’32 Sounds’ Review: Auditory Wonders

metroweekly.com:

32 Sounds (★★★★☆) aims to unlock the power sound wields over our ears, bodies, and minds. Director Sam Green actually suggests in the film that a pair of good headphones are the best way to experience not only the designated disparate sounds, but the vast world of music, noise, nature, and silence the movie explores with verve and technical prowess.Inspired by the award-winning Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, the film also wields a sentimental streak suiting Green’s message that sound connects us to the world.

It’s our first connection to the outside world from within the womb, he notes in voiceover, referencing a theory held by Oscar-winning sound designer Walter Murch, whose wife Aggie’s landmark recordings of womb sounds kick off the titular list.But it’s on the subject of death, rather than birth, that the film finds several compelling examples of sounds that stir emotions, starting with the mating call of a bird now extinct.

The film encourages viewers to close their eyes and really listen to the recording of the male Moho braccatus, the very last of his species, warbling his song into a rain-soaked Hawaiian evening, unaware his call will never reach a mate.A curator at the British Library Sound Archive chooses that tragic Moho call, among the millions of items cataloged in the archive, as “the most sad recording you could ever have.” Notably, nearly all the scientists who appear in the film to elucidate the physics and biology of sound, or the engineering of sound recording and reproduction, also address the unfathomable ways that sound can make us feel things.In one sound-warping scene, Princeton scientist Edgar Choueiri leads Green in a lighthearted demonstration of binaural and spatial audio, shaking a.