Between The Ears

New Creatives is co-funded by Arts Council England and BBC Arts

By Elinor Lower

Produced by Emma Lazenby

A soundscape that absorbs human noise into the mythic world of the wild coast.

A family of four set off on an adventure to a Norfolk wood. They search for kindling and logs to build a bonfire to mark this special time of year. On their journey they are lured into the hidden magic and mischief of the natural world: the life and death struggle of owls and mice, the glistering swirl of the evening chorus, the flutter of insect wings, all of which power the story of this special night narrated by naturalist and writer Bridget Nicholls.

In the dying light of the day, as the family toast marshmallows over the embers of the fire, the mosquitoes and moths swirl above them, giddy in the sugary air.

As darkness descends and the family head back to the house, we realise the adventures of the natural world are not over yet.

Produced by Sarah Peters, music and sound design by Iain Chambers, mixed by Peregrine Andrews. An Open Audio production for BBC Radio 3.

Drama about a family of four exploring the magic of a Norfolk wood on midsummer night.

The cow was here long before man arrived. Does the fact that human beings have maths, space travel and doughnuts really make us superior to all other beings on earth? What does the cow have that we don't have? Four stomachs. Hooves. A lot of patience.

A meditative journey unfolds within the sonic backdrop of the ancient city of Varanasi - until suddenly the two of them find themselves on the set of a Bollywood dance film.

A consideration of the nature of radio, a pondering of inter-species relationships, Pejk's programme invites you to un-follow your digital stream and exercise your ability to be just present.

Written and produced by Pejk Malinovski.

A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio Three.

A meditative journey within the sonic backdrop of the ancient Indian city of Varanasi.

Alan Dein is astonished by the Aardvarks in directory-land. Turn to or click on the first page, and it begins: Aardvark Archery, Aardvark travel (proprietor: Aaron Aardvark), Aardvark renewable energy, the Aardvark Pub, Aardvark mobile disco, Aardvark Tea Rooms, Aardvark Ceilidh band. Just who are all these Aardvarks, and what makes them really believe that they should be pulled out of the hat first? Dein interviews our nation's Aardvarks, and at the same time ponders the real, amazing Aardvark, with its stout body, arched back sparsely covered with coarse hairs, with its greatly elongated head and short thick neck and huge ears. Why would any business want to be named after a creature that not only looks like that, but has a long thin snakelike protruding tongue that is capable of grasping tens of thousands of termites or ants in a day?

Producer Mark Burman.

Alan Dein discusses why business use the word aardvark as a name.

Travel through the universal stages of life. From conception and birth, to play and learning. Puberty and rebellion, to love, marriage and beyond. 

Through sound design and collage from BBC programmes, some obscure and some perhaps distantly familiar, glimpse how much our lives have changed over the course of the last century, and how the voice of the BBC has changed with them.

Produced by Jason Martin.

Feat. 0x10, A Child's Place, A Sense of Belonging, Allo, Allo, Anatomy of a Gang, Birth Right: The Dignity of Labour, Body Matters: As Time Goes By, Brass Tacks: Punk Rock, Civilisation: The Fallacy of Hope, E for Ecstasy, Everyman, Fields of Meaning, Forty Minutes, Grange Hill, Heath in Childhood, Horizon, How Your Body Works, Landmarks, Letting Go, Looking Back with Lord Reith, Man Alive, Marjorie Proops, Merry-Go-Round, Middle Age, Naked, Natural Break, Open Door, Order out of Chaos, Poldark, Public School, Robert Morley, Scene, School and Home, Seven Ages, Special Enquiry, Teenagers and Families, Trials of Life , The Child Experts, The Complete BBC Fitness Show, The Look, The Lowdown, The Mind Machine, Walrus, Watch, World of Sound and World of Wildlife.

The sound of a human lifetime as refracted through a century of BBC archive.

In 1442, a Venetian cartographer in 1442 firmly situated paradise at the most eastern edge of India. For a young film company location scout, it is indistinguishable from the beach at Applecross on the west coast of Scotland, whereas others recognise it in the English country garden at Sissinghurst, Kent. For one of the architects responsible for a new retail experience in Paradise Street, Liverpool, it can be glimpsed in the joy in existence he feels with each new dawn.

'I could hear certain Indian ragas in what Hendrix was playing - like Dhani, Jog, Malkauns - not because I'd gone looking for them, but in a way that one becomes aware, one day, of another dimension to an outline: like, for instance, the duck-rabbit, Wittgenstein's famous mutant'

He explores his own musical education, weaving in references to Tagore, Wittgenstein, Cage, Magritte and Frankie Goes to Hollywood - 'an excellent song; but, to my ears, noise, and noise I still wouldn't have any idea what to do with.

and tells how chance mishearings of popular western tunes led him into the world of MySpace and YouTube and a second career as a successful recording and performing artist

The typical hotel Indian classical muzak was my ambience - the santoor, whose tinny, glossy notes I was trying successfully to ignore, when it seemed to launch, without prior notice, into 'Auld Lang Syne'. I listened intently; but, in a few moments, the music had gone back to being the raga it was, Bhupali, a pentatonic identical to the Highlands scale from which the Scottish melody was derived. My project had such non-serious beginnings'.

Amit Chaudhuri on how music has a common root in both Eastern and Western traditions.

Composer Elizabeth Purnell has created a soundscape for the work which includes composed music, field recordings and processed sound in a raw response to the words. She set the poems specifically for Robert Wyatt whose voice in its high, delicate register suggests a beyond-the-grave alter-ego to the young Rimbaud. This version is a fierce abridgement of the original, but offers a startling insight into its power and beauty. It contains some language that might now give offence. Producer Sara Davies.

Setting of Rimbaud's hallucinatory prose poem. Contains language that might cause offence.

'Composing is like driving down a foggy road toward a house. Slowly you see more details of the house - the colour of the slates and bricks, the shape of the windows. The notes are the bricks and the mortar of the house.'

Via a compositional road trip, artists in the process of creating and making give insight into their own personal creative process, and what drives them to create. Like a play within a play or a documentary that documents itself - this feature dips its toe into the infinite and timeless nature of artistic creativity as an integral part of being human.

The fear of new beginnings, the pleasure of being in flow, moments of illumination, and of being lost; the artists' relationship with the environment and their own interior landscapes are revealed by Sculptor Helaine Blumenfeld, Art Student Imran Perretta, Composer Cheryl Frances-Hoad, Choreographer and Artistic Director of Rambert Dance Company, Mark Baldwin; and a group of people with Dementia and memory problems at a Creative Arts Session run by the Arts development company Verd de gris.

Their insights are woven together with a metaphorical motorbike journey performed by violinist Oli Langford and a soundscape of specially composed music.

First broadcast 06/07/2013.

A feature in which artists give insight into their creative process.

Radiophonic version of the text in the Book of Revelations.

Crackpot Hall is an ancient, ruined farmhouse near the village of Keld, which lies on the crossroads of the Pennine Way and the Coast to Coast Path in Swaledale. In its time, it has been a hunting lodge, an office for the local lead-mining industry and a family farm.

The acclaimed children's writer David Almond has long been intrigued by Crackpot Hall, and for decades has travelled west from his home near Newcastle to visit it. Recently, his curiosity was rekindled when he read about Alice, a four-year old child who was said to have been discovered roaming wild near Crackpot in the 1930s.

Led by the fabled laughter of Alice, David set out to find the wild child again and hear her story. Prepared to engage his imagination as a writer if facts alone failed, David was amazed by what Crackpot could still reveal.

Spoiler Alert: Alice was 4 years old when Ella Pontefract and Marie Hartley, the author and illustrator of a 1930s guide-book to Swaledale declared they had found her - 'with a mocking, chuckling laugh' as she roamed alone with her dog and cats near Crackpot. Like many others, David believed Alice to be a figment of the two women's imagination, so he set out to make a programme about how places create stories. He found Alice, now 88, living in a village near Carlisle, and as full of laughter as ever.

With music arranged by the Leeds-based composer Emily Levy.

Producer: Beaty Rubens.

The truth behind the story of a wild child found roaming at Crackpot Hall in Swaledale.

In this `aural exercise`, London's players, coaches, community workers and artists discuss the sport's core value of collaboration, both on and off the court. From a footing drenched with the ball's booming thud and staccato squeaks of sneakers on the court, All Ball amplifies the physicality, vernacular and movement-lead language of this forceful, urgent scene.

Contributors (in order of appearance):

Fatama Jennah

Ines Goryanova

Leia Edwards

Melita Emanuel-Carr

Caroline Charles

Stephanie Okoye

Inua Ellams

Aitana Infante

Indiana Lawrence

Rickardo Stewart

Lyndon White

Produced by Joseph Bond

New Creatives is supported by Arts Council England and BBC Arts

A meditation on the physical, psychological and communal benefits of basketball in London

Mixing bucolic lyric poem, music-sampling, the cut-up, weather forecasts, psychedelic literature and astronomic travelogue with the tone of a pre-recorded message from the beyond, Heather Phillipson's feature proposes the ear as an airborne dustbin. Beginning with a toenail and grass blades, then incrementally zooming out to the heavens, her composition probes the relative significance of life-forms and ideas in a quest for strangeness. Throughout, pop references set the agenda, tethering everything to earthly culture, while words and sounds take flight, suggesting listening as a way of becoming alien. Almost Gone is its own kind of space-time travel, sounding out other dimensions, tuning in to climactic vertigo. Listen in the dark.

Heather Phillipson is a British artist who works across video, sculpture, web projects, music, drawing and poetry. THE END, her sculpture for the Fourth Plinth, Trafalgar Square, is unveiled on March 26th 2020. She has also been commissioned for the next Duveen Galleries commission at Tate Britain, launching in June 2020.

Writer: Heather Phillipson

Composer/Sound Design/Editor: Heather Phillipson

Producers: Jack Howson and Joby Waldman

A Reduced Listening Production for BBC Radio 3

An ear floats off to the galaxies, listening in on a fading Earth. By Heather Phillipson.

Orcadian composer Erland Cooper grew up on the same street, just a few doors down, until the poet's death in 1996. To mark Mackay Brown's centenary, Erland returns to Stromness with acclaimed violinist Daniel Pioro. They journey over hilly moorland on the island of Hoy and to Rousay, an island known as the Egypt of the North. With Mackay Brown's book An Orkney Tapestry as their guide, they perform in a megalithic rock-cut tomb, shelter from gale-force storms against bothy walls with sheep, hike to an iron age broch, and discover an audience of fiddle-loving seals, culminating in a secret tape-planting ceremony.

George Mackay Brown famously rarely left the islands. But he enjoyed an international reputation, founded the St Magnus festival, and collaborated often with composer Peter Maxwell Davies. His words also inspired Erland's recent trilogy of records: 'The essence of Orkney's magic is silence, loneliness, and the deep marvellous rhythms of sea and land, darkness and light'. And for the centenary, Erland has also recorded a three-part orchestral movement with Daniel Pioro and Studio Collective at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. As an experiment, and collaboration with the landscape itself, all digital recorded files were deleted and the only recording exists on a reel-to-reel tape. Erland will bury this during the trip in an undisclosed location, to be left for three years to decompose... unless someone else finds it first.

With thanks to the George Mackay Brown estate, Polygon Press, and Sue MacGregor.

Producer: Victoria Ferran

Exec Producer: Sara Jane Hall

A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 3

Erland Cooper and Daniel Pioro pay tribute to Orkney poet George Mackay Brown.

Artist Susan Aldworth was commissioned to make a series of artworks reflecting epilepsy for St Thomas' Hospital in Westminster, now on display. In the pursuit of one portrait in particular she placed centre-stage her close friend Max Eilenberg and we follow her on this journey.

Through audio diaries and interviews with Max, we hear her become closer to her subject and her friend. She talks with him about philosophical notions of personal identity in relation to the impact of the absences which define epilepsy.

If you're blind, you're blind. You don't have blindness. If you've got a cold, you've got a cold. You are not cold. I have got epilepsy and I am epileptic. It's a constituent part of me in the same way as if I'd been born with one leg.' Max Eilenberg.

She also talks to neuroscientists and gets the chance to hear the sound of a seizure in the brain.

A haunting experience.

The sound of epilepsy is not a jagged rasping, not spikes of sound - but more like the sound of whale song, a plaintive cry for help, a call in the wild. How does an artist go about creating a work of art to reflect this?

Her own particular interest in the relationship of The Self to the physical brain came after seeing inside her own brain, real time, during a diagnostic brain scan ten years ago on Christmas Day.

Disturbing stuff. But just for a moment, share what it feels like to go through the devastation of a brain turning on its carrier.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

First broadcast in May 2011.

Susan Aldworth's creation of a portrait of epilepsy now in the National Portrait Gallery.

At the heart of any football match is the crowd. Without it, the beautiful game is meaningless. The deathly silence of Covid reminded everyone of the crowd's power and place. Across a tumultuous last season at Arsenal, Mark Burman recorded from his beloved North Bank & travelled to hear the roar of Borussia Dortmund's legendary Yellow Wall. Former Ultra & artist Marcin Dudek summons the sonic demons of his days fighting and shouting in the concrete bowl of Cracovia in Poland.

With the voices of Wayne Busbridge, Marcin Dudek, David Goldblatt, Uli Hesse, Tom Jones, Chrissie Langton, Allan Mabert, Clive Palmer & 60,000 Gooners. Recorded in ambisonic & binaural so best heard with your headphones on.

Producer: Mark Burman

At the heart of any football match is the crowd. Mark Burman captures the joy and despair.

Starring Ed Gaughan, and children from Bristol, London and Glasgow.

Written by Sebastian Baczkiewicz

Produced and directed by Joby Waldman

A Reduced Listening Production for BBC Radio 3.

With many thanks to Felix Road Adventure Playground and Linkes Community Project.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

It features original music from the following Motion Picture Soundtracks:

The Grifter (composer Elmer Bernstein)

Diamonds are Forever (composer John Barry)

The Godfather (composer Nino Rota)

Eight and a Half (composer Nino Rota)

Chinatown (composer Jerry Goldsmith)

Psycho (composer Bernard Herrmann)

Casanova (composer Nino Rota)

The Road to Perdition (composer Thomas Newman)

The Omen (composer Jerry Goldsmith)

Blade Runner (composer Vangelis)

The Big Country (composer Jerome Moross)

Young children listen to classic film soundtracks and invent original stories.

Producers Alan Hall and Piers Plowright

(Photo credit: Lucy Tizard)

An archive repeat in tribute to the radio producer Piers Plowright who died in 2021.

Bal Bazaar is a journey through the shop and through Indian cultures in Britain, both real and imagined. Shop owners tell their stories: a hairdresser snips her way through the day, while a Muslim butcher explains how he is really an IT worker covering for his brother who has cancer. Bal Bazaar hints at the religious and political - a story of faked Halal meat - and a world of religious festival and song. It also tells the common human stories of food, hair cutting and the every day, domestic life within the shopkeepers' community.

Readers/Daljit Nagra and Sudhar Buchar.

Producer/Jo Wheeler.

Daljit Nagra's new poetic narrative inspired by his uncle's shops in west London.

In the wake of a painful relationship breakup, film-maker Anastasia Kirillova finds herself in Tokyo. By chance she stumbles upon Bar Answer, an out-of-the-way cocktail bar that serves as the front-office for a love detective agency. Sipping on drinks named ‘Jealousy' and ‘Obsession', potential clients seek a remedy for their broken relationships, an escape from pain.

Separation operator Kyoko Kawakami is a ‘Kosaquin', a love detective, working for Bar Answer. For a fee she offers ‘Fukuen', reconciliation with a former partner, or ‘Wakaresaseya', a break-up service for impatient lovers. Above all, she aims to help clients come to terms with ‘Genjitsu', reality.

Bar Answer explores the private world of failing relationships, the pain of loving, and the ways back from the madness it can drive us to.

Created and performed by Anastasia Kirillova

Jonathan - .. Jonathan Bonicci

Produced by Nicolas Jackson and Steve Bond

An Afonica production for BBC Radio 3

A Japanese true love detective story from film-maker Anastasia Kirillova.

The poems are set to the soundscape of the human hive: the mechanised city, with its pulses of human construction and communication, its humming motifs of social movement and the isolated sounds of the single cells within it.

At the heart of the sequence, in the heart of the hive, is the queen bee - voiced by champion beatboxer Bellatrix.

The soundtrack is compiled from wildtrack and recordings from cities around the world, and includes music by Elizabeth Purnell and Neil Sorrell.

Sean Borodale is one of 2014's Next Generation Poets. He is currently Creative Fellow at Trinity College, Cambridge. His second collection, Human Work: A Poet's Cookbook, is newly published.

