“32 Sounds”
Shortly after the invention of the phonograph in 1877, a prominent newspaper of the time predicted that Thomas Edison’s machine was powerful enough to stop death itself. The human body was still ephemeral, but the human voice had effectively become immortal. It was now capable of being heard long after the person who produced it had decomposed into nothing more than bone and memory.
When AI broke into the mainstream some 150 years later, tech websites almost immediately began reporting about new digital tools that allow people to upload audio recordings of their loved ones in order to keep talking with them after they’re gone.
That development is a bit too recent to be included in “A Thousand Thoughts” and “The Weather Underground” director Sam Green’s “32 Sounds,” but it provides a perfect coda to this soft and semi-interactive documentary about the ambient power of acoustic vibration; to a scattershot TED Talk of a film that is somewhat counterintuitively obsessed with death, but only because the ephemeral nature of life on Earth offers the best evidence of sound’s power to connect us to the universe more strongly than any other sense. Read IndieWire’s full review.