Disquiet

The new TV series Sunny, from Apple, stars Rashida Jones as an apparent widow in Japan, her husband and son having disappeared during a plane crash. I say “apparent” because as of this writing we’re two episodes in and very little is certain. Jones’ grieving character, Suzie, is left alone in the family’s Kyoto home until a robot, named Sunny, is delivered by a colleague of Suzie’s husband. The robot is quite advanced, nudging the story from our own Roomba-and-Alexa present to something slightly further into the technological future — along the lines of WALL-E meets Severance. 

There is an array of unfamiliar gadgetry in Sunny, from ambiguous handhelds to textile-like product design, and sound is a factor in many of the interfaces. Yes, there’s no small irony to this being an Apple production, all the more so given how fraught some of this technology’s presence is, at least as far as Suzie is concerned. (The series is based on the novel The Dark Manual by Colin O’Sullivan.)

In the first episode of Sunny, the emphasis is on a secondary device, an earbud translator, which lets Suzie, who doesn’t speak much Japanese, participate more freely in society than she might otherwise. The show, which grapples with various forms of new technology, has moments when unintended consequences surface, such as when someone accidentally overhears Suzie and then admonishes her for speaking within earshot while they still have their earbuds in. This happens, as well, with Suzie’s mother-in-law, a fierce yet sympathetic Judy Ongg, and the moment marks Ongg’s character as more stranger than relative.

In the second episode, we witness the meet-cute moment between Suzie and her husband, Masa, who may or may not be an inventor of the robot Sunny and its ilk. At one point Masa, played by Hidetoshi Nishijima (who was fantastic in the movie Drive My Car, by Ryusuke Hamaguchi — who has his own intense relationship with sound in filmed narrative), struggles with the correct English words for something he wants to express, and Suzie reaches for her earbuds to make it easier for him to communicate. 

They’re both damaged people. Masa has emerged from his own dark period, whereas Suzie seems to be just now entering her own. Masa stops Suzie from using the earbud, and it’s a touching moment. We see that Masa would rather risk being seen as ineloquent than have their fledgling relationship get mediated by technology. (Maybe he knows something she doesn’t.) I don’t want to give too much away, so let’s just say it’s a double effort on his part, in this scene, to be seen as struggling — and that his concern about technology rubs up against what we at least seem to know about him in the story’s present tense. Again, this scene is their origin story, set a decade earlier.

And then there is, also in the second episode, Suzie’s other main relationship so far — not the one with her nuclear family or her somewhat distant mother-in-law, but the newly arrived robot, Sunny. With Suzie’s husband and son out of the picture, so to speak, most of Suzie’s relationships are with women (there’s also the bartender Mixxy in the first episode), of which Sunny appears to be adjacent, as is de rigueur, problematic as such e-gender modes may be, for domestic virtual servants (not least among them, Apple’s own Siri). At the end of the second episode, Suzie and Sunny end up next to each other in bed — it’s not sexual — and the following brief conversation occurs:

Suzie: “Are you breathing?”

Sunny: “Just a sound effect. I thought you’d like it. I can stop.”

Suzie: “No. I like it.”

Now, Sunny was introduced to us, and to Suzie, as primed for Suzie as her user. There are lingering questions as to whether Masa himself was part if not of Sunny’s overall development and design, then at least of its optimization and personalization for Suzie. In this moment, though, it is not a third party, but Sunny itself/herself who is doing the interpersonal-alignment fine-tuning: adjusting tone to match the needs of not just her interlocutor but, for all intents and purposes, her owner. (The character is voiced by Joanna Sotomura.) It says something about their interaction that Sunny can employ a term as purely functional as “sound effect” without negating the realism of its/her own seeming humanity. 

. . .

VOICE ACTIVATED
On the topic of voice, technology, and culture — more items:

▰ AI Tolerance: There’s an actual robot bartender — combining, as it were, two of Sunny’s characters — by a company called Cecilia.ai

▰ Chat Trick: The in-the-works higher-end Alexa, called Remarkable Alexa, may be in jeopardy if it can’t deliver results. 

▰ On Background: Google’s Gemini assistant/service/chatbot may have an always-on mode, stoking privacy concerns, based on a peek at the underlying code that revealed “a string that mentions a ‘background_mode.’”

▰ Speaker Box: The Mayo Clinic reports the “first known successful total larynx transplant.”

▰ Logic Branch: Mat Eric Hart wonders “What Sounds Do Trees Make?” — opening with a quote from Richard Powers’ novel The Overstory: “they speak on frequencies too low for people to hear.”

This originally appeared in the July 12, 2024, issue of This Week in Sound.

Note: In the version of the article about the TV series Sunny that I emailed out, I had the name of the robot, Sunny, and the name of the bartender, Mixxy, mixed up. That’s what I get for fact-checking-while Covid. Thanks, Ernie Dulanowsky, for the alert!

As you can tell from the piece on the TV series Sunny in this week’s issue, I’m experimenting with format. I want the newsletter to feel less like I’m offloading homework onto the reader. Much as I like being fairly upstream with news, much as I like observing topics coalesce over weeks and years, data points not necessarily evident as a through-line except in retrospect, I think there’s value in my clustering these sound studies findings. Thus in this issue I have, among other things, a “lead” story about digital voices in Sunny, followed by a variety of other current stories that engage with voice, technology, assistants, and culture but that have no direct ties to Sunny. It’s an experiment.