He was selected as a Granta New Poet in 2012, and Bee Journal was shortlisted for the TS Eliot Prize and the Costa Book Award in 2013. Mighty Beast, his documentary poem for Radio 3 (also produced by Sara Davies), won the Radio Academy Gold Award in 2014 for Best Feature or Documentary.

A Cast Iron Radio Production for BBC Radio 3.

Poem sequence by Sean Borodale centring on bees and the hive. With the voice of Bellatrix.

Producer Alan Hall

First broadcast on BBC Radio 3 on 21 October 1996.

Iceland's Route One, or Hringvegurinn, is the country's main road. It opened in 1974, but has recently undergone a period of repair and rebuilding. It is 1,322 kilometres long and connects the majority of towns together in the most populated areas of the country. Even with the addition of modern infrastructure, Icelandic folklore still plays a large part in today's society. Tales from the past are not forgotten.

Icelanders have always told fantastic tales of their strange encounters with the many supernatural beings with which they share the land. During the long dark winter nights of old, storytelling was the chief form of Icelandic entertainment, with each region fostering its very own sagas, tales and legends that were passed down from generation to generation.

In this episode of Between The Ears, the New York-based Icelandic sound designer and composer Andrea Kristinsdottir goes back home to discover the sounds and stories before Route One.

Andrea starts her journey in Keflavik, moving counter-clockwise around the country on Route One, from the moss covered lava fields to the black volcanic windswept beaches of Vik. Then onwards to Kirkjubæjarklaustur with glaciers glinting in the distance and driving to the far northern alien landscape of bubbling geysers in Hverir. At every stop, Andrea juxtaposes the sounds of modern Iceland with stories from before Route One, bringing to life the Land of Ice and Fire, with location recordings of waterfalls, glaciers, thermal baths and geysers, complemented by folklore and fairytales.

Presenter / Sound designer / Composer: Andrea Kristinsdottir

Producer: Jo Meek for Audio Always

Icelandic tales from the past are not forgotten but fused with epic sounds of nature.

In a country of epic landscapes, Iceland's Route One is the country's main road. Icelandic composer Andrea Kristinsdottir discovers the sounds and stories from before Route One.

Andrea starts her journey in Keflavik, moving counter-clockwise around the country on Route One, from the moss covered lava fields to the black volcanic windswept beaches of Vik. Then onwards to Kirkjub怀jarklaustur with glaciers glinting in the distance and driving to the far northern alien landscape of bubbling geysers in Hverir. At every stop, Andrea juxtaposes the sounds of modern Iceland with stories from before Route One, bringing to life the Land of Ice and Fire, with location recordings of waterfalls, glaciers, thermal baths and geysers, complemented by folklore and fairytales.

What caused the women of Nagyrev to poison their husbands? Was it, as commentators at the time suggested, the impact of World War I or of social change? Was it revenge for their husbands' drinking and violence?

The programme reconstructs the facts of a baffling mass-murder with archives from the trial, press reports and the memories of one Nagyrev resident still living who remembers the case.

A look back at the case of the poisoning of 50 men in Nagyrev in Hungary.

What caused the women of Nagyrev to poison their husbands? Was it, as commentators at the time suggested, the impact of World War I or of social change? Was it revenge for their husbands' drinking and violence?

The programme reconstructs the facts of a baffling mass-murder with archives from the trial, press reports and the memories of one Nagyrev resident still living who remembers the case.

A look back at the case of the poisoning of 50 men in Nagyrev in Hungary.

Mike and Sue need to find a bungalow so Mike, who recently had a stroke, doesn't have to cope with stairs. The belongings he desperately wants to keep, although perhaps now unnecessary, symbolise both his past fitness and his potential future happiness.

Nina is moving to a retirement flat and prides herself on a life free of attachment to material things, but over the years she has amassed a fascinating collection of possessions that hold powerful memories for her.

Patricia was a successful soprano, and now in her 80s has many boxes full of treasures from her career. She finds it hard to throw things away, they are as she says: 'my life'.

For many people possessions are just 'stuff'. The stories of Pat, Mike and Nina are interspersed with those for whom the disposal and moving of belongings is how they make their living. We hear the detached comments of auctioneers, removal men and estate agents. The intention of Belongings is to make the listener lose themselves in the lives of the downsizers, but also to make them think 'what do I value most?'.

Following people making difficult decisions about what to keep and what to throw away.

Dean's audio artwork Berlin Project is constructed out of a variety of sound recordings and created sound artefacts including street sounds recorded live in Berlin, specially created sound effects, some spoken word, and brass band music, all combining to produce an audio portrait of Berlin. She worked with producer Roger Elsgood and sound designer John Hunt to make her first work for radio.

Artist Tacita Dean's audio artwork, Berlin Project, based on the sound of the city.

Sitar performed by Sheema Mukherjee. Sonic realization Mark Burman and Donald MacDonald.

Directed and Produced by Mark Burman

Enter JG Ballard's innerspace with two new binaural dramatisations of his short fiction.

In the opening Prelude the Australian producer Sophie Townsend weaves a tender exploration of what beginnings might be found when everything has ended. (With music by Martin Peralta.)

Fugue, by the British producer Michael Umney, offers a poetic exploration of the countryside, farming and false nostalgia.

The Menuet by Belgian producer Katharina Smets presents a musical piece about the empty space between people that were once very close, set in the harbour city of Antwerp. A menuet is an old waltz that keeps a safe distance between the dancers. From across the room, the dancers glance at each other, briefly touching hands and letting go... (With sound and electronics by Inne Eysermans.)

Pavane, by Norwegian producer Sindre Leganger, looks at those who live in the shadow of 'The Man' - the tip of a mountain in western Norway, which is perenially reported to be on the verge of falling down. (With music by Tri-Tachyon.)

And in conclusion, the Toccata by the Canadian producers Mira Burt-Wintonick and Cristal Duhaime blends reality and fiction to explore a parasitic relationship. Featuring the voice of Jane Lewis.

A musical suite of innovative radio features from around the world.

Bone Music features a live demonstration of cutting discs on x-ray, and lively memories of bootleggers along with the sound of their treasured records.

Presenter: Stephen Coates

Producer: Monica Whitlock

How hospital x-rays were used to capture forbidden music in the Cold War

Using different recordings of Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 - which famously underscores the 1945 film - Between the Ears reflects on how a chance meeting can change our lives forever.

In the 1950s two people bump into each other changing trains at Harrow-on-the-Hill station. In 2001, two strangers meet on a train bound for Edinburgh. In 2014 two paths cross in a departure lounge at Toronto Airport. Meanwhile, a few Christmases ago in a pub in Margate eyes meet across a crowded bar.

For each person, for good or ill, life will never be the same again. Between the Ears tells their stories, set to Rachmaninov's haunting music.

Producer: Laurence Grissell

Sound mixed by Donald MacDonald

Featuring the voices of:

Barry and Maureen Leveton

Anna Nation K䀀hler

Kristen Adamson

Aoife Hanna

Featuring the following recordings of Rachmaninov, Piano Concerto No. 2:

Krystian Zimerman, Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Seiji Ozawa

Leif Ove Andsnes, Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Antonio Pappano

Vladimir Ashkenazy, London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Andr退 Previn

John Ogdon, Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by John Pritchard

Stories of real-life chance encounters mark the anniversary of the film Brief Encounter.

While collaging the mores and cadences of telephone behaviour and speech the piece also lands in the physical space of the landline - the actual line and the real land. The world of the telephone engineer atop a telegraph pole; the village operator, the maintenance or laying of underwater cables, the middle-of-nowhere phone box which exists oblique to the density of traffic of information and chat.

The plot lines of death and murder stalking the crossed lines of the city, to the call of the worried voice 'Are you still there?'. All these spaces are opened up with the reassurances and communities of landline use.

It is a line crossed next to the atmospheric space that denotes a fragility and hints at the ways in which the technology that opened up connection also imported in its liveness an equal and opposite force of disconnection.

Running out of change, the broken phone box, the drama and plunge into existential separation, opened up by the one-sided conversation and now, the relentless possibility of being in touch.

With thanks to Max Flemmich of Darvel Telephone Museum and Dr Sarah Jackson, Senior Lecturer English and Creative Writing, Nottingham Trent University.

A Cast Iron Radio Production.

A sound portrait in which artist Graeme Miller captures the poetry of the landline.

Kim Addonizio - Exit Opera

When wildfires turned the sky over San Francisco orange, poet Kim Addonizio began to fear for the future of the California she loves. In the footsteps of Jack Kerouac, who spent a season as a fire lookout, she heads for the National Sequoia Forest to spend a night in a fire lookout tower high above the tree-line.

'I came to a point when I needed solitude, and just stop the machine of thinking and living. They say in ancient scriptures wisdom can be only obtained from solitude.'

Jack Kerouac - Desolation Angels

There used to be over 10,000 lookouts scattered across the USA, but in the 1960s and 70s they began to fall out of use. Today they are coming back into use as the fire service needs every tool in their toolbox - and despite its toughness, it is a job often done by women, straining their experienced eyes into a network of early warning systems.

Kim learns the skills of a fire lookout from Mich Michigian and Kathryn Allison, who have watched fires rage and lightning explode from the relative safety of a tiny lookout tower, perched on a gigantic granite outcrop called Buck Rock. Scanning the horizon every 15 minutes, the job is to report ‘smokes' - and when the lightning gets too close, to run inside and sit on the ‘lightning stool' until the storm passes.

Jack Kerouac was less interested in fire, and more into Buddhism. In search of enlightenment, he headed to the Cascade Mountains, and the look-out on Desolation Peak. Poet Neeli Cherkovski reveals how after his initial delight, and without the crutch of drugs and liquor, he found the isolation tormenting.

`Desolation adventure finds me finding at the bottom of myself abysmal nothingness - worse than that, no illusion even - my mind's in rags.`

Inspired by these fire watchers, Kim Addonizio considers an inferno-like future of mega-fires, even giga-fires, whilst keeping an eye out for lightning strikes, fireworks, anything that could spark a fire, high in her lookout tower above the forest.

Exit Opera by Kim Addonizio

Readings by Daniel Caron

Musical inspiration by Danny Webb

With thanks to the Buck Rock Foundation.

Produced by Sara Jane Hall

A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 3

High above the giant sequoias, poet Kim Addonizio shadows Jack Kerouac as a fire watcher.

Norman Ackroyd has spent his life travelling to some of the most remote places in the British Isles and his etchings rely on the interplay between light and dark, but there is a mysterious alchemy to his process. This is a rare opportunity to be privy to this and accompany Norman, now in his 83rd year, as he takes a boat from Southwold harbour at dawn, to paint the Suffolk coast from the North Sea for the first time, hoping to watch the sun rise on its crumbling cliffs.

A new commission by Nancy Campbell responds to Norman's journey, forming a counterpoint to his practical concerns as he sketches and balances precariously at the stern of the boat. Nancy embodies different forms of light, describing how it travels through space, and outlines the visible world, making Norman's creation of a likeness possible.

Rich in immersive binaural recordings, Norman's lyrical observations and Nancy's poem are woven with the wild soundscape of the Suffolk coast; the sea, the birds, the insights of the accompanying fishermen and music specially composed by Jane Watkins.

Printmaker Norman Ackroyd and poet Nancy Campbell explore what it takes to capture light.

Of the ninety-nine people killed in Ardoyne between 1969 and 1997 by the army or by nationalist or loyalist paramilitaries, two-thirds attended these schools. Children like Philip McTaggart used the burnt-out houses abandoned by Protestant families in 1969 as their playground. Others like Karen McGuigan leapt from their bicycles and ran for cover as gun battles broke out between republicans and the army.

A generation later - and three years after the Good Friday Agreement - Karen and her daughter Christine, who was then in her last year at primary school, became embroiled in the Holy Cross dispute. This protest by loyalist residents against their Catholic neighbours' route to the school shocked a world that had been lulled into thinking the worst of Northern Ireland's troubles was in the past.

In this 'composed meditation', residents of Ardoyne - Catholic and Protestant, nationalist and loyalist - remember growing up during the conflict and, together with children of today, seek an understanding of the legacy that's been bequeathed to the children of tomorrow.

A meditation on 'the Troubles' from the viewpoint of north-Belfast children.

'A character can be true without being real, don't you think?'

John, an exiled Chinese novelist, meets an American author struggling with a commission about a shape-shifting princess. Their ideas fuse, and as Princess Xu-Feng takes form, mind-altering events occur. We travel inside the minds of the characters, hearing their thoughts and their words, revealing the gap between fantasy and reality.

Chinoiserie explores the true price we pay for speaking the truth. We rule our lives by what we think is real, by what we decide is true. This drama asks whether we're deceiving ourselves.

Chinoiserie follows Peter Blegvad and Iain Chambers' previous drama for Between The Ears, Use It Or Lose It, which won a Sony Radio Award and Prix Europa special commendation in 2012.

An Open Audio production for BBC Radio 3.

Drama in which an exiled novelist meets an author writing about a shape-shifting princess.

There are several thousand people in vegetative or minimally conscious states in the UK and, as medical interventions to save the body improve, numbers are growing. 'What is it like being in such as state?', 'Is she in there?', 'Does he recognize me?' 'What should I do for the best?' 'Is this a meaningful existence, or a state worse than death?' These are the questions that haunt families. Using new research from the York-Cardiff Chronic Disorders of Consciousness Research Centre, this programme asks the inevitable question of whether one would choose to die rather than live in such a state, trapped in a 'fate worse than death'. Not dead, but perhaps not fully alive either.

Family members talk with stark honesty about what it is like to have a relative in a coma-like state, unable to speak or do anything for themselves, year after year; their feelings at the bedside and their thoughts about the heart-breaking dilemmas they face. Using words, sounds, music and poetry, the programme explores the surreal and extraordinary situation created by modern medicine's ability to save the body, but not to restore the brain.

Produced by Llinos Jones and Professor Jenny Kitzinger. This is a Terrier Productions Ltd programme for BBC Radio 3.

Illustration: 'Wordless' (detail) by Tim Sanders.

A meditation on the cultural representation of comas.

Combining Lisa's music with her journey into scientific exploration of the whales' song, the programme dives into the haunting yet magical underwater musical world of the humpback whale.

Lisa Walker takes her music out onto Pacific waters to collaborate with humpback whales.

Paris is well known for its historic architecture: the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe, and the endless rows of apartment buildings built by Hausmann in the 19th century. But beyond the historic centre lie a series of alternative Parisian cities, built from concrete during the 1960s and 70s.

This lesser-known concrete Paris creates a surprising journey around the Boulevard P退riph退rique, the ring road that contains the historic centre of Paris.

These alternative Parises were built after World War II, when the need to provide mass accommodation was counterbalanced by the desire to protect the historic centre. So a ‘multipolar' solution was found, and the administrations beyond the P退ripherique - many of them Communist - set to work, commissioning architects to reimagine the city. We visit buildings at Ivry-sur-Seine designed by Jean Renaudie and Ren退e Gailhoustet; Bobigny, by Oscar Niemeyer; and Cr退teil, by G退rard Grandval.

Contributors:

Robin Wilson

Serge Renaudie

Producer/Composer: Iain Chambers

Sound mix: Peregrine Andrews

Executive Producer: Nina Perry

Recordings by Dinah Bird, Iain Chambers

Translations by Madeleine Williams

An Open Audio production for BBC Radio 3

A radiophonic sound journey around the alternative concrete Paris beyond the inner city.

Containers are the nearly invisible carriers of 90% of the goods on earth - yet we know so little about them, or the people on board. The crew who power globalisation, are unsung heroes. Now we hear them sing, and capture something of that strange, lonely, heroic life.

Sea shanties are a relic of the past - today it's far more likely to be karaoke soothing the soul and powering the arm of the modern sea farer.

Instead nearly all ships have a karaoke machine on board - and rumour has it, competition is ferocious.

In search of the modern sea shanty, Nathaniel Mann, award winning singer and song collector, who has long avoided taking part in karaoke, boards a state-of-the-art container ship in Gdansk shipyard - the Maribo Maersk, to sing along with the Filipino sea men, ship's cook Valiente, and able-seaman Ariel.

He also ‘plays the ship' - discovering acoustic possibilities from the engine room to the Monkey Island (the platform above the bridge), attaching contact microphones which revel the rhythms hidden behind heavy metal walls.

He climbs out on the 'catwalk' to watch the stevedores at work, the giant cranes crashing a container into the hold every two minutes, 24 hours a day - until all 18,272 have been shifted - with all the complexity of a game of Tetrus.

The company offers mainly 5 month contracts to the 20 or so sailors on board, and discovering how the team pass those months at sea, Nathaniel hears tales of home-sickness, made even more poignant by the choice of songs the crew prefer to sing.

