‘32 Sounds’ explores new adventures in listening

New York documentary filmmaker Sam Green, formerly from San Francisco, has his own approach to presenting his films in public.

For the past 10 years, he has presented what he calls “live documentaries,” projecting the film onscreen while narrating it in person onstage, with live musicians performing the soundtrack.

And that will be the format for the Green Music Center’s showing Saturday of Green’s “32 Sounds,” which premiered in January 2022 at the Sundance Film Festival.

“You can’t get this on Netflix or watch it on Hulu,” Green said. “People really don’t know what to expect.”

Green Music Center will present “32 Sounds” in collaboration with AVFilm, a film festival and education nonprofit based in Healdsburg.

Conceived as an exercise in active listening, the film consists of 32 vignettes, each about a specific audio recording.

“The film took about two years. It’s a documentary about sound,” Green said. “My hope is that (it) ends up being a kind of poem about sound.”

In a 2019 paper, Massachusetts Institute of Technology scientists identified a brain circuit, which is controlled by the prefrontal cortex, that filters out unwanted background noise or other distracting sensory stimuli.

In a sense, Green aims to help audiences temporarily shut off that process and become aware of sounds they might otherwise automatically ignore.

One of the most profound influences on the film is the work of the late avante-garde composer John Cage. The film’s first segment is devoted to “4’33” from 1952, which is performed in the absence of deliberate sound.

Musicians who perform the work do nothing except be present for the duration: 4 minutes and 33 seconds. The content of the composition is intended to be the sounds of the environment heard by the audience during performance.

For the film version, Green cut together snippets of a variety of people and groups, from the BBC Symphony to American pianist David Tudor, performing “4’33.”

Another segment of the film is devoted to a piece for organ that Cage composed in 1987. The only instructions that accompanied the eight-page score were to play it “as slow as possible, so no two performances are exactly the same.”

In a chapter called “The Quietest Place on Earth,” Green visits the anechoic chamber at Orfield Laboratories in Minneapolis, prompted by Cage’s observation that in a similar soundproof room he had heard the sound of his own blood flowing through the chambers of his heart.

“Cage is a giant in the field of sound,” Green said. “He was so radical in his thinking about sound.”

Additional segments include “Foghorns of San Francisco,” “The Sound of Cicadas” and a visit to a Princeton University physics professor who is experimenting with what he calls “3-D sound.”

Through the film, the audience will visit the British Library Sound Archive, one of the largest collections of audio recordings in the world, and savor the sounds of snow falling in Japan and church bells in Venice.

It’s common to call events that use some special effects “immersive,” but Green really means it.

“We travel with 500 sets of headphones, so everyone in the audience wears them,” he said. ”It sort of like 3D glasses for your ears.“

You can reach Staff Writer Dan Taylor at dan.taylor@pressdemocrat.com or 707-521-5243. On Twitter @danarts.