter headphones, and we traveled around doing these performances. We would give everyone headphones to wear. But the Film Forum in New York wanted to show it and asked if we could do a mix in 7.1 so we did. Doing that was a big task, but I think if you’re at home and the option is to watch on your laptop with headphones, I urge people to wear headphones. I don’t want to be one of those fussy filmmakers who tell people to see it in the best possible sound environment, but with this film, it’s kind of true.
How did you find out what those 32 sounds are?
Green: We talked about the sounds that interested me or moved me, so they all came out of the dialogue. I read a book about field recordings and it mentioned a recording by Mazen Kerbaj. He recorded himself playing the trumpet as bombs were falling and I listened to it, and it was just extraordinary, so a lot of the sound came together just like that.
We had one with the loudest crowd in the world which I liked, but Mark said there was no way to do that without punishing your audience’s ears, so that’s not one of the 32 sounds.
There are recordings from decades ago, such as Annea Lockwood’s water recordings, and there are ones you took from the ground up, what were the challenges they faced when collecting them to tell a story?
Green: The scene with the guy driving around Brooklyn playing “In the Air Tonight” from his car was difficult to record. We got Ambisonic microphones and our sound recorder was leaning out the window and we went to town with it, and we realized they were terrible, so it was built from the ground up with filters and reverb.
The other challenge was how to order it with no main characters, no conflict, and no chronology. How do you make things flow and keep people’s attention? It’s the opposite of a random order, it took so long to get an order that seems random and works.
It had to flow in an associative, almost poetic way so as not to distract you. That was the biggest challenge.
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