We hear from an international crew about life at sea in this giant vessel - you can't even hear the sea from the decks above. Tales of dark skies, longed for loved ones, learning the shape of the world from water - we hear a fluid mix of the sounds of the ship, the crew singing karaoke, and Nathan's own new songs, gleaned from his observations on board.

We also hear from Suffolk shanty singers Des and Jed, who wonder if karaoke might be an updated version of an older form of shanty.

About the presenter: Nathaniel Mann is an experimental composer, sound artist, performer and sound designer - known both for his experimental trio Dead Rat Orchestra, and most recently as embedded composer at the Pitt Rivers Museum. He also won the Arts Foundation's 25th Anniversary Fellowship 2018.

In 2015 he won the George Butterworth Prize for Composition, and much of his experience as an accomplished and imaginative percussive master, as well as singer, will be integral to this programme - a symphony of singing, the sea, the ships and the songsters.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

With thanks to the crew of the Maribo Maersk, especially:

Chief Officer: Morten Fløjborg Hansen

CPT: Stig Lindegaard Mikkelsen

2nd Officer: Francis Umbay Dela Cerna

4th Engineer: Campbell John Dooley

Chief Cook: Valiente Panopio Peralta

AB: Ariel Dallarte Martin

19,000 containers can be poor company on a voyage. Time for some karaoke!

Dust rises from the hooves of cattle returning to a village at sunset. Smoke from open fires wreathes in ribbons across the fields. As the evening shadows begin to lengthen, people, animals and birds all return to their homes to rest.

This time of day is known in India as 'godhuli bela', or 'cowdust time'. It is the sacred time when Lord Krishna brought his own cattle safely home. In paintings, he is often seen meeting his beloved Radha in the evening, as peacocks call, bright green parakeets chatter loudly in the neem trees, temple bells and muezzins call people of different faiths to prayer.

There are many devotional songs and poems devoted to this twilight hour. It is seen throughout India as an auspicious time for engagements, weddings, even business ventures. But it's also the time when mothers call their children home, to avoid evil spirits. And when those same children are told not to whistle, for fear of inviting evil in.

In this hypnotic sound tapestry - recorded in Gujarat, the Kumaon hills and Madhya Pradesh - we hear cows and other animals being brought back to their village, the loud clamour of birds, the eerie noise of crickets.

'It is that fantastic time of day,' says writer and academic Rajendrasingh Jadeja, 'when the cowdust raised transforms the scene from stark, sharp light to a fantasy world.'

That fantasy world has been captured in art, music and literature. Painter and art critic Amit Ambalal, poets Jayant Parmar and Mahek Tankarvi, and musician Sugna Shah, are among those who talk about the religious and cultural significance of twilight. We also hear the poetry, prayers, lullabies and ragas depicting this magical time 'when the earth does yoga'.

A sound portrait of Indian twilight, known as 'cowdust time'.

Dramatist Lou Stein explores the tensions between selective memory and identity.

David Bramwell has a fascination and fear of water. He grew up by a water tower, close to the heart of Doncaster: a place of mystery and wonder to him, the highest building in the area, almost a kind of temple.

We have wandered too far from some vital totem, something central to us that we must find our way back to, following a hair of meaning' - Alan Moore

With deep thought from cult author Alan Moore, the witches of Sheffield, ex-steel workers and the conservationists of Yorkshire, musician David Bramwell plunges into the river Don to celebrate its return to health and the revival of the worship of its goddess, Danu - the river's original name from pre-Roman times.

It's also an underwater musical experience for the listener... blending the sounds of the rivers, canals and streams of the Don, recorded with hydrophones, into new music, new sounds, with Bramwell's compositions.

Bramwell travels up the Don to its source, backwards in time, uncovering the history of its days as an industrial heartland, now a regenerated river - banked by forests of figs and swum through by deer.

He meets John Heaps who, as a teenager in the 1970s at the steel works, was instructed to throw cyanide in the river by the bucket-load; takes a boat with Professor Ian Rotherham, of Sheffield Hallam University, who guides him through the decaying, yet reviving industrial landscape of the city; hunts fresh fish with river expert Chris Firth of the Don Catchment River Trust; stares up at Vulcan on the Town Hall roof, the harsh overlord of industry, with folklorist and lecturer David Clarke; and hears from witches Anwen and Lynne Harling (also an archaeologist, handily), trying to bring back recognition for the goddess of the river.

But this is also a mystical journey - searching out the 'spirit of this dark and lonely water', in an attempt to come to peace with Bramwell's own fear, perhaps to atone for the wrongs committed to Danu by Vulcan, in the name of progress and industrialisation.

Going under, with Between the Ears.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

Music and words performed, written and presented by David Bramwell.

Clips from Lonely Water (1973) from The COI Collection, courtesy BFI National Archive.

The film can be view on the BFI player, see link below.

David Bramwell confronts his fear of water, exploring the history of the river Don.

Almost exactly fifty years after the meeting in early June 1964, Radio 3's adventurous feature series Between the Ears brings the moment to life with the aid of Groucho Marx and TS Eliot's exchange of letters. They'd been pen-pals since 1961, had swapped signed photographs - Eliot particular that Groucho send him a cigar-toting portrait - and compared lifestories. Eliot hung his Groucho picture between his portraits of WB Yeats and French poet Paul Valery - a place of great honour, according to Craig Raine, celebrated poet himself and biographer of Eliot, who also appears in the programme.

With Lenny Henry taking the role of Groucho, Jakko Jakszyk has woven a delicate vocal and instrumental score around the letters, while he and Lenny together speculate about the nature of the men's seemlingly unlikely passion for each other's work.

After a number of failed arrangements, in June 1964, a car arrives at the Savoy to collect Groucho and his wife to take them the short distance to Eliot's home for the much-awaited dinner. Yet such is the nature of celebrity that when Groucho quoted lines from Eliot's The Wasteland back to him, he was uninterested, and Groucho, in turn, was unable to recall the scene from Duck Soup that Eliot particularly loved. They parted, disappointed and a little dejected. Yet, nine months later, on learning of the poet's death, Marx wrote: 'he was a nice man, the best epitaph any man can have...'.

Lenny Henry stars in a musical fantasy about TS Eliot's 1964 dinner with Groucho Marx.

This culture has its origins in the time prior to the second world war, when imported records and audio equipment were prohibitively expensive. People began to gather in caf退s where, for the price of a cup of coffee, they could listen to rare records on the highest quality gramophones.

While the traditional classical and jazz caf退s are slowly disappearing, there are new modern listening bars emerging, often concentrating on specific genres and even microgenres of contemporary music, with a focus on the same concept of concentrated and collective listening.

Rich in binaural recordings, this radio documentary features the owners and regulars of legendary music caf退s, like the classical music caf退s Violon in Tokyo, and Musik in Kyoto, the jazz caf退 Downbeat in Yokohama, as well as the DJ-Bar Bridge, a cutting-edge listening bar in Shibuya, Tokyo.

Producer: Andreas Hartmann in collaboration with Julia Shimura

Translation: Krzysztof Honowski

Voice Actors: Peter Becker, Matthew Burton, Ian Dickinson, Riah Knight and Tomas Sinclair Spencer

Photo Credit: Andreas Hartmann

A sonic journey into Japan's unique culture of music cafes and listening bars.

Armed with audio recorders Diptee, Olya, Lynda, Sally and Nikki tape their journey: from shopping trips for disposable knickers and maternity towels, to the moment they wonder whether it's started, whether this is it... to the peak of their labours. Deliverance bravely bares all from pregnancy to birth, and Lemn's dialogue with the women reveals how, through the process, not only is a new child born but a new woman.

Lemn was without his birth family until he was 21. Since then he can count on two hands the number of times he's met his mother. He realizes that the nine months he spent in her womb are the only time they were truly connected. Yet only his mother has the memory of it.

Pregnancy's ordinary, yet mysterious. The inner workings of a pregnant woman's mind and body are veiled, private. Yet five women nearing childbirth from as far afield as Russia, Bangladesh and Manchester reveal what many are too fearful to admit to.

We hear Nikki, a surrogate mother determined not to bond with her baby. Sally weeps quietly in fear at 4am; Olya, just 25, considers which country to bring her child up in. And Lynda worries about losing the bond with her toddler Joe, as she reads to him in bed for the last time before the new baby arrives.

A new radio poem by Lemn Sissay featuring five women's audio diaries of pregnancy.

Frenchman Louis Daguerre is known primarily as one of the inventors of photography - but before the magic of light fixed on paper there was the diorama, which some call the precursor to the moving image, and cinema. The Diorama offered the well-heeled audience a glimpse into other worlds - where volcanos would erupt on the hour, Roman ruins explored, mountain peaks ascended - not unlike a modern Las Vegas but in the 1820s.

Using light, moving apertures, smoke and mirrors, sound and music, to produce unusually realistic effects, he created a new form of entertainment - immersive, dramatic, sensational, and for a brief period, the wonder of the Western world. From New York to Moscow,

Dioramas opened their doors to well-heeled customers who would be so delighted with the ‘realism' of the created scene, they would frequently ask to be led onto the stage - be it a scene from the Alps, the Battle of Trafalgar, Cowes in the Isle of Wight, or a voyage in search of the North-West Passage.

By 1850, nearly all had burnt to the ground, probably due to the large number of oil lamps involved, and the highly flammable nature of the stage props and theatres, but hidden by a Nash fa瀀ade in Regents Park, London, there stands the last of the Diorama Theatres - a Grade 1 listed building, now sadly empty and awaiting ‘reimagining'. Architect Marek Wojiechowski, who is developing plans for the long empty building, takes him on a tour backstage.

Award-winning writer, drama producer and podcast expert Dr Lance Dann gets a chance to visit the original Diorama before setting off on a kaleidoscopic journey through other influential dioramas. He returns to the Denis Severs House in Spitalfields, where he once helped install a sound scape, to bring this detailed recreation of a Huguenot silk weaver's house, to life. Does the magic still work?

Dr Hetta Howes takes him into the immersive atmosphere of Great St Bartholomew's Church where the worshippers were once drench is sounds, sights and evocative suggestions, and describes the most suggestible of religious texts - the passion meditations. Intriguingly he hears about The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death - the murder dioramas created by the brilliant and formidable Chicago heiress Francis Glessner Lee - still used today to teach detectives. Susan Marks has spent a decade researching her - her first film was charmingly titled - The Dolls of Murder, and together they try and solve one of her most famous murder scenes - Barn!

Dr Sarah Garfinkle helps us understand how our brains fool us, or decide to play along with immersion, whilst Dr Alistair Good, VR games designer, tempts Dann to jump off a tall building, virtually. Finally Dann visits possibly the last genuine Daguerre diorama in the world - in a small village just outside Paris, Bry-Sur-Marne, where the Mayor Jean Pierre-Spillbauer, and local archivist Vincent Roblin, have dedicated much of the last 20 years trying to restore the small but effective diorama at the back of a provincial church. After contacting Antoine Wilmering at the Getty Foundation, they received a grant of $200,000, matched by the French Government, which saved the last of Daguerre's dioramas.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

Music sourced with the help of Danny Webb.

Before there was cinema, there was the diorama. Now extinct, we bring it back to life!

Disequilibrium' is a meditation on the nature of sound and hearing. It traces Nick's experience of his balance disorder as it morphs his world into a space nearly as alien as the one he's creating. And it explores the process of making a world out of sound and how this work is affected by, and affects, his condition.

With contributions from Cath Le Couteur, Gillian Ryan, Jeremy Corcoran, Paul Bennun, Rahul Kanegaonkar, Rachel Ritchie. The GP is played by Neil Bennun.

The music featured in the programme includes 'Brain Waves' by Mira Calix and 'As Above so below' by Nick Ryan

With special thanks to the staff of the Balance Clinic, Guys Hospital, and Mira Calix.

Disequilibrium was made by Lisa Gee and Nick Ryan and produced by Jeremy Mortimer

Nick Ryan is a composer and sound designer. He holds top industry awards in technical and creative fields for his unique approach to sound and music for film, radio and TV drama and documentary, interactive media, animation and orchestral composition. In 2004 he received a BAFTA for 'The Dark House', a groundbreaking interactive radio drama that he devised and scored, broadcast live on BBC Radio 4 in September 2003.

Lisa Gee wrote Stage Mum (Arrow 2009, Hutchinson 2008), Friends: Why Men and Women are From the Same Planet (Bloomsbury 2004) and edited Bricks Without Mortar: the selected poems of Hartley Coleridge (Picador 2000). She writes, edits and creates video content about books, music and other cultural stuff for a variety of print and online outlets. She has trained as a sound engineer.

Sound designer Nick Ryan explores the disorientating effects of a balance disorder.

The letters contained details of experiments, observations and intuitions, and read like an alternative history of space.

With John Moraitis, Kerry Shale, Barbara Barnes and Jennifer Lee Jellicorse, plus the music of Olivier Messiaen and Urmas Sisask.

Letters sent by people who had gleaned information about the universe without a telescope.

Pejk Malinovski's soundscape of real dreams and reflections on security gauges the impact of the 'War on Terror' on our collective unconscious.

Since 9/11 Bin Laden has been appearing in people's dreams all over the West.

Music by Jeremy Thurlow.

Producer: David Stenhouse.

A poetic meditation on physicist Ronald Drever and the search for Gravitational Waves.

West Burton was originally planned to close in September 2022, but the invasion of Ukraine by Russia has extended its operations until the spring of 2023 to help with the energy crisis.

Andrew's late father was a mechanical engineer, and he was involved in the power construction industry in the 60s, and fifty years ago he took Andrew around Cottam power station - which is just up the road from West Burton - and as you can imagine that tour around the plant left a big impression on an eight-year-old.

As luck would have it, when Andrew was recording at West Burton, he was able to go to Cottam, which is in the process of being demolished, and he walked again in his father's footsteps. It brought back a lot of poignant memories.

This soundscape in an operating and disused coal-fired power station is Andrew's homage to his father, before these cathedrals of power are reduced to rubble, capturing, before it's too late, the sounds that would otherwise be lost to history.

A BBC Radio Cumbria production, produced by Andrew Carter

Andrew Carter's coal-to-kettle soundscape pays homage to these vast cathedrals of power.

With music by composer Damian Montagu and Fair Isle musicians, including his collaboration with singer Lise Sinclair on the song Empty Ocean. It sets Paul Rich's poem The Halibut Fisher's Saturday Night, about the great hauls of the past compared to today, where the ocean is empty of fish and the seabed smooth from over-fishing. There is also Sinclair's poem Silent, portraying the disappearance of seabirds from the skies because of the lack of sandeels for feeding.

Islanders on Fair Isle lament the loss of fishing. And music performed by local musicians.

An Open Audio production for BBC Radio 3.

A drama about the end of the world, as seen from a liner on a deserted sea.

Producer, Melanie Harris

Sound Designer, Eloise Whitmore

Executive Producer, Jo Meek

A Sparklab production for BBC Radio 3.

Feature about violin maker Andrea Ortona's work creating a copy of a Guarneri Kemp violin.

Along the route of this sonic road movie, Rob meets people working to protect this extraordinary species: Darlene Burgess, a conservation specialist monitoring butterfly populations at Point Pelee on the shores of Lake Eerie; Nancy Barnhart, coordinating the monarch migration programme for the Coastal Virginia Wildlife Observatory at Kiptopeke State Park, where we also encounter composer Matthew Burtner, whose sonifications of data from the local seagrass beds help track changes in the monarch's environment; and butterfly expert Pablo Jaramillo-L　pez giving a tour of the Sierra Chincua and Cerro Pel　n reserves in Mexico. We also hear reflections from the late Lincoln Brower, the American entomologist whose legacy has inspired many of today's research and conservation efforts.

The programme features Rob Mackay's binaural field recordings, and audio from live stream boxes, set up in partnership with the ecological art and technology collective SoundCamp to monitor the monarch's changing habitats. Plus Rob's own flute playing, recorded in each of the locations visited, also featuring David Blink on handpan and trumpet, and poetry in Spanish about the monarch by Rolando Rodriguez.

Presented and sound designed by Rob Mackay, produced by Andy King.

The migratory route of the monarch butterfly traced in words, music and sound.

Before his death, Ian was recording the course of the night across the wilder places of East Anglia. He made these field recordings in remote locations across Norfolk and Suffolk, sometimes camping overnight in bird hides to capture the different nocturnal moments.

Ian called the project, ‘From Dusk Till Dawn', and handed the recordings to his friend, composer/producer Iain Chambers, saying that he wanted them to bring about something new.

Here, writer Kayo Chingonyi responds to the recordings, and Iain uses both elements to create a new composed sound piece, in tribute to Ian Rawes.

