You can use Librosa’s load() function,
import librosa
y, s = librosa.load('test.wav', sr=8000) # Downsample 44.1kHz to 8kHz
The extra effort to install Librosa is probably worth the peace of mind.
Pro-tip: when installing Librosa on Anaconda, you need to install ffmpeg as well, so
pip install librosa
conda install -c conda-forge ffmpeg
This saves you the NoBackendError() error.