Year of the Rat Music Project

Imagine you are colorblind and one day your eyes are fixed so you can see all of the colors you’ve been missing-that is what watching “Touch the Sound” is like.

“Touch the Sound” is a documentary about Evelyn Glennie, a Grammy award-winning, deaf, percussionist who plays music by feeling the vibrations of sound. The result is music unlike anything I’ve ever heard before — the work of someone who experiences sound unlike anyone you’ve ever met or ever likely will meet. You know the feeling of you fingers rubbing the rim of a wineglass? It is in that sensation that Glennie’s music resides.

The movie itself is one long music video with scenes of Glennie traveling the world to play with different avant-garde musicians intercut with minimalistic interviews. The sound quality itself is amazing and with each new location the film takes a few minutes to dwell on the tiny noises we hear but ignore everyday.

“Touch the Sound” is much more cinematic than any documentary I’ve ever seen; the camera work and editing often uses the visual element as a metaphor for the sound- extreme closeups for tiny sounds, panning up as the music ascends in volume or tenor, and even spiraling around Glennie as she plays. The film is so stylistic that it borders on not being a documentary at all. If this is a documentary, then so is Vertov’s “Man with a Movie Camera.”

The director explains in the documentary that he is composing scenes to demonstrate the principles of sound, kind of like a PBS science show. For example, for the scenes with Glennie and Fred Frith in the sugar factory, they filmed them playing music for three days. So is it an accurate recording of an improvised song? Yes. But it’s not spontaneous or objective in anyway. Thomas Riedelsheimer, the filmmaker, picked the location and introduced Glennie and Frith himself specifically for this film.

Which is fine, I have no problem with both “Touch the Sound” and “Man with A Movie Camera” being labeled as documentaries– they are trying to achieve an artistic truth as opposed to a journalistic truth. But where as most documentaries minimize stylistic flourishes in an attempt to (supposedly) remove the presence of the director as much as possible and increase objectivity, “Touch the Sound” uses the camera work and editing to try and convey the director’s subjective impression of the music.

A great example of this is the opening sequence which starts with Glennie playing a gong almost inaudibly. As she plays louder the camera glides away from her. Since the microphone recording the sound is not moving away from Glennie, this shot has the simple but awe-inspiring effect of defying how we would normally experience a sound if we were walking away from it.

I know that must be confusing, but unfortunately I can’t find any videos of this clip; I’m afraid you’re just going to have to rent the movie for yourself.