We start at sunset: the sounds of wildfowl travel far across the flooded fields of the Ouse Washes in Cambridgeshire. Many are Bewick's and whooper swans spending the winter in the Fens before migrating back to Iceland and Siberia.

https://thelondonsoundsurvey.bandcamp.com/album/from-dusk-till-dawn

https://www.soundsurvey.org.uk

Recordings - Ian Rawes / The London Sound Survey

Words/voice - Kayo Chingonyi

Composer/producer - Iain Chambers

Mixing engineer - Peregrine Andrews

Executive Producer - Nina Perry

An Open Audio production for BBC Radio 3

Field recordings across East Anglia at night-time create an atmospheric radiophonic work.

Julia Copus won the Poetry Society award for best poem in 2010. Her first two collections were published by Bloodaxe and she has just been adopted by Faber and Faber, who are to publish her next collection.

Jacob Shirley studied composition at Trinity College of Music and is a full time composer and musician.

Produced by John Taylor

A Fiction Factory production for BBC Radio 3.

Poet Julia Copus recounts in verse and personal testimony her experience of IVF.

Composer and conductor Hannah Catherine Jones explores how this particular frequency for A rose to dominance in the western world. It's a story that encompasses a century-long argument between several countries, and which also involves BBC radio and even telephone ringtones.

Featuring new music she has composed specially for the programme, Hannah experiments with how it feels to reject the default tuning and embrace other frequencies. She presents a question in sound: what are we missing in the vibrations we don't hear?

Contributors:

Fanny Gribenski, Research Scholar at the National Centre for Scientific Research in Paris

Ruth E. Rosenberg, Associate Professor of Music at the University of Illinois at Chicago

Musicians of The Fantasy Orchestra, Bristol

Evan Ifekoya, multidisciplinary artist

Producer: Eliza Lomas for BBC Audio in Bristol

Hannah Catherine Jones explores why everyone tunes to the standard frequency of 440Hz.

Using recordings of patients, the devices some of them were attached to, and the hospital itself, the piece weaves together intensely personal narratives with the sounds of the hospital environment, exploring the experiences of transplant patients and the important issues raised by this invasive, last-option medical procedure.

Sound piece about the experiences of Harefield Hospital's heart/lung transplant patients.

Mancini is one of the great icons of film music. His scores for movies like Breakfast at Tiffany's and The Pink Panther or TV shows like Peter Gunn, not only brought him Academy Awards and a glittering career, but featured songs and themes that have become instantly hummable classics in their own right away from the screen.

Alongside these seminal hits like Moon River or Days of Wine and Roses, and a reputation for 'cool jazz' Mancini was actually one of the most versatile composers in Hollywood. He pushed the artform in new directions and inspired some of the biggest names in film music today, from John Williams to Quincy Jones.

This Between the Ears tells Henry Mancini's story from his early life as the son of Italian immigrants in Pittsburgh where he was first handed a flute by his father, through his years as a musician in the Big Bands, learning the film trade at Universal Pictures, and eventually to composing some of the most recognisable music on film.

With recordings of Mancini himself from the BBC Archives, we also hear from his daughter Monica Mancini and son in law Gregg Field, both professional jazz musicians, film historian Jon Burlingame and pianist Tom Poster.

Produced by Hannah Thorne and mixed by Callum Lawrence for BBC Audio

Archive: Parkinson, The Songwriters, The Great Mancini, Wogan, Film Night: Henry Mancini,

Film clips: Peter Gunn (Spartan, 1958), Breakfast at Tiffany's (Paramount, 1961), Days of Wine and Roses (Jalem Productions, 1962), Two for the Road (Stanley Donen, 1967), Mr Lucky (Spartan, 1959), Pink Panther (The Mirisch Company, 1963), The Glenn Miller Story (Universal, 1956), Creature from the Black Lagoon (Universal, 1954)

With thanks to the Mancini family and Rhiannon Neads

An immersive dive into the life and music of the iconic film composer Henry Mancini

Innovative and thought-provoking features on a wide variety of subjects

An immersive dive into the life and music of one of the greatest film music composers of all time Henry Mancini, who was born 100 years ago this year

Mancini is one of the great icons of film music - his scores and songs for movies like Breakfast at Tiffanys and The Pink Panther, or TV shows like Peter Gunn - not only brought him Academy Awards and a glittering career but are also instantly hummable whatever your age away from the screen. Alongside these seminal hits like Moon River, Mancini was one of the most versatile composers in Hollywood who pushed the artform in new directions and inspired some of the biggest names still working today.

This Between the Ears tells Mancini's story from his early life as a son of Italian immigrants in Pittsburgh where he was handed a flute by his father, through his years as a big band player, learning the trade at Universal Pictures and through to some of his most recognisable scores.

Using recordings of Mancini himself from the BBC Archives, we also hear from his daughter Monica Mancini and son in law Gregg Field, both professional jazz musicians, film historian Jon Burlingame and pianist Tom Poster.

An immersive dive into the life and music of the iconic film composer Henry Mancini.

An immersive dive into the life and music of one of the greatest film music composers of all time, Henry Mancini, who was born 100 years ago this year.

Sound artist Frazer Merrick explores the hidden sounds of Walton Pier.

The poem is inspired by a 3,000 year old figure of a horse, cut into the chalk of a hill near Uffington, that leaps across the Oxfordshire landscape. It is scored for two voices, the poet and the actor Steven Hawksby, and two computers, played by Zinoviev, who developed the machine that made Dalek voices possible and the synthesizer used by Pink Floyd on 'Dark Side of the Moon'. He has also worked with Stockhausen and Harrison Birtwistle.

All the sounds used in the music are derived from recordings which Peter Zinoviev made of King Harry Ferry, which crosses the River Fal in Cornwall on huge chains. Katrina Porteous found rhythms and word-sounds in Zinoviev's initial recordings, and he responded to these as he manipulated the recordings, so the music and words grew out of the same source.

Horse' is a poem of many voices - performed by two. Actor Steve Hawksby shadows the leading voice of Katrina Porteous. There are echoes and chants, electronic and spoken, derived from Northumbrian dialect words associated with farming and metal-working. These suggest an older language buried beneath this one, which at moments emerges out of music into speech then sinks back into music.

The piece connects the horse with its chalk landscape, which is itself a huge natural auditorium, with the sky and stars - especially the constellation we know as the Plough, of which the figure can seen as a reflection, and its Bronze Age past. The site is associated with the legend of Wayland the Blacksmith, who gives his name to a nearby Neolithic burial cairn. 'Horse' contains the echoes and distant fires of metal-working.

Immediately beside the Uffington Horse is the hill where St George is said to have slaughtered the Dragon. At sunset around the time of the winter solstice, a dramatic winged figure seems to emerge from the ridge of that hill, cutting across the exact spot where the horse is carved. So the piece evokes the metamorphosis of Horse into Dragon and the ambiguity of these two figures.

The poem also chronicles the place of horses in English culture, how and why horses are still so imaginatively important.

Although the poem recalls 3,000 years of human history around the horse, it places this within the much deeper history of the chalk landscape, created millions of years ago beneath the sea. The overall sense of 'Horse' is that these massive creative processes are still at work all around us, and also within us.

Producer: Julian May.

A poem by Katrina Porteous and composer Peter Zinoviev inspired by the Uffington Horse.

How was your day Joe?' asks his mum Emma (the producer of the programme).

But Joe, and many like him on the autistic spectrum, can't always find the words to summarise their day, or even make sense of the question. Yet later on, they may come round to offering an answer. So what is happening as they struggle to process what is being asked of them?

Through sound and interview, Joe and Emma explore where he and others on the autistic spectrum go to in their minds between the question and a possible answer.

Emma finds out that part of Joe's resistance to giving an answer may come from the fact that he's exhausted just from the effort of processing the transition between school and home. Whereas so-called 'neurotypical' people find it easy to make sense of the different settings and can see them in a wider context, people with autism often focus on every tiny detail and find it difficult to filter information. So a short walk up the path to the house may be crammed with observations of every blade of grass, or a struggle to understand why some things have changed since they left- the window being open for instance when it wasn't before.

And the question itself - 'How was your day?' Which part of the day? Does Mummy mean 'today' or yesterday? Is it the right question to be asking at all?

Emma and Joe hear testimony from others on the autistic spectrum, including the writers Wendy Lawson, Michael Barton and the poet Nicole Nicholson. There are also contributions from Professor Simon Baron-Cohen (Director of the Autism Research Centre at Cambridge University), clinical psychologist Andrew McDonnell, speech therapist Robert Bell and Delia Barton, Michael's mother.

Producer: Emma Kingsley.

How can Joe, a boy on the autistic spectrum, answer a question teeming with possibilities?

In a letter to his friend, the poet Anne Waldman, he reported ecstatically, 'I feel very much like God writing the Bible. I mean, I feel like I'm not really writing it, but that it is because of me that it is being written'.

Brainard was never driven by nostalgia, but found that the more precisely he described his memories, the deeper the reader could relate. In this process Joe discovered that I Remember was not about him, but about everybody. The book became a classic, used in writing classes across the world and loved by many.

For this montage of memories, radio producer and poet Pejk Malinovski interviewed ten of Brainard's close friends and admirers - poets and novelists like Ron Padgett, Ann Lauterbach, Edmund White and Anne Waldman, whose own lives have been shaped by Brainard's masterpiece.

Produced by Pejk Malinovski

A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio Three

A celebration of the writer Joe Brainard's most influential book, I Remember.

In -40° winter of the Canadian Yukon Valley, ancient forests, perfectly preserved by the permafrost, are uncovered by miners and 10,000-year-old grass seeds sprout into life. In the blustery remote Artic town of Ny-ŀlesund, Svalbard (the world's northernmost settlement) cryomicrobiologists drill boreholes hundreds of meters deep to explore the deepest and oldest of earthly ecologies, bringing to the surface living microbes that are hundreds of thousands of years old. And in unceded Sကpmi lands of northern Finland, permafrost mounds decompose into marshy peatlands, while biologists trace the shifting bio- and geoacoustics of a changing ecology.

From the piercing-white tundra and the hundreds of thousands of lakes across the vast expanse of Siberia, indigenous folklore emerges from the unknowns of the icy underlands. And scientists in Yakutsk (the world's coldest city), travel the icy landscapes to discover the stories secreted within the still fleshy, visceral carcasses of mammoths and ancient creatures that are exposed as the millennia-year-old ice thaws.

With contributions by Hannu Autto, Jonathan Carruthers-Jones, Tori Herridge, Karen Lloyd, Sanna Piilo, Svetlana Romanova, Nikita Tananaev, Peter von Tiesenhausen, and other members of Sကmi, Sakha and Yukagir communities of unceded Sကpmi territory and Northern Siberia who prefer not to be named.

Specially commissioned spoken word piece by Sata Taas (written and spoken by Al-Yene and Jaangy, with sound design by Karina Kazaryan aka KP Transmission)

With excerpts of Jana Winderen's 'Energy Field', 'Listening Through the Dead Zones' and 'Pasvikdalen'. Published by Touch Music.

Recorded and curated by Sophie J Williamson

Sound design by Rob Mackay

Produced by Mark Rickards

A Whistledown Scotland Production for BBC 3

Imagining the Permafrost is part of the wider arts programme, Undead Matter. Follow on Instagram @undead_matter

A journey into the permafrost

A sound-collage created by Anthony Pitts, inspired by the National Mining Museum tunnels.

In the upside down world of Tanizaki everything might have been different if science had been invented in the East. He explains that the radio and the gramophone are Western inventions, intended to convey the pomp and splendour of Western instruments and compositions. The Japanese love of silence or 'Ma' could never perhaps be best conveyed by loudspeaker. Today Naomi Kashiwagi explores this idea through the conceptual art piece 'Gramophonica', replaying old sounds and even traditional materials like Japanese tissue paper on a wind-up gramophone with her own DIY stylus to capture otherworldly inherent sounds, sounds that might have been.

To understand how the concept of 'Ma' influences all of Japanese culture Nick talks to design guru Kenya Hara of Muji and Japan House and architect Kengo Kuma who recently designed the V&A in Dundee and the new Olympic Stadium in Tokyo. Finally in Kyoto Nick explores what we might all gain from the ancient traditions of Eastern thinking with Noh Theatre expert Diego Pellecchia and curator of space Robert Yellin.

Nick Luscombe explores the sonic landscape of Junichiro Tanizaki's 'In Praise of Shadows'.

This is where he draws his inspiration.

Just like gamelan', he says. And it was.

On the Indonesian island of Bali, music is not just entertainment; it is fully integrated into everyday life. Behind the elaborate walls of family compounds and villages, away from tourist eyes, gamelan orchestras practise daily, slit gongs, called kulkul, call the children to school, and music is offered to the Gods in every ceremony of life. Often a bewilderingly chaotic style of music for the Western ear, gamelan in context can make so much more sense.

Even the scarecrows make music here; from bamboo chimes and whirring clackers, to rusty tin cans and elaborate the plastic bag mobiles, shaken by the farmers and the wind; all to rid the valuable rice fields of the birds.

In the search for the music of scarecrows we encounter not only the natural and concrete sounds found in gamelan; the toads, birds, geckos, frogs and ducks, but also the new generation of composers and choreographers who are inspired by these sounds to create new music and dances. Farmers are still reputed to make the best composers.

Using the scarecrows, wildlife and the gamelan of Bali, 'In Search of the Balinese Scarecrow' explores where the music stops and the sounds of nature begin.

Music included in the programme included compositions by Bapak I Made Arnawa, Pak Dewa Allit, and I Dewa Putu Berata, a musician, composer , and the founder of Àudamani , one of Bali's most innovative new gamelan ensembles.

Emiko Saraswati Susilo is a dancer, singer, and musician who has been active in Balinese and Javanese arts for 25 years. She is artistic director of Gamelan Sekar Jaya, a San Franciscan based group, and associate director of Cudamani in Pengosekan, Ubud, Bali, running International Summer schools for people interested in learning gamelan.

Musical specialists advising on the programme are:

Andy Channing, the UK's foremost teacher of Balinese Gamelan

And jazz musician and composer Ray Sandoval, who is writing his doctoral thesis on Canadian composer Colin McPhee. Thanks to Emiko, Pak Dewa, all those recorded for the programme and also Gregory Ghent, D'Lo, Anjali, Ida, Danu, and all those who taught, played and were part of the Cudamani Summer School 2011

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

First broadcast in June 2012.

A magical sound journey through Bali - where gamelan music intertwines with nature.

But precisely how many films Beryl worked on is not known, as Foley artists were not routinely credited until the last decade of her career.

Through interviews, fragments of archive and a full palette of Foley sound, this programme brings an unseen artform into the foreground, uncovering not only more about Beryl's craft but also a portrait of the women herself - a glamorous and larger than life bon viveur who remained dedicated to 'the underbelly' of filmmaking until the very end.

With contributions from former colleagues and Foley artists; Jason, Ted and Dianne Swanscott, David Hamilton-Smith, Ruth Sullivan and Jack Stew, film historian Professor Melanie Bell and director Sally Potter.

Includes extracts of Beryl from the making of Foley Artist by Tacita Dean (1996), originally recorded by Steve Felton.

Additional Foley effects and footsteps by Jason Swanscott (recorded by Rob Price of EarthSound), Ruth Sullivan and Jack Stew.

Produced by Hannah Dean.

An evocation of Foley artist Beryl Mortimer.

Radio Alwan began in 2013 as a small community radio station in Northern Syria, broadcasting independent information in response to the repression and civil war that followed the demonstrations of 2011. At first the station only broadcast for four hours a day from a transmitter mounted on a van, but before long was increasing its hours and its audience. When the political conflict worsened and the situation for independent media became dangerous Alwan's founder, Ahmad Al-Kaddour, was forced, along with many others, to leave the country.

Now broadcasting from an undisclosed address in a busy district of Western Istanbul, Radio Alwan transmits daily programmes on its FM frequency back into Syria to areas around Aleppo and Idlib and over the internet. It is staffed by young producers and presenters, almost all of whom have had to leave their country under difficult circumstances and some of whom have little hope of seeing their homes again. Over the last four years the station has suffered attacks on its Syrian offices and transmitters,

Alwan in Arabic means 'colours', a name the station wants to reflect in its aim of representing the many different groups across Syrian society. It offers its audience independent news and political coverage, but also entertainment and drama, and broadcasts a weekly drama serial, Sad Northern Nights, that follows the fortunes of a Syrian mother and her teenage son as they become caught up in the war inside the country.

Since this programme was first broadcast, Alwan FM has recently managed to re-establish a studio in the city of Saraqib, near Idlib, from where it runs a 3-hour daily live programme.

Produced by Sara Davies.

A Cast Iron Radio production for BBC Radio 3.

An exiled Syrian radio station in Istanbul provides a lifeline for its listeners in Syria.

Film-maker Terence Davies' memoir about his mother and his development as an artist.

