Touch the Sound

Touch the Sound was an incredibly intense auditory experience. On the surface, the film tells the story of Evelyn Glennie, a renowned percussionist who is profoundly deaf. Thematically though, the film is an exploration of sounds, and seems to be asking the viewer to question what it means to hear.

There is almost an excessive sense of detail paid to the sounds in the film. In one scene, we see an overhead walkway in an airport, and the director zeroes in on the rolling suitcases, the clicking heels, the rhythmic stepping of people’s feet as they walk across; spending much more time on these details than you would expect. In almost every new scene this is how we are introduced to the environment - by a close-up examination of the sounds. It made me incredibly aware of my sense of hearing, and I found myself listening much harder than I usually do on a film, which I consider more of a visual medium. Of course, the visuals were also impressive. Very graphic and picturesque, and the transitions were often these great unexpected matched cuts – from image to image that are tied together more by their similar sounds than by the way they look.

Although I was impressed by the visual and audio quality of the film, I thought it had a weak storyline. It seemed more like an experiment in sound recording than a story telling endeavor. I felt like there wasn’t much of an arc, and there were a few attempts to bring in other aspects of Glennie’s life outside of music (like her family) that seemed forced and not completely relevant to the rest of the story.

The most interesting issue that was addressed, I thought, came from Glennie’s perspective on what the definition of hearing is. In an article she wrote on her website, Glennie examines how her deafness compares to people who can hear.

“…I am not totally deaf, I am profoundly deaf. Profound deafness covers a wide range of symptoms, although it is commonly taken to mean that the quality of the sound heard is not sufficient to be able to understand the spoken word from sound alone….For instance when a phone rings I hear a kind of crackle. However, it is a distinctive type of crackle that I associate with a phone so I know when the phone rings. This is basically the same as how normally hearing people detect a phone, the phone has a distinctive type of ring which we associate with a phone.”

She goes on to say that there is no way to know if everyone hears things the same way, and so how do you qualify someone as “deaf” or “hearing” when there is so much gray area. The film did a good job of making you think about this idea with numerous shots of Glennie listening to the world around her. This was a constant reminder that she was hearing in some way, we just didn’t know exactly what that sounded like.

I appreciated that the film made me think more about how sound can be as important as visuals, and asked a lot of interesting questions about the meaning of hearing. I thought the story line dragged though, and the director spent a lot of gratuitous time on very long experimental music sequences and extravagant visual montages that didn't advance the story.