The Art of Listening: A Conversation with director Sam Green and Undergraduate Lilian Fan

Lilian Fan

As excitement builds for this weekend’s screenings of Sam Green’s 32 Sounds at Duke, Duke undergraduate, Coffeehouse Booking Manager, and WXDU Music Director Lilian Fan (class of 2026) reached out to the Oscar-nominated filmmaker about his innovative exploration of sound. Blurring the boundaries between cinema and live performance, 32 Sounds invites viewers to engage their ears with intentionality, transforming the act of listening into an immersive, connective experience. Fan—a Benenson Award recipient recognized for her work with sound—drew on her summer experiences recording environmental sounds and experimenting with noise creation for this exclusive Q&A. Lilian brought a deep understanding of sound’s artistic impact to their discussion, resulting in a compelling and thought-provoking dialogue.

Their conversation delved into Green’s creative process, including his use of technologies like binaural recording to deepen audience engagement, and his inspiration from avant-garde composers such as Annea Lockwood and John Cage. Green reflected on the film’s central themes, from the ephemeral nature of sound to its profound ability to connect us to the present and bridge time. Fan asked incisive questions about sound’s interplay with the visual focus of cinema and the challenges of reshaping passive listening habits into active sonic experiences.

As the Benenson Awards in the Arts open for applications for Summer 2025, this conversation between a previous awardee and a renowned filmmaker highlights the opportunities the awards provide for emerging artists to explore their interests and contribute to the arts at Duke and beyond.


How do you explore sound in a visual medium?

Photo by Catalina Kulczar

Lilian: The relationship between the audio and the visual has been really interesting in your film. Sometimes you tell the viewers to close their eyes with text, other times you directly show the sound along with how it is recorded (i.e. holding a microphone in front of a wind chime). In the process of making a film about sound, have you encountered any challenges to presenting sound in a medium where the visual often dominates? How do you think the role of the visual has shaped our relationship with sound, and how did you approach that relationship in the process of filming?

Sam: This really is the million-dollar question. The big challenge of making a film about sound is that as you point out, film is a primarily visual medium.Somebody once said to me, and I think this is really true: you can only really focus on one sense at a time. if your eye is being dazzled, it’s hard to really use your ears. And the opposite it true too. So much of cinema really is about the eye. And one corollary point is that so many movies have fantastic sound design and that means one generally just leans back and lets the sound wash over them. Even the crummiest Hollywood movie has spent millions of dollars on sound, and fantastically talented professionals have put their heart and soul into it.

So between the fact that we think film is primarily visual, and most sound in films is really great—people generally listen to movies in a very passive way, I think. As you know, I’m sure, there’s a big difference between lazy listening, and really engaging your ears. I would argue that with most films, the sonic experience is the former, and with 32 SOUNDS I was trying to figure out a way to make the experience the latter—to get people to really engage their ears.

So the two interventions you mentioned were definitely designed to do just that. Asking people to close their eyes and just listen. I always laughed because in cinema that’s almost sacrilegious. But it really works. People do listen in a new and different way. And same with showing the microphones—it draws attention to the fact that this is sound that has been recorded. By being self-reflexive about it, it encourages people to actually consider the sound in a way they otherwise would not. 

Why 32 Sounds?

Lilian: As shown from the title, you select 32 distinct sounds to connect the threads of the documentary, which reminds me a lot of the traditions of musique concrete, where artists made sound collages by manipulating recorded, unprocessed sounds. How did you approach what sounds to select and how did you go about arranging them? Did you draw any inspiration from experimental artists like Annea Lockwood that you featured in the making of the film? 

“32 Sounds” still of Annea Lockwood Piano Burning

Sam: I’m impressed with your musique concrete reference! 

Honestly, the film was incredibly fun to make (in addition to be SUPER hard work) because it was mostly just me following my curiosity and interests and fancies. I would read about a sound or have an idea for a sound, and look into it, and most of the time, it wouldn’t develop into anything, but sometimes it would! The church bells in Venice for example—I always love them, and at some point thought to myself “I should try to film/record them” and it worked. I read about the Moho braccatus somewhere, and that was great. Same with Mazen Kerbaj and his recording. With Edgar Choueiri, I was getting ready to interview him and came across a reference to the fact that he’d recorded this tape for himself as a kid. It was a tiny detail at the end of an article about him, but it turned out to be great. The Zamboni is something I just thought “wow—that would be fun.” So, it was a wide range. The really hard part of making the film was putting the sounds together in a way that created a larger kind of poem, or flow of ideas. Sometimes people say to me “is the order of sounds completely random?” And that couldn’t be further from the case. It took lots and lots and lots of work to get the right sounds and to put them in the right order. 

And yes, for sure, I took a ton of inspiration from Annea Lockwood. And also John Cage. And Pauline Oliveros. Many of those avant garde composers were really smart about sound. Annea Lockwood still is! 