At the turn of the 20th century, very few outsiders had penetrated its mysterious spaces. Spanish priests, American soldiers and silver-hungry prospectors had vied with warring Ute and Navajo Indians amidst the red rock. Then came isolated trading posts and the first flourishings of tourism in the 1920s - Americans eager to 'discover' what was still a largely blank space on the map but was firmly part of the Navajo Nation, who had returned to their land of rock and sand after defeat and exile.

Exactly 60 years ago, a teenage Pippa Scott made what was then an arduous journey to act in John Ford's The Searchers. In 1955, it was a remote and inaccessible place. No running water, power or telephones but it offered a towering landscape of eroded rock like no other. An ancient place, still home to a small community of Navajos who eke out a living in a place of deep spiritual significance to them, and exercising a powerful pull on all our imaginations via the words of writers like Zane Grey and Willa Cather and the films of John Ford. Lose yourself in the swirling dust.

First broadcast in 2015

Mark Burman takes his microphone for a ride into the legendary Monument Valley.

With contributions from writers, urban explorers and mapmakers we explore the imaginative possibilities held within cities, their secret folds. How does the layout of a city's streets, underground passages and the glittering spires of its skyscrapers capture our desires, our fears and our memories?

From the ghosts contained in a cavernous lost property office deep underground to the view from the top of an abandoned warehouse - what impression does the structure of a city leave on its inhabitants?

Produced by Eleanor McDowall

Documentary revealing hidden, fantastical, heartbreaking and surreal stories in cities.

In the early 1800s this small island at the mouth of the Kyle of Tongue – its Gaelic name translated as “Island of the Seals ? – became home to three crofting families, and at its height of population the community flourished to around 70 people. But the island became devoid of human life again by 1938, as the departure of its younger inhabitants prompted a gradual re-location back to the mainland. Since then, apart from a brief period of research into the common cold in the 1950s, Eilean nan Ròn has been home only to the grey seals which give the island its name, a flock of wild sheep, and colonies of seabirds.

The memories created over that century of human inhabitation still linger today though, amongst the ruins of eight abandoned stone houses and their crofts, which dot the dramatic landscape. This story of human life includes the ancestors of Rob Mackay, whose grandfather and great-grandfather lived on the island with their families. 40 years on from his last visit as a child, Rob makes a return trip to search for a closer connection with these family roots, and to understand their self-sustaining way of life, which included fishing for herring, cooking over peat fires and making crowdie. We join Rob as he crosses the short stretch of North Atlantic water to wild-camp next to his grandfather's house, and uses recorded sound and his own flute playing to tune into the soul of the island's deserted village.

We hear stories of the island and its people through the voices of Rob's mum Iona Mackay, his cousins Lina and Donny Mackay, fellow descendent of islanders Ray Richards (archive audio courtesy of Wick Heritage), artist and rower Ruth Macdougall, local school head-teacher and documenter of oral history Katherine Van Voornveld, and Jean Maclean, whose small fishing boat enables Rob and producer Andy to spend 24 hours on the difficult-to-access island. Excerpts from two poems about the island are told by Ray Richards, and storyteller Alex Patience.

Traditional tunes related to the area (The Dark Island, Waters of Kylesku and the Gaelic tune Cailin Mo Rùin-sa) were recorded specially for the programme by fiddler Karen Steven, whose granny was also an inhabitant of the island, with accordionist Alastair Macdonald. Rob's immersive musical soundscape includes echoes of these fiddle and accordion tunes, field recordings of snapping shrimp and grey seals, and ambisonic recordings from the night on the island.

A BBC Audio production by Andy King with sound mixing by Rob Winter.

A soundscape of the uninhabited island of Eilean nan R\u00f2n, off the north coast of Scotland.

Rob Mackay traces his family roots with an immersive soundscape of the uninhabited island of Eilean nan Ròn, off the north coast of Scotland.

Weaving together the words and stories of the British public with a blend of rap, jazz, a cappella and verbatim theatre, this half-hour musical documentary blurs the line between songwriting and social research in capturing a snapshot of this unique moment in history.

‘Isolation, In Your Words' was written and recorded by Mandeep Singh, Leanne Sedin and Kevin Fox, and produced by Arun Dhanjal (Zar). It was commissioned as part of the BBC Culture in Quarantine programme; funded and supported by The Space Arts, BBC Arts and Arts Council England.

A modern soundtrack to life in lockdown, created around the words of the British public.

Producer: Chris Ledgard.

Sebastiane Hegarty explores voice, recording and memory in a sound portrait of his mother.

In June, I change my tune,

In July, far off I fly...

Ten years ago, musician Cosmo Sheldrake started making an album of bird songs, each track inspired by an endangered species on the 'Birds of Conservation Concern' list. The album is called Wake Up Calls, a nod to the dawn chorus, but also because it is doing a second kind of waking up. Each track is a celebration of the birds that we are rapidly losing. Birds like the nightingale, the mistle thrush, the skylark, the cuckoo. With their decline comes the loss of the musical, emotional and cultural richness they bring to our lives.

For Cosmo, the process of making music with these birds opened up a whole new way of thinking about composition. It's the birds who set the tempos and inform the melodies. You could even say it's the birds who are the lead vocalists, provoking questions around intellectual property: who owns this music? Should the birds get publishing royalties? Are the birds collaborators of sorts?

Featuring, in order of appearance, writer Robert MacFarlane, poet Erin Robinsong, sound ecologist Bernie Krause, artist Marcus Coates, musician Brian Eno, musician Sam Lee and artist Rachel Berwick.

Produced by Becky Ripley

A celebration of birdsong through the making of an album by musician Cosmo Sheldrake.

The Woodlawn Cemetery in New York's Bronx holds the graves of numerous jazz luminaries.

The Woodlawn Cemetery in New York's Bronx holds the graves of numerous jazz luminaries.

Apnea, or freediving without breathing apparatus, requires the few who practise it to encounter a profound stillness as their heart rate slows and their lungs contract. In the darkness of the abyss, on a single breath, they truly meet themselves. In Hannah Silva's lyrical text, voiced by actress Fiona Shaw, memory and sensation fragment and intertwine in shifting layers of consciousness.

Jump Blue' is based on extensive interviews with many of the world's leading freedivers, including Natalia Molchanova's son Alexey.

Freediver - Fiona Shaw

Text by Hannah Silva

Research by Nicolas Jackson

Executive producer, Sara Davies

Music by Aaron May

Sound design by Steve Bond

Produced by Nicolas Jackson and Steve Bond

Jump Blue' is an Afonica production for BBC Radio 3

A recreation of the final descent of the great Russian freediver, Natalia Molchanova.

The language has continued to be spoken as the lingua franca amongst the Sephardic Diaspora for over 500 years and is currently listed as endangered by UNESCO. The last generation of speakers to use Ladino at home are now mostly in their nineties.

Jessica Marlowe, a sound artist and Sephardic singer from London, sets out on a personal journey to discover what remains of this medieval language, the mother tongue of her grandparents, and of an oral and written tradition rich in Jewish culture, religion and song.

On her travels through Bulgaria, Jessica takes with her the songs and stories she grew up with, to share with the Ladino speakers she meets there.

In Spain she discovers an international radio programme broadcast in Ladino and meets Sephardim and Spanish musicians keeping the language and culture alive through poetry and song.

`Ladino` features contributions from Daisy Marlowe, Yvonne Behar, Leah Davcheva, Hanna Lorer, Sofi Danon, Buba Franses, Reni Lidgi, Isaac Bourla, Yvette Anavi, Ivan Kanchev, Estrella Aelion (from archive recording), Pepa Rull, Dar퀀o Villanueva, Paco D퀀ez, Matilda, Rajel and Yael Barnatကn.

An excerpt from the poem ‘Me visto tu cara sobre la m퀀a' by Margalit Matitiahu is read by Daisy Marlowe.

Extracts from ‘Emisi　n en sefard픀 are reproduced with kind permission of Radio Exterior, Radio Nacional de Espaကa

Produced and presented by Jessica Marlowe

Translation from the Bulgarian by Leah Davcheva

Sound mixer - .. Steve Bond

Executive producer - .. Nicolas Jackson

An Afonica production for BBC Radio 3

In search of the language and culture of the Sephardic Jews, expelled from Spain in 1492.

Norwegian artist and composer Jana Winderen has been recording and sharing sounds of the deep for nearly two decades, dangling microphones from boats to uncover sonic wonders such as the tectonic boom of melting ice, singing whales, and fish that howl at the moon.

With a background in natural sciences and fine arts, Jana Winderen's vast sound archive brings the oceans to life in a unique way: transporting us to Greenland, where the waters moan under the pressure of the climate emergency; plunging us into cacophonous Caribbean coral reefs; taking us to a Thai fishing community, who for generations have passed down traditional techniques for underwater hearing.

By listening closely one can perhaps look at the planet we live on with a new perspective.

Recordist and host: Jana Winderen

Dog: Charlie

Contributors: Madeline Appiah, Carlos Duarte, Hans Slabbekoorn, Rungrueng Ramanyah / ????????? ???????? (Bang Nee)

Translation and photography: Palin Ansusinha

Mixing: Mike Woolley

With thanks to: TBA21-Academy and Ruben Torres

Producer: Jack Howson

A Reduced Listening Production for BBC Radio 3

Artist Jana Winderen transports us underwater to listen to the sonic wonders of the sea.

Music by Will Gregory (Goldfrapp, The Moog Ensemble), with violin by Alex Balanescu (Michael Nyman Band, Balanescu Quartet), and vocals by Hazel Mills (Goldfrapp, Florence and the Machine, The Paper Cinema).

Sound design by Iain Hunter.

A Pier Production, produced and directed by Kate McAll.

Alison Lock's dreamlike poem about a freak accident on the Yorkshire moors.

All sorts come to the shop: immigrants in search of work, locals who find it a home from home, tourists captivated by the shop's film-set quality, artists drawn by the exhibition space upstairs and young women, like Becks and Nancy, who work around the corner and have heard stories of the shop's risqu退 past. There's something teasing, even transgressive, about the way Michele tempts customers with her varieties of shortcrust, filo, flaky, choux and puff.

With the voice of Sandra Jean Pierre

Produced by Hannah Dean and Alan Hall

A portrait of a legendary Soho patisserie and the woman for whom it provides a stage.

This 'composed feature' by Nina Perry (whose previous BBC productions include the acclaimed Sounding Post and Mirror, Mirror) explores the icy landscapes of Greenland, Iceland and the Highlands of Scotland through recordings of environmental sounds, interviews with people going about their day to day lives and gathered music that expresses cultural and emotional connections to the weather.

The winter thaw into spring is a time most often associated with renewal and hope, yet paradoxically in light of climate change melting ice has taken on the more ominous connotation of disappearing ice mass and rising sea levels.

Among the voices heard are an Icelandic writer, a Greenlandic fisherman, a drama therapist for whom an ice cube provides a telling metaphor and an ice-climbing fiddle-playing mountain rescuer from the Cairngorms. Their words are interwoven with spectacular recordings of the Greenland ice sheet as it calves and destroys and a specially composed musical soundscape to reveal the dichotomy and emotional resonance of the thaw.

Feature on the environmental, cultural and musical significance of several icy landscapes.

On Christmas Eve 1968, as the crew of Apollo 8 orbited the Moon, they read extracts from Genesis live on TV to tens of millions of people around the world. Later, they would also capture - by accident - a photograph of the Earth rising above the lunar landscape: Earthrise. Both events would have a profound and influential effect that continues to this day.

In Message from the Moon, we follow the Apollo 8 mission from launch to splashdown - including the reading from Genesis - and hear from astronauts giving their unique perspective on creation, faith and God. Their thoughts are interwoven with music from Hannah Peel's composition, Mary Casio: Journey to Cassiopeia.

The programme features original interviews with Apollo 8 commander, Frank Borman, Apollo 16 astronaut and Moonwalker Charlie Duke, Shuttle astronauts Nicole Stott and Mike Massimino, as well as serving NASA astronaut Jeff Williams and European Space Agency astronaut Paolo Nespoli.

Archive includes NASA commentary from the mission, previously un-broadcast extracts from the Apollo 8 capsule flight recorder and BBC TV commentary.

And God bless you all, all of you on the Good Earth.

The producer is Richard Hollingham, with sound engineering by Sam Gunn.

Message from the Moon is a Boffin Media Production for BBC Radio 3.

On a journey to the Moon, astronauts reflect on creation, God and our place in the cosmos.

The auctioneer is played by Christopher Bianchi

The poem is written by Sean Borodale

The soundscape is created by Elizabeth Purnell

The Producer is Sara Davies.

Documentary version of Sean Borodale's poem set at a cattle market.

Written and performed by Karen McCarthy Woolf

Pastor: Wyllie Longmore

Sound design Sharon Hughes

Produced by Susan Roberts

Directed by Sharon Sephton

Poet Karen McCarthy Woolf is on the trail of a letter sent to her Jamaican grandmother.

Crunching across the shingle of Britain's only desert, poet and playwright Kate Tempest's words are buffeted by the relentless wind of Dungeness - home to two lighthouses, two nuclear power stations, abundant wildlife, and to Prospect Cottage.

Here iconic British filmmaker Derek Jarman spent the last years of his life building his garden, writing diaries, inscribing the words of John Donne on the wall of his cottage. Here the wind whips across the flat, barren shingle, around the fisherman's cottages, out to the open sea where rolling waves meet a vast sky.

Recorded entirely on location in Dungeness, at Jarman's desk and out in the elements, Kate Tempest weaves the words and thoughts of local families and fishermen with rich soundscapes, both natural and man-made. Amidst the quietest sounds of the sanctuary of Prospect Cottage, to the roaring innards of the power station, Tempest crafts vivid new verse, at once intimate and elemental, mapping Dungeness anew.

Features music recorded on the beach by musician Alexander Tucker, and Keith Collins reading from Derek Jarman's 'Modern Nature'. Includes field recordings from the RSPB nature reserve and inside Dungeness B Nuclear Power Station.

Producer, Peter Meanwell

An Open Audio production for BBC Radio 3.

Poet Kate Tempest with a portrait of the Kent beach where film-maker Derek Jarman lived.

Mr Rainbow fuses elements of drama with real voices and is inspired by The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. Part of Radio 3's series 'In the Shadow of Kafka' exploring the enduring power of the writer's work.

Tom Bennett plays Gregory and the Spaceman.

It also features the voices of Tom Kenyon, Margaret Paul, Joan Herrmann, Kezia Noble, Terry Elston and Chazz Ellis.

Written by Sebastian Baczkiewicz

Produced and directed by Joby Waldman

Executive producer, Polly Thomas

Sound design by Chris O'Shaughnessy

A Somethin Else production for BBC Radio 3

This is part of the series 'In the Shadow of Kafka', a week of Kafka-related programmes on Radio 3 from 10th-16th May 2015.

It includes:

Sunday Feature, Prophet of Prague, Sun 10th May 1845

Drama on 3, The Process, Mark Ravenhill's adaptation of The Trial, Sun 10th May 2200

The Essay, Encounters with Kafka by five contemporary writers, Mon-Fri 2245

Jazz on 3: A session from British quartet Blue Eyed Hawk inspired by Kafka's short stories. Mon 11th May 2300.

Kafka-inspired drama about a young man seeking advice from a series of self-help experts.

They range from Barbara Ennis, a corporal, who chooses 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' because Owen's description of a gas attack matched her own experience, to General Sir Richard Dannatt, who was the Chief of the General Staff. He considers the worst fate that can befall a soldier - going mad. David Hamilton joined up as a boy, Justin Featherstone fought as a second lieutenant, Owen's rank, and one was awarded, like the poet, the Military Cross.

They reflect on killing, on boredom, the covenant between soldiers and the society they serve - and the civilian population's lack of understanding. 'The Soldiers' Poet', first broadcast in 2006, was an early catalyst to the debate about this that continues to this day. These are what Wilfred Owen's poems, written a lifetime ago, address. They speak to today's soldiers, whose readings of the poems have arresting immediacy.

Soldiers get to the point, make it quickly and move on. This, their poetry programme, cracks along, reflecting their brisk clarity. There is no presentation, just essential information - who the soldiers are and where they have served - the equivalent of giving name, rank and number.

Producer: Julian May.

Soldiers, from corporal to general, choose, read and speak about a poem by Wilfred Owen.

Yuri Goligorsky, formerly of the Russian Service, returns to the site of the Bush House dormitory, where night-shift presenters were offered a bed - although Yuri found the snoring unbearable. He also remembers one of the landmark programmes he produced - a phone-in with Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, broadcast live to the Soviet Union.

Hamid Ismailov takes one last look at the small office where he was once the first and - at that time - only Uzbek in the building, and Michael Goldfarb recalls the unique sound-world of the building, with its many languages, signature tunes, and hardened smokers.

~Between The Ears also hears Bush House memories from correspondent Mark Tully, Irini Roumboglou of the Greek Service, which was closed in 2005, and Najiba Kasraee, once of the Pashto Service. Bush House studio manager Robin Warren reveals how he captured and mixed the sounds of the building's marble stairwells, and composer and musician Matthew Herbert, now director of the BBC Radiophonic Workshop, reflects on Bush's unique sound world - and why it's vital to record it.

Producer John Goudie.

An evocation of the sounds of Bush House, formerly home of the BBC World Service.

The story goes that Ragnar was conceived during the filming of a sex scene involving his actor-parents, quaint footage of which was part of an installation during his acclaimed retrospective at the Barbican in 2016. And Kjartansson's mother has been central to his work, in a series of films recorded every five years, called 'Me and My Mother'.

As an adult, he discovered that what held him was the situation created on stage, rather than the narrative: 'I became interested in creating these situations that are sculptural,' he explains of his move into performance art.

In this 'radio happening' by the acclaimed Brooklyn-based Danish poet and producer Pejk Malinovski, we mirror in sound the highly staged expression of Kjartansson's art, the central relationship with his mother, his humour and heart.

Produced by Pejk Malinovski

Consulting editor: Sydney Viles

A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio Three.

Artist Ragnar Kjartansson reflects on 'the realness of fakeness' in his art.

With audio collaged from public transport announcements, customer service phone lines, chat bots and computer error codes, this is an aural journey through the multitude of depersonalised and depersonalising messages that accost us every day. Hearing from members of the public across Britain who vent their tales of admin woe, this programme gives voice to the frustration we all feel.

We also hear the ‘content creators' put their side of the story - from on-hold messaging designer Nikki Cooper to Emma Clarke, the voice of Mind the Gap. Cultural analysts Peter Fleming and Jamie Woodcock throw light on the causes of contemporary digital bureaucracy, and Helen Dewdney suggests ways to flex our consumer rights.

Finally, with the help of composer Neil Luck, we transform these grey snowdrifts into an original musical composition that sublimates dross into art. Through auditory alchemy, the negativity we are all subject to is transmuted into something of value that lifts us out of the everyday, reclaiming the human from digitised modern life.

Producers: Eliane Glaser and Jon Holmes

Composer: Neil Luck

Performers: Patricia Auchterlonie (soprano), Tom Jackson (saxophone), Rebecca Burden (cello)

Sound Design: Tony Churnside and Jon Holmes.

Readings: Hazel Holder

Noise is an unusual production for BBC Radio 3

A sonic trip through our tick-box, on-hold, automated world, turning bureaucracy into art.

Richard Kennedy is Yanggendyinanyuk's great great grandson, and it is through him and his family that some of the text was translated and spoken (by Richard) in the Wergaia language. This language is currently being reconstructed from 19th century sources; over 100 years of silence marks the destruction of the Wergaia peoples and their culture.

Although a punishing schedule of cricket matches was played, there were other more sinister motives for the trip.

Are the patronising racist attitudes heard in Not Quite Cricket a distant harmless memory of the 1860s, or were they inherent in the development of the pseudoscience of eugenics and its aftermath?

Richard Kennedy (Yanggendyinanyuk, Wergaia translation), Warren Foster (Aboriginal cricket team narrator), Andrew McLennan (Master of Ceremonies).

Hollis Taylor (violin), Anthony Pateras (piano), Rishin Singh (trombone, tuba), Laura Altman (clarinet, whistle), Jon Rose (violin, piano, voice).

Text written by, music composed by Jon Rose.

Additional contributions from Jane Ulman, Nick Shimmin, Corinne Vernizeau, Adam Mountford.

The first-ever Australian cricket tour of England in 1868, re-imagined by Jon Rose.

Amanda Dalton's Notes on Water is a beautiful, visceral poetic exploration of grief. A river full of wreckage with nothing that will make a raft. Written following the death of her partner in 2019, Notes on Water takes us lyrically through the universal human experience of loss. Everything is sodden, cold, sunken. Homes are flooded, broken. The village is not a haven. Nothing is solid. Hotels fall into the sea, everything slips and changes, including time.

Sound design is by Laurence Nelson, one of the young sound designers who have come though BBC's Sound First - a development scheme for new sound designers.

As we move through images of the seabed, the centre of the earth and the blackness of raging water, these powerful words and sound seep under the skin, sending a depth charge through our deepest emotions. Memories of a sister punctuate the narrative, with the detail of a pink balloon the only colour in the colour drained landscape and her dancing the only light.

Voices: Amanda Dalton and Colette Bryce

Producer: Susan Roberts

Amanda Dalton's Notes on Water, with sound design by Laurence Nelson.

As well as exploring the Radio's archive to build a picture of this wholesome way of life over the last 60 years, local people talk about how the town has changed since the obituary reading began. From a famed and thriving industrial town making socks, farming tobacco, building furniture and mining granite, Mt Airy has witnessed the decline of the American South, and the flight of jobs from its rural areas. Almost all the industry has gone and the town is struggling to find its place in a new non-industrial economy. Those who live there are concerned about the future for the town's young people, but are full of nostalgia for the past, and love the close knit community.

Whether the daily Obituary Notices are for the local individuals who pass each day, taking with them another chapter of this part of America's unique rural history, or whether they are a collective sigh for a disappearing way of life is not clear - life in some form will go on in the American South, and WPAQ will still broadcast obituaries.

All the material for this programme was recorded in and around the town of Mt Airy, North Carolina. Drawing heavily on local field recordings, the reminiscence of local people, and the archive of WPAQ 740AM, to create an aural portrait of a community of people united by a slowly disappearing way of life.

Produced by Peter Meanwell.

Documentary about the daily obituary readings on North Carolina radio station WPAQ 740AM.

Venturing deep into the forest, Laura and Emilia found the group and lived on their fringes for months. But with the Huaorani initially hostile and refusing to engage, Emilia became increasingly ill. Laura faced a life-defining decision: leave the forest with her daughter or send her away and stay alone.

As Laura tells her incredible story, an immersive binaural forest soundscape guides the way. Recorded in the Amazon by multi-award-winning sound designer Gareth Fry and mixed with Laura's taped forest recordings, we join Laura on a surprising journey deep under the forest canopy.

In midsummer week, Radio 3 enters one of the most potent sources of the human imagination. 'Into the Forest' explores the enchantment, escape and magical danger of the forest in summer, with slow radio moments featuring the sounds of the forest, allowing time out from today's often frenetic world.

Binaural documentary on an anthropologist's quest to live with an uncontacted tribe.

Described by its makers as 'an illustrated lecture, with songs', On Imaginary Media explores 'techno-mysticism', the irrational beliefs we project onto new technologies. It looks back to 19th century inventors like Edison and Tesla, to the hopes and fears their inventions raised of such things as a soul-catcher, a thought-projector, or of communication with the dead. And it looks forward into the future, imagining 'moodia' (mood altering media), and technologies designed to 'remove all obstacles to the immediate gratification of every whim.' The characters debate these innovations, imagining what the consequences might be of such god-like capabilities.

Absurdist humour permeates the piece, which is presented as a performance in rehearsal, with a small company of actors (played by John Ramm and Emma Powell) and an increasingly exasperated director (Peter Blegvad) working against a deadline and beset by other problems. Featuring sound design by Iain Chambers and songs by Peter Blegvad, On Imaginary Media demonstrates the evocative power of radio, once seen as the most mysterious medium of all, a technology which gave rise to no end of hopes and fears and is still capable of exercising our capacity for wonder.

Starring Peter Blegvad, Emma Powell and John Ramm.

Produced and directed by Iain Chambers, with music by Peter Blegvad and Langham Research Centre.

An Open Audio production for BBC Radio 3.

Radiophonic drama exploring the irrational beliefs we project onto new technologies.

Yue was eight when the Cultural Revolution began. Red guards almost killed his mother and took her away. Yue and his 12-year-old brother Yi were left alone. He spent his time - hoping to make his mother proud on her return - sitting in the compound practising his bamboo flute. Yue saw terrible things, yet remembers the revolutionary songs with affection - and still sings them. The brothers, and their sister were involved in a performance in Tiananmen Square in front of Mao himself.

Sent out of Beijing with the military, Yue managed to avoid regular army duties by leading the marching on his flute. At 16 he won a place as flautist in an army orchestra and travelled the country playing for the soldiers.

In his early twenties, Yue left China to study at the Guildhall in London. He performs across the world and can now return to Beijing. His hutong is still there but on a recent visit he found that his house had been knocked down. So he stood on the rubble and played his flute.

In this Between the Ears, memories, music and sounds work in several ways simultaneously. Street noises and chopping prompt Yue's memories - and these prompt him to play his flutes. New performances as well as the sounds of Chinese life, Cultural Revolution songs,recordings of rallies and parades and Guo Yue's reminiscences cohere to create a memoir of his life.

Producer: Julian May

First broadcast in 2011.

A memoir in sound by Chinese flautist Guo Yue.

This collaborative edition of Between the Ears explores radio's capacity for re-presenting art. It evokes through sound the primary colours, elemental spiralling shape and gastropodic allusions of an image that's at once playful and melancholy. Late in his life, ill-health forced Matisse to work with a new technique, directing assistants to arrange coloured paper cut-outs on his studio wall - The Snail of 1953 is the most celebrated example of this period.

The 'On the Trail of the Snail' audio collage consists of:

Chris Brookes (Canada) - '?The Snail Trail in the White House' (with reference to The Orlons 1962 hit The Wah-Watusi and Alma Thomas' homage to Matisse, Watusi)

Dinah Bird (France) - 'Helix' ('The spiral is a spiritual circle. In the spiral form, the circle, uncoiled, unwound, has ceased to be vicious; it has been set free.' Vladimir Nabokov)

Sherre DeLys (Australia) - 'Chromatic Composition'. (Sherre and sculptor Joan Grounds reflect on Matisse's use of colour as they walk through a north American woodland.)

Pejk Malinovski (USA) - 'A Snail is a Snail is a Snail is an Artist', featuring the voices of Gertrude Stein and biologist Ronald Chase.

Kari Hesthamar (Norway) - 'Tramp' ('The first step in any trip or journey is always a footstep - the brave or curious act of putting one foot in front of the other.' The Norwegian author Tomas Espedal walks - to collect stories and to survive.)

Curated by London-based producer Alan Hall.

Five radio producers give their responses in sound to Henri Matisse's collage The Snail.

The writer Kate Clanchy asked women across the country to talk about the other mothers around them:

'Other mothers never spend the day watching Spongebob.'

'Other mothers walk past me without a glance.'

'Other mothers get what one of those days is.'

The result is a dark, funny radio poem which explores our deepest divides - and our brightest areas of unity.

with Adjoa Andoh and Zita Sattar. Research by Matilda James. Additional material by Emily Waples.

Produced by Jonquil Panting.

Writer Kate Clanchy hears women talking about the other mothers around them.

In the early 1980s James Crowden worked as shepherd. Some of his sheep kept escaping onto ground owned by the conductor and maestro John Eliot Gardiner. In the end John Eliot bought the sheep off James and at lambing time employed him to work as a night shepherd alongside his own shepherd Walt Pitman. It was whilst working here on the long dark nights in the lambing shed that James started to write his first book, Blood Earth and Medicine. To see a flock of 500 lambing is quite extraordinary and in the quiet of night the noises of sheep can be very illuminating - a strange language that works its way into the shed and us.

Interspersed with the sheep noises voices of shepherds talking to the sheep. Calling them, the wide variety of sheep counting systems up and down the country.

Yan Tan Tethera etc: links with old Celtic language systems + Anglo Saxon and Norse systems Wonderful variations from Rathmell to Teesdale. Also modern sheep countings shearing by the score and the sheep terms themselves gimmer, hogget, tup, ram, shearling, yo, ewe, teg, chilver, grass ewe, draft ewe, suck lamb, weather.

Poet James Crowden experiences the wide range of sheep communication at lambing time.

A soundscape of the acquisition of language from a baby's viewpoint.

Ergo Phizmiz's fantastical encounter with Swiss painter Paul Klee.

Producer: Tim Dee.

Poet Paul Farley imagines himself a sound recordist taping the Garden of Eden.

In this programme Westerners describe ways in which playing the Tai Chi Form has, over time, changed their lives. Murray took it up initally to heal damage he'd caused to his back from being a baker. Alec started in order to overcome shyness. Johkim began when both of her parents died and she wanted to change the direction of her life. Bruce Frantzis describes the way in which playing Tai Chi healed his broken back after a car accident. Over time, Playing the Form altered the path of each of their lives.

There is a sense that the Short Form is being played throughout this programme, with accompanying soundtrack from composer Simon Hall.

Producer Rosie Boulton.

Westerners describe ways in which playing T'ai Chi has changed their lives.

A version of Rain has been created in binaural sound. Listen on headphones for the full effect.

Rain - written and performed by Alice Oswald

Sound design Steve Brooke

Produced by Susan Roberts.

Rain, Alice Oswald's radio poem, commissioned in 2016 for Radio 3's 70th anniversary.

Re: Union' fuses the violent, lyrical soundscape of Welsh rugby and its culture with a meditation on the social, historical and cultural signifiers of the national sport.

A collaboration between between radio producer Steven Rajam and Welsh writer Owen Sheers, this new radio poem explores the complex, often difficult, links between modern Welsh identity and rugby union, Wales' national sport.

Sheers' new poem is told from the perspective of a young rugby player, about to make his debut for Wales. As he makes the mental and physical journey from the training pitch to the national stadium, he reflects on the experiences, the people and the deeply-knotted histories that have led him to the threshold of that hallowed first cap.

Realised for the radio by Steven Rajam, the poem is woven around the sounds and sensations of a real international matchday: the violence of the training pitch, the crowds thronging to the centre of Cardiff, the intensity of the stadium - and much more.

Complementing the young player's story are contributions from social historians, the groundsman at the Millennium Stadium, a player turned acclaimed poet, and 7-year-old superfans Dylan and Alfie - who show us how real Welsh rugby should be played - with a team of their teddies.

Voiced by Scott Arthur, and featuring contributions from Peter Stead, Ceri Wyn Jones and Martin Johnes.

Owen Sheers's new poem explores the relationship between rugby and modern Welsh identity.

Matthew Herbert's Requiem is jointly commissioned by BBC Radio 3, Festival d'Aix-en-Provence, and Centre National de Cr退ation Musicale (GMEM) in Marseille, where the sounds of broken instruments were recorded. Part of Radio 3's 70th season, celebrating seven decades of pioneering music and culture since the founding of the Third Programme.

The instruments of a string ensemble are physically deconstructed as they play Beethoven.

Forbidden Planet was M.G.M.'s lavish leap into science fiction. Fusing Shakespeare's Tempest, pop Freud and pulp SF. Fleetingly Hollywood and the electronic avant-garde embraced to make unworldly music inspired by the new science of cybernetics. The Barrons were close associates of John Cage and at the cutting edge of new technology and music. Their 'electronic tonalities', as credited on screen in deference to an anxious musicians union, were groundbreaking for both experimental music film scoring.

In the cramped space of their Greenwich village apartment the Barron's poured current through homemade circuits made up of valves, oscillators and wires. Music, sound effects and character were all arrived at by wiring, art and sweat. The roaring Monster from the Id, the bubbling sounds of Planet Altair IV and the vast caverns of glowing, ancient Krell technology. Even the Krell music, anthem to a long dead race of technologically advanced beings.

Audiences and filmmakers were startled by this great musical experiment. It remains one of the most perfect fusions of film and music, defining the way we thought the future would sound. In rare recordings Bebe and Louis Barron relate their adventures in sound. Meanwhile, somewhere near Stoke, Ken Hollings challenges music boffin Phil Taylor to a hardwired search for the secrets of Krell music and the electronic heartbeat of the Monster from the Id.

Producer: Mark Burman

Electronic tonalities: Phil Taylor and Donald MacDonald

In 1956, the film Forbidden Planet introduced the world to the music of the future.

In 1906 the Grainger visited Brigg in Lincolnshire to record, for the very first time, the songs of traditional folk singers on a wax cylinder machine. Among his subjects was the 74-year-old Joseph Taylor who was later invited to attend the London premiere of Delius's An English Rhapsody which had been inspired by the old man's rendition of Brigg Fair. When he heard the familiar tune, Taylor was said to have removed his hat and sang along, encouraged by Delius and Grainger.

This programme follows Jim Moray as he experiments with technology to recreate that moment; bringing the voice of Joseph Taylor and the Delius orchestral work back together for the first time in over 100 years. Moray takes the original fragile and scratchy recording, restores the sound and then synthesises Taylor's voice in order to play it like an instrument in time with the orchestra.