How do recording technologies shape our experience of sound?

Lilian: You use and introduce a number of recording technologies in the film, from low fidelity tape recorders, to more cutting-edge technology like binaural recordings. I’m curious about the various uses and values they bring to the film. How do you think differences in fidelity impact the role and effect of the technology in transferring and preserving sounds in our lives? 

Sam: Yes, there is a very wide range of technologies. And in some ways, that is a theme of the film. From the very beginning with Edison, recording technology has profoundly changed our world, and who we are – how we see ourselves in the world and our experience of the world. It’s hard to overstate that. So, the history of sound recording technology is super interesting to me. I love that old film of demonstrating stereo for the first time. It’s called “Walking and Talking” and back then stereo was incredibly radical. We’ve obviously come a long way. Binaural recording is like moving from black and white to color. But the funny thing is – Mark Mangini, the great sound designer I worked with, pointed this out to me once: the most cutting-edge binaural recording/playback really just mimics how our own ears hear the world. if you want to have a totally immersive surround sound experience, just use your ears!

So it’s important to remember that all of this recording technology is really just a doomed effort to reproduce the world. There’s nothing that can truly do that though. True experience is actually profoundly ephemeral. 

How does listening shape our connection to time and place?

Photo by Catalina Kulczar

Lilian: The theme of temporality recurs throughout the film: while John Cage’s 4’33” establishes a piece by imposing a time constraint on a live performance, tape recordings of answering machines capture and preserve specific moments in time and place. How do we understand our relationship to time through the act of listening—both in recordings and in real life?

Sam: Really Lilian, these questions just get better and better! For me, there are two ways in which sound can work. And both of them are profound. Firstly, there’s Annea Lockwood’s idea of “listening with”—this made a huge impact on me, personally. The idea that by opening your ears you can connect with the wider world and root your body in the present moment.

So much of our experience these days is mediated and puts us elsewhere—our phones, reading a book, watching films, etc. But sitting on your back deck at dusk and really opening your ears, as [Annea Lockwood] says, is a way to feel a profound connection to the bugs and the birds and the cars and the passing airplanes—and it’s also a way to zap back into your body and the present moment. Sound locates you, and roots you in the present. 

So that is one dynamic. The other is through recording of course, we can bridge time. We can be elsewhere—in another place and in another time. We can be sitting with the last Moho braccatus as it sings its impossible mating call. We can be in Harvard Square in 1971 as John Cage performs 4:33, we can be in a foley studio in San Diego creating sounds that will later appear to be the sound of a tree falling in the forest. And we can also be connected to the voice (and being) of people who are no longer living – my younger brother David, or my father, or Harold Gilliam, or my friend Nehanda. It’s a miracle really that we can time-travel in this way. And up until 150 years ago, no human had ever had any experience remotely like this. We’ve forgotten how incredibly magic it really is. 

How can intentional listening transform our experience of the world?

Lilian: The film brings an awareness to the sounds we often take for granted, especially the sounds of our environment that mediates between us and others. How do you think the intentional act of listening, or listening with, can potentially change how we interact with the world in the age of modernity?

“32 Sounds” Still

Sam: I kind of answered this already, but to say a little more. I already said that I think intentional listening can root one in their own body and the present moment in a really powerful way. But I also think that intentional listening—engaging one’s ears – can lead to all kinds of great pleasure. John Cage, who really is a titan in the world of sound, was asked a million times what his favorite sound was, and he always said, the sound of traffic on 6th avenue outside his window. There are countless interviews in which he gives this answer – and if it’s a recorded interview, you can hear the sounds, and the traffic is loud. But he was great in articulating the pleasure that can come from almost all sounds. Annea Lockwood too. Sounds can be wonderful—even things that one thinks are just dull or boring or even annoying—when one listens with intention. So that to me has been a life-changing realization. I was walking in Chinatown NYC and there was an intersection in which several cars had all gotten stuck in the middle—like a Tetris or something—and everyone was honking and honking—and I found myself thinking—instead of “yick!! what a horrible noise”—my first reaction was more that this was a wonderful composition! It was as if they were an ensemble, and this was a new piece of music they all created together. it was fabulous! And in that moment, I knew that I was a different person – that the ideas of John Cage and Annea Lockwood had changed me, and changed me for the better.


About the Benenson Awards

Lilian Fan is a 2024 Benenson Award Recipient who is pursing a B.A. in Global Culture and Theory. Fan used her award to develop her project Noise & Sounds of North Carolina. Read more about her project here. The Benenson Awards provide summer funding for Duke students pursuing arts training, research or projects. Learn more about Benenson awards here. We are now accepting applications for the Benenson Awards. Apply now here.

Interested in exploring sound?

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32 [Diggable] Sounds of Black Wall Street

Join us for an unforgettable sound-based journey through Durham’s Black Wall Street! This free public event invites you to hear, feel, connect with the echoes of Durham’s past in new and surprising ways.