Moray's technical experiment runs in parallel with his exploration of the significance of Percy Grainger's encounter with Joseph Taylor, tracing the story back to Brigg in Lincolnshire and exploring the impact of those early field recordings on the history of recorded song in general and on folk music in particular. Applying the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics, he asks if folk music is fundamentally altered by the act of recording it.

Jim Moray on the meeting of composer Percy Grainger and farm bailiff Joseph Taylor.

The Gododdin occupies a unique place in the literature of the United Kingdom. The oldest Welsh poem - a battle elegy from around 600AD - it was passed down orally, possibly in the form of song, for hundreds of years. Written down by two scribes in the 13th century in a form of proto-Welsh - Brythonic - then spoken from Scotland down through Cumbria to present day Wales, it's as strange yet accessible to Welsh-speakers today as Chaucer is to English-speakers. The events commemorated are real, but took place before Wales and England even existed, and long before there was such a thing as the English language.

The Gododdin were a tribe based south of present day Edinburgh, who, as Britannia was reshaping itself in the post-Roman era, were fighting off incursions of Anglo-Saxons from the east. The poem describes a real battle. The time is the 7th century; the site of the battle near Catterick; the context, a warring world of rival tribes and chieftains. We can identify the lord, Mynyddog Mwynfawr, who gathers the Celtic warriors together from his own tribe, calling for help from Gwynedd in present-day Wales. And we know that the poem was composed by Aneirin, who must have been present at the battle.

Aneirin recorded what he witnessed in a series of 100 elegies for the fallen. What we hear is an evocation of the men who went into battle, hopelessly outnumbered, and were cut down. Their names in themselves are a form of poetry, the naming a sacred act of commemoration. The characters of the fallen are here preserved like bog-men of fifteen hundred years ago. 'Madog cut down men like rushes, but was shy before a girl'; 'At court the quiet one, Erthgi made armies groan'.

The Gododdin, largely forgotten, re-emerged in the early twentieth century. Its tale of the pity of individual lives ended in battle, often young lives, carries clear relevance today. The Gododdin also deals in what we would now call collateral damage: the bereaved and the bereft. The epigraph to David Jones's First World War masterpiece In Parenthesis is taken from The Gododdin, and it collapses the distance between the 20th century and the 6th century: 'Sennyessit e gledyf ym mhenn mameu' - 'His sword sounded in the heads of mothers'. Today, the Gododdin's ancient tale of warriors, far from home, serving a nobleman and paying with their lives, seems both timeless and timely.

~Between The Ears: Rhythms of Remembering enters into the world of The Gododdin, weaving extracts of Gillian Clarke's new English translation of the poem with an immersive soundscape and music. Her translation of Aneirin's words - the first complete one by a poet - read by Lisa Jen Brown, provide the backbone of the programme, and the poem's history and resonance today is explored through interviews with Gillian, theatre director Mike Pearson, and Ieuan Jenkins, who recalls his experience of serving as a young soldier in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With music specially composed for the programme by Georgia Ruth.

Produced for BBC Wales by Megan Jones

A radiophonic exploration of The Gododdin, a lament for the fallen from the 7th century.

Producer: Mark Burman

Haunted by noises heard whilst undergoing surgery, Ken Hollings searches for primal sound.

With contributions from famous axemen such as Steve Howe (Yes), Bernie Marsden (Whitesnake), and John Campbell (Are You Experienced?).

An exploration of the Jimi Chord, a chord found in the opening of Hendrix's Purple Haze.

With contributions from famous axemen such as Steve Howe (Yes), Bernie Marsden (Whitesnake), and John Campbell (Are You Experienced?).

An exploration of the Jimi Chord, a chord found in the opening of Hendrix's Purple Haze.

In 1846 Spanish bishop, Rosendo Salvado arrived in the Australian outback to establish New Norcia, a Benedictine monastery. Despite the intention of the mission to bring salvation to the 'savages', records show that Salvado's interest and respect for the indigenous Nyangara, though patronising, was truly enlightened for the time.

This programme reveals Salvado's views on the Nyangara people, customs, and music, as documented in his memoirs. We also hear reconstructions of the Aboriginal New Norcia String Orchestra, Brass Band, and Choir. The programme features the sounds of the bush and the acoustics of the New Norcia monastery.

Produced by Jon Rose.

Spanish monks encounter native inhabitants of Western Australia in the 19th century.

Each year thousands of Chinese tourists visit Cambridge, not to see the usual sites, but to pay homage to a poem they all had to learn by heart in school - Xu Zhimo's 'Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again'. Few non-Chinese speakers will have heard of it.

Saying Goodbye again and again' takes a sonic journey along the River Cam capturing the voices of teachers, students, tourists, punt chauffeurs, a tour guide, a translator and experts on early 20th century Chinese poetry. Also visiting Cambridge are two poets from two very different backgrounds - Sean Street and Xin Zeng - who muse on the life of Xu Zhimo and explore the hidden depths of a poem which used ideas from the English romantics to help break the strict rules of classical Chinese poetry.

Producer: Andy Cartwright

A Soundscape Production for BBC Radio 3.

A sonic journey through Xu Zhimo's famous Chinese poem: Saying Goodbye to Cambridge Again.

Now 'Between the Ears' gives listeners a chance to hear the harmonica as a truly virtuoso instrument, always an instrument of the people - portable, affordable and playable. Acclaimed poet Kim Addonizio turns harmonica student, heading to blues school with pen, mouth, and a stack of harps at the ready, in search of the sweetest sounds.

Trossingen in Germany may be the world capital of harmonicas. Every street echoes to the sound of the harp, and even the downtown hotel is part of the old Hohner Factory. This is where you will find the true aficionados, the hard-core addicts, who come to have lessons with the top players.

Kim learns riffs from the world's top ‘harp' teachers, Dave Barrett, Steve Baker and Joe Filisko - who customizes harps for such as Neil Young, blues great Kim Wilson, and jazz phenomenon Howard Levy, and who she wants to persuade to accompany her on his magical harp.

She also dreams of being the first woman to jam on stage at the Blues conference... so will her dreams become reality?

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

The best harmonica impression of a train you will ever hear - no question.

What does mental illness sound like? Popular audio representations of mental illness are often discordant or otherworldly, designed to evoke strong emotions like fear or anxiety. Yet those with mental illness often describe other sounds which are meaningful to them and their experience, reflecting monotony, lack of connectedness, repetition, silence, control, and lack of control.

Radio 3's Researcher in Residence, Professor Sally Marlow of King's College London, asked composer and sound artist Gawain Hewitt to work with a group of people with lived experience of mental illness to co-compose new work to explore a whole spectrum of symptoms and changing feelings that words alone cannot do justice. Through a series of music-making workshops, the team found new ways to express their experiences using musical instruments, voices, apps, and everyday extraneous sounds in an ambitious attempt to break through the language barriers of mental health.

The result is an exhilarating series of short musical works moving from optimism tinged with uncertainty, to deep disquiet, that weave intimate personal experiences with the acoustic and electronic sounds and music that have evolved from these workshops, to capture vividly how mental illness resonates to those who are mentally unwell.

Devised and curated by Sally Marlow

Producer: Adrian Washbourne

Sound mixed by Giles Aspen

A TellTale Industries production for BBC Radio 3

Composers: Gawain Hewitt with

Michelle Baharier, Stephanie Bates, Lavinia Black, Rashima Black, Rick Burgess, Cruella Dot, Daisy, James Downs, Dorothy Dunn, Cameron Durdy, Tania Gergel, Barrington Gordon, Nicky Heinen, Sarah Hill, Cassie Lovelock, Tiffany Pitts, Sonia Thompson, and members of the Mental Fight Club.

Accompanied by Matt Maguire, Sub principal viola, City of London Sinfonia.

Supported by Verity Buckley, Madison Wempe, Katie Lowis

Image by Stephanie Bates

With thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council Impact Acceleration Account, the ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health at King's College London, Bethlem Gallery and Mental Fight Club.

Vivid new sound and music capturing how mental illness resonates to those mentally unwell

Polymathic and profound, the intricacies of Sebald's writing cannot be summarised or explained. But this programme hopes to explore a few of the themes that most preoccupied Sebald in his life and writing: in particular, memory, history and landscape.

A voluntary emigrant from Germany to England, Sebald settled in East Anglia in 1970. The Rings of Saturn, a book first published in German in 1995, recounts a long walk down the coast, from Somerleyton to Orford. The narrator is a man who seems to be partly based on Sebald himself.

Last year, the acclaimed theatre director Katie Mitchell put The Rings of Saturn or Die Ringe des Saturn on stage - not in England but in Cologne, Germany.

This programme follows her as she takes her German actors to East Anglia to experience at first-hand the landscape in which Sebald was writing and walking. They explore a coastline, which - as Sebald was acutely aware - looks out towards Germany, across what used to be known until the late 19th century as 'the German Ocean'.

The trip along the coast precipitates the actors' personal reflections and memories of their grandparents' generation during the Second World War and the way the history of that time has been handed down to them.

The programme introduces The Rings of Saturn through beautiful readings by the actor Stephen Dillane, interspersed with music by composer Paul Clark, and sounds recorded on the Suffolk coastline; but it also shows Sebald's contemporary importance in a world in which the significance of history, time and place can so easily be dismissed.

First broadcast in June 2013.

An essay on the writings of WG Sebald, prompted by a theatre version of one of his novels.

For over four decades, Mark Talbot recorded scenes from his life and used them to create a cassette radio show, which he called Second Side Up. Complete with music, interviews and phone-ins, Second Side Up sounded like professional work, but not a single episode was ever broadcast. The tapes were distributed to a tiny network of friends and family, a unique correspondence that came to define Mark's life.

The resulting archive of tapes is a unique autobiography in radio-show format.

Between the songs, we meet the people in Mark's life; we hear him falling in love, growing old, mourning the death of the analogue era as his chosen medium becomes obsolete. Through all the changes, one thing remains constant - Mark's addiction to producing Second Side Up.

Producer, David Waters

Assistant Producer, Robbie MacInnes

Executive Producer, Francesca Panetta

A Phantom Production for BBC Radio 3.

Documentary about an aspiring disc jockey who turned his life into a cassette radio show.

Out of this experience, Kathleen has written The Green Room - a sequence of poems which tell the story of these ancient woodlands from the perspective of the water, lichens, mosses, oaks and hazelwoods that make up this unique and rare ecosystem, also known as Celtic rainforest or Atlantic Woodland.

Scotland's west-coast rainforest zone is hyper-oceanic and includes 125 Sites of Special Scientific Interest (SSSIs). But today only around 30,000 hectares of rainforest remain, and it faces many threats including overgrazing, pollution, human development and invasive rhododendron. However, there are plans to restore and regenerate it through large-scale projects.

In this wet and wild corner of the Highlands, Kathleen is accompanied by crofter and ecologist Alasdair Firth from The Woodland Trust and local RSPB warden Izzy Baker.

Includes music by Scottish composer Erland Cooper and Alice Boyd's EP ‘From The Understory', created as part of her artist residency at the Eden Project - the world's largest indoor rainforest.

Produced by Victoria Ferran

Exec producer Susan Marling

A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 3

Poet Kathleen Jamie explores a temperate rainforest on the west coast of Scotland.

Tim van Eyken, the dramatist Joseph Wilde and radio producer Julian May trace the history, the development of the language of the call for help, from the initial Mayday procedure created by Frederick Mockford. A radio operator at East Croydon airport, in 1923 he was asked for a word that would indicate distress and would easily be understood by all in an emergency.

They gather recordings of distress calls and the conversations between those in danger (whose language is often very dramatic and heart rending - 'Now. Now. Please. Come Now.') and their rescuers, terse, calm, yet urgent. Joe writes a drama for the actress Susan Jameson ; Julian uses calls, responses, instructions, and song, make a story in sound of the call for help. They delve into how we call for help: from a new born baby's first cry, then the reluctance to do so, that shameful admittance of need, to the point at which we become beyond help (forever in 'seelonce'), yet help is given.

We hear from a midwife, a psychotherapist, a coastguard, a pilot, the great undertaker poet, Thomas Lynch - and there's a song from Jackie Oates.

Producer: Julian May.

An exploration of the history and the development of the language of the call for help.

Shifts was commissioned as part of the BBC Culture in Quarantine with the support of Arts Council England and BBC Arts.

Producer: Judith Dimant and Julian Wilkinson for Wayward Productions

Poetry, testimony and interviews inspired by the experiences of nurses during lockdown.

The world's most brilliant swimming instructor is Pierre Grunberg. He's in his late 80s but still teaches in the pool of The Grand Hotel in southern France. Like some character from a Wes Anderson film, this adroit Adonis speaks English with charming French/German accent. He's taught everyone: Picasso, Chaplin, Jacques Tati, Liza Minelli, the McCartney's, Aristotle Onassis, David Niven, Bono, Tina Turner. He taught the celebrated French actress Silvia Monfort and she became the first great love of his life until her death in 1991. He was great friends with Jean Cocteau. But Doreen Chanter was the hardest to teach. This modest Londoner (formerly of the pop duo The Chanter Sisters) became his second wife.

But can Pierre teach presenter Jane Ray? She discovers the seed of her phobia and attempts Pierre's peculiar method of singing under water in a salad bowl. We learn of her instructor's past. He was born a German Jew who survived in disguise, and of his bizarre dinner with a hotel guest in the 1950's - an SS guard. Recorded in the pool over three days, Jane blossoms and, in an emotional final scene, swims free in the sea.

If Cocteau made a film it would sound like this. The sounds of bubbles, panic, splashes, sea. Famous voices of the past floating up, through and away on waves of music and sound. Above all capturing the mystery of water and our relationship with it.

Presenter: Jane Ray

Sound: Matt Thompson

Producer: Matt Thompson/Jane Ray

Rockethouse Production for BBC Radio 3

Can the world's greatest swimming instructor teach a terrified 57-year-old to swim?

These liminal spaces have a unique and troubling consistency: neither absolutely water, nor absolutely earth, but a potentially dangerous mix between the two.

Writers have long been fascinated by the dangerous pull of the bog but also by the secrets that lay buried the peat, from 'The Slough of Despond' in John Bunyan's 'Pilgrim's Progress' to Seamus Heaney's 'Bog Poems

Producer Neil McCarthy and author and former rock climber Jim Perrin attempt to cross a bog called Waun-y-Griafolen in Snowdonia. A living entity, the bog erases paths over time and the duo's navigation becomes as uncertain as the ground beneath them. As they make their way, and as the days fades, they are accompanied by the reflections of Hetta Howes ('Transformative Waters'), Karin Sanders ('Bodies in the Bog'), and artist Mark Daniels who also finds he's strayed from the path.

They squelch their way, hoping to understand the bog's contradictory nature before getting swallowed up.

Featuring the poem 'Bog Queen' by Seamus Heaney

Original composition and sound design by Phil Channell

Produced by Neil McCarthy

Enter the netherworld of the Great British bog on a journey into the lost and found.

Dreams may represent that which is beyond our physical limitations. In our subconscious mind, we can be anybody and do anything. We feel undefeatable and nobody can tell us what we cannot do and accomplish.

In reality, we do not have the ability to fly. Or do we?

'I suppose it's the flip side of being real, it's about flying in the face of reality and saying ha! See? See what I can do? See what we can do? See what can be done? Not just physically here, but as metaphor, as life statement as joie de vivre, as life.'

With contributions from Adi Andrei, Hitomi Sakamoto, Evelyn Quek and Matt Costain.

Produced by Hana Walker-Brown

A flight simulation in sound, featuring a portrait of trapeze artist Matt Costain.

Please note Skylarking is a lawn-based, horizontal radio feature best experienced from the comfort of a picnic blanket with a long drink, a soft pillow and a view of the sky.

This episode of Between the Ears was produced by Cathy FitzGerald and Matt Thompson. Original music and sound design by Joe Acheson (Hidden Orchestra), featuring clarinettist Tomas Dvorak and cellist Su-a Lee.

Skylarking is a Rockethouse Production for BBC Radio 3.

Feature on looking up at a blue sky, as Cathy FitzGerald meets a prisoner and a paraglider

Solitary confinement, or segregation, is described as 'deep custody' and has three key characteristics: social isolation; reduced sensory input and activity; and an increased control of prisoners. Some spend as long as 23.5 hours a day locked up alone inside the most basic of cells.

As of January 2015, the total segregation capacity in England and Wales was 1586 cells with 9% of those occupying them segregated for longer than 84 days. Prisoners are entitled to a short period of exercise, a shower, and a phone call daily. In some segregation units in the UK, prisoners have to choose between having a shower and taking exercise, with periods of exercise lasting less than 30 minutes. (From 'Deep Custody: Segregation Units and Close Supervision Centres in England and Wales' by Dr Sharon Shalev and Kimmett Edgar - 2015).

Hannah Silva's drama explores the intensely horrific experience of segregation. Within the confines of her tiny cell, Mandy is entirely cut off from the world. Yet she is unable to keep out the unbearable weight of her past.

Solitary' is informed by the accounts of women prisoners who have experienced segregation for prolonged periods in UK prisons.

Mandy - Christine Bottomley

Other voices - Tanya Auclair and Will Howard

Executive producer Sara Davies

Written by Hannah Silva

Produced by Nicolas Jackson and Steve Bond

Solitary' is an Afonica production for BBC Radio 3.

Inside the disturbing world of solitary confinement, the prison within a prison.

Natalie brings us to Mojave Valley, to the home of her uncle Hubert McCord. At 91, Hubert is the last fluent Mojave speaker who is also a singer. Together they have been working on a language recovery program for young people, whilst also recording ancient bird and clan songs for future generations.

Immersing us in Mojave language and culture, we hear stories of the Colorado river. For Mojaves, there is an inseparable relationship between the body and the land which they have inherited from the creator, Matevil, who Hubert simply calls the great man.

Mojaves call themselves Aha'Macav - which means the river runs through their bodies and through their land. Today this is the most endangered river in the United States - so how will Natalie say 'I am am carrying the Colorado river in my body, I am the river' when this river is gone?

The valley is surrounded by a ring of mountains including Avi kwame (Spirit Mountain) where Mojaves were created, the rock who cried, and the sand dunes where Mojaves go on to the next life. Despite brutal attempts to silence Mojave language and culture in the 20th century, Mojave ancient songs, with their stories of animals, the river, and ancient beings, still resonate with life today on the reservation. Although many traditions are at risk of dying out.

Produced by Victoria Ferran

A Just Radio production for BBC Radio 3

As well as witnessing the Aurora Borealis, Karin also turns the lights into sound. Using a very low frequency radio recorder, she takes us deep into the forest on her dog sleigh to capture - in sound - the swirls and whistles generated by the solar shower as it interacts with earth's electromagnetic field. The sounds are as haunting and ethereal as whale song.

Karin captures the sounds of the northern lights for a project with the environmental composer Matthew Burtner whose work draws on environmental change in his native Alaska. He uses captured sound and music to reflect environmental change. Matthew listens to the lights out in the Alaskan wilderness for the first time using a very low frequency recorder and uses recordings of the lights to compose a piece of music.

Producer: Kate Bissell

Karin Lehmkuhl Bodony records the sounds of the northern lights in the Alaskan sky.

Evocative, thoughtful and challenging, new poems recorded at the BBC Contains Strong Language festival in Leeds by the Words First spoken word artists are interwoven with new sound designs from our Sound First sound artists.

Sound First is supported by ambassador Ben Brick, the producer of Have You Heard George's Podcast? by George the Poet. Words First is supported by the poetry organisations Apples and Snakes and Young Identity.

Poems and Sound Designs by:

Stories in Storeys by Lisa O'Hare - sound design by Caitlin Hinds

Dear Miss Nanji by Anna Margarita - sound design by Owen McDonnell

Mind The Bleep by Nigeen Dara - sound design by Jo Kennedy

ESCA by HL Truslove - sound design by Laura Campbell

This Thing Called Life by Jed - sound design by Cameron Naylor

Aquaphobia by Nosa - sound design by Cameron Naylor and Owen McDonnell

Planted by Anisa Butt - sound design by Jo Kennedy

My Last Night with Mandy by Spoken 2 Life - sound design by Laura Campbell

The Shrewing of the Tame by Lisa O'Hare - sound design by Oliver Denman

We Are Not Divided by Anna Margarita - sound design by Ross Burns

Sound designers work with poets to create new soundworlds around spoken word performances

Innovative and thought-provoking features on a wide variety of subjects

Evocative spoken word performances, recorded onstage at the BBC's Contains Strong Language festival in Leeds, are interwoven with new sound designs from emerging talent

The emerging talent from two BBC development schemes - Sound First and Words First - collaborate here to create new spoken word and sound design poems.

Evocative, thoughtful and challenging, new poems recorded at the BBC Contains Strong Language festival in Leeds by the Words First spoken word artists is interwoven with new sound designs from our Sound First sound artists.

Sound First is supported by ambassador Ben Brick, the producer of George the Poets podcast. Words First is supported by the poetry organisations Apples and Snakes and Young Identity.

New sound designers work with young poets from two BBC talent schemes to create new work.

Evocative spoken word, performed at the BBC's Contains Strong Language festival in Leeds is interwoven with new sound designs that sonically shape and support the poets' words

In this programme, Jason seeks the source of his fascination with mimicking the natural world, which became very important to him after reading 'The Conference of the Birds' a 12th-century Persian poem.

Jason also thinks his fascination with shapeshifting or 'soundshifting' must have something to do with his great-grandfather, who left Lahore to travel and read the palms of the great and the good, always carrying glowing letters of recommendation explaining that he would reveal truths about people 'not commonly known' and reflecting people's stories back to them. He explores the idea that they are both 'listeners' - a kind of family inheritance.

Jason bares his process along the way, taking us deep into a soundscape of sea, wind, birds and drones.

Contributors:

Sophie Scott

Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London

Alan Williams

Professor of Iranian Studies and Comparative Religion and the University of Manchester

Dr Humera Iqbal

Associate Professor of Social and Cultural Psychology at University College London

Producer: Faith Lawrence

Mixed by: Sharon Hughes and Sue Stonestreet

Nature beatboxer Jason Singh explores the origin and meaning of his art.

Director Polly Thomas and writer Alex Bulmer are midway through a performance development project about voice and gender identity. Thanks to Wellcome Trust funding, they have spent 18 months interviewing transgender people, their families and clinicians about the shift of voice in gender transition and how the world perceives them. Many transgender people talk about the voice being the final piece to fall into place - only when their voice became truly 'female' could friends and family remember to use the correct pronoun.

Sounds Like She features three transgender women and a speech therapist, specialising in working with transgender clients. Their thoughts and experiences about voice and how to express gender are meshed with Hush, a song written by award-winning writer Alex Bulmer from interviews with transgender women and composed/performed by celebrated musician Errollyn Wallen.

Sounds Like She is a creative fusion of real voices and music, combining into a challenging look at modern notions of voice and gender.

The participants

Krista Rayne Clarke

Kate O'Donnell is an award-winning transgender performer, activist, theatre and cabaret maker. She is the Artistic Director of Trans Creative, a newly formed trans-creative, trans-positive, trans-led theatre company based in Manchester supported with three years-worth of funding by Arts Council England's Elevate Fund.

Her previous work includes the award-winning autobiographical performance Big Girl's Blouse, which dealt with growing up as a boy in the 1970s when no-one knew what being transgender was, and several well received cabaret performances which have played at a number of venues and festivals nationally.

In the past 12 months Kate has performed in Boy Meets Girl (BBC) and Hush (a musical developed with Lift Festival and performed at The Royal Exchange) and co-created Mum, a short film directed by Anne-Marie O'Connor which premi耀red this September and will tour festivals across the next year.

A Manchester Legend' - Timeout

Tight, elegant and fearless' - Rachel Morris, Cosmopolitan

Winner of Be Proud Special Achievement Award - 2015

Winner of Brighton Fringe LGBTQ Award - 2015

Winner: LGBT Foundation Hero Award- 2015

Steph Holmes www.transsexualinfo.co.uk

I instigated and run Chrysalis Transsexual Support Groups based in Blackburn, Preston, Blackpool, Accrington and Darwen currently, which includes liaising with the police, Crown Prosecution Service, NHS, and many other bodies and charities, and also includes carrying out interventions with transsexual service users throughout the North West of England. We offer advice, support and advocacy, including accompanying them for visits to Gender Clinics, visits to doctors, problems with employers, et al., for pre- and post-transition, pre-op, post-op and non-op transsexuals of any gender and their supporters, family, and friends. We also support Intersex, Bi-gender, and GenderFluid people. We were runners-up in the National Diversity Awards 2016, Community Organisation Award for LGBT.

Dr Sean Pert is a speech and language therapist and senior lecturer at the University of Manchester. Sean has worked in partnership with the LGBT Foundation's Trans Programme to deliver voice and communication groups, involving students to ensure the needs of trans people are understood by the next generation of therapists. www.transvoicetherapy.co.uk

Creative consultant - Alex Bulmer - www.alexbulmer.co.uk/

Composer and musical performer - Errollyn Wallen - www.errollynwallen.com

Producer, Polly Thomas - www.pollythomas.forufour.com

Sound designer and Executive Producer, Eloise Whitmore

Production co-ordinator, Sarah Kenny

A Naked Production for BBC Radio 3.

A musical exploration by transgender women of voice and gender.

A radio composition by Jonny Trunk created from BBC Sound Effects recorded in the 1970s.

Since the dawn of the Space Age, amateur 'ham' radio has eavesdropped on our exploration of the cosmos. From Sputnik to the International Space Station, radio enthusiasts with homemade kit have been able tune into the distant sounds of space and talk to those exploring it. Caroline Devine, found space-sound artist, creates a composition from the ethereal sounds of space and the space hams and sends Between the Ears into orbit.

Owen K. Garriott reveals why he was the first astronaut to take amateur radio into space, opening up, for the very first time, the channels of communication with ordinary people back on Earth, a tradition still maintained on the International Space Station to this day.

And we hear newly released archive of US radio ham Roy Welch, who immediately after Sputnik's launch rigged up a makeshift station, looking up to the night sky as the satellite's eerie beat found voice in his ramshackle equipment.

Radio brought us Neil Armstrong's first transmission from the Moon and afforded ham operator, Larry Baysinger, the chance to intercept the radio transmissions between the astronauts. His recordings include the moment President Nixon transmitted his message of congratulations to them.

Interwoven with these are Caroline Devine's artful reworking of other cosmic sounds picked up by ham receivers from across the world to create an ethereal and magical journey, a momentary re-ignition of the childlike wonder of space.

Producer: Rose de Larrabeiti

Space Ham is a Whistledown Production for BBC Radio 3.

A celebrationg of amateur radio enthusiasts who eavesdrop on space exploration.

Gates screech open and closed, gravel crunches, letter boxes clang, dogs bark and snap at hurriedly withdrawn fingers. Kevin transports us from the desolate, windswept static caravan park on the moor (where pretend owls outnumber the human population two-to-one), to nostalgia-saturated rural idylls, to the eerie former psychiatric hospital where time stopped decades ago.

`I feel like I'm walking around in one of those terrifying 1970s public information films where everyone eventually meets a sticky end because they decide to go for a swim in a slurry pit or climb into an electricity substation to retrieve a frisbee.`

Since suffering a breakdown in younger years, Kevin has found solace in obsessively recording spaces: their shifting character, the hidden ways they shape us and we shape them. As we deliver mail on urban streets and country lanes, he creates a taxonomy of all the ‘species of spaces' he encounters. Following in the footsteps of his hero, the great French polymath Georges Perec, he reveals the fascinating depth and contingent comedy of the everyday.

As he goes about his mission, Kevin draws on the perspectives of other ‘space travellers': poet Kei Miller and artist Joanne Lee. The programme includes archive provided by the BFI National Archive.

Producer: Dave Anderson

A 7digital production for BBC Radio 3

Produced by Phil Smith

A sonic mosaic of grief and remembrance, woven from performances in a Brighton pub.

A sonic mosaic of collective grief and bawdy outpourings of remembrance, woven from recordings made at the annual Staggering in the Dark event at The Hand In Hand pub in Brighton.

He talks to Bob, who was born close to Pentonville and grew up in the area. Bob rented a flat across the road with his girlfriend, became an inmate himself and watched her comings and goings on the street outside. Now a free man for many years, he lives just feet from the prison wall, but this time on the outside, staring at the wall first thing in the morning and last thing at night.

Alan Dein captures the sounds and thoughts of life outside the walls of Pentonville prison

Andy is a typical London taxi driver, and his daily life involves navigating through the choked streets of the capital. But Andy is also a monk who will take us to a totally different world of a Buddhist retreat and what is known as a 'summer sesshin

Sesshin' is a Japanese word which means 'touching the heart - mind' and involves a period of intensive meditation in a Zen monastery. In this Between the Ears we hear from those who have to balance stressful lives with their Buddhist outlook. Along with Andy we meet a young Polish student who exchanges her work behind one of the noisiest city bars for the silence of the Buddhist retreat and a chip shop owner who attempts to escape the chaos of a Saturday night by attending a sesshin. Can they manage to carry the silence of the sesshin back into their daily lives?

As we discover their lives we hear the precise, beautiful sounds mark the timing of daily rituals such as wake-up, meditation, meal and work times.

Documentary about people balancing stressful lives with the silence of a Buddhist retreat.

Following the supply chain from the container port to the doorstep, he seeks out its hidden corners and all the people who make things move.

Featuring contributions from Professor Laleh Khalili, Exeter University; Julian Wong, Stella Maris East Anglian Port Chaplain; Joe Underwood, Warden Trimley Marshes; Justin Zantboer, bird ringer and logistics at Felixstowe Port; Denis, truck driver from Estonia; Angelo, Supervisor at Amazon, Tilbury; Jake Margiotta from William George Online Auctions; Paul the courier.

Words and Music by Aidan Tulloch

Studio Mixed by Donald McDonald

Producer Neil McCarthy

Aidan Tulloch reimagines the journey an item goes on in the age of the 24/7 supply chain.

Jason Samuels Smith is a native New Yorker, from Hell's Kitchen. He's an Emmy award-winning dancer at the heart of the 1990s African American revival of tap dance through the infusion of hip hop beats. Jason tells us how he pioneered a unique collaboration with renowned Indian Kathak dance master Pandit Chitresh Dash. They've challenged each other to interpret their moves and grooves in a live show of taps versus bare feet and bells, drums, sitars and rap tunes, on an acclaimed US tour.

Roxane Butterfly, the first person to be granted a green card to work as a professional tap dancer, was brought up in France by her Romansh-Swiss father and Moroccan-born mother, she lives an itinerant existence. Proclaimed 'the John Coltrane of Tap' by the New York Times, Roxane studied tap dance in New York with the legendary Jimmy Slyde - an inheritance she'll always treasure - although it hasn't stopped her blending jazz-tap with Moroccan DJellaba grooves and Cameroonian moves.

Max Pollak is a master of rhythm, from tapping feet to drumming to body percussion. Born in Austria, he came to New York in the 1990s to work on a choreography with jazz bassist Ray Brown. After meeting members of the Tito Puente band, he created RumbaTap, bringing new life to traditional Cuban folk stories and culture with his own dance style.

A bold exchange of world rhythms in the world's capital city of tap.

Three dancers describe how they are taking tap-dancing into new areas.

The lives of bees and humans have been linked ever since the first hominid tasted a wild hive's honey. Neither domesticated nor fully wild, honey bees are key to our survival, a barometer of our relationship with nature. Without them, we'd have no fruit, no nuts and seeds, and eventually, no food. No bees; no songbirds. Silent woods.

For centuries, we've projected stories and beliefs onto these strange, familiar creatures, seeing them as messengers between this world and the next. In this Covid-wracked year, Maria Margaronis explores the old customs of `telling the bees` about a death or significant event, lest they grow angry and leave us. She enters the sonic world of the hive to hear what the bees might be telling us in the company of wise bee guides like Toxteth's Rastafarian Barry Chang, Mississippi's Ali Pinion, Lithuania's Paulius Chockevicius and young beekeeper Zhivko Todorov in London's busy Finsbury Park. Others tell us and their bees their significant news. Follow bee tellers and bee callers on a seasonal journey from summer through winter into spring, tuning in to to the hum of the hive and the buzz of the universe.

Recorded binaurally.

Producer: Mark Burman

Additional bee recordings: Mark Ferguson

Maria Margaronis escapes into the hive to explore the folk custom of telling the bees.

The programme combines the sounds of Skegness with the voices of local readers interpreting a range of Tennyson's works and features excerpts from Charge Of The Light Brigade, Maud, The Miller's Daughter and Break, Break, Break.

Exploring Tennyson's connection with Skegness, where he wrote some of his best-known verse

Produced by Pauline Harris

More Info:

John has a massive cult following, he performs now to packed audiences. Tall and thin with a mess of black hair, black sunglasses, drainpipe trousers and cuban-heeled boots: John has made a multitude of recent UK and Irish festival appearances. He also tours throughout Europe and Australasia. Some of his poems are now in the GCSE syllabus. He is studied by many A level students and his poetry is prolific within UK and Irish University courses, all ensuring that he will be forever ingrained in the psyche of Britain's new youth.

A documentary about one of Britain's most revered performance poets, John Cooper Clarke.

Paris-based sound artist Dinah Bird records some peculiarities of ultra-hierarchal French office life and composes her version of Perec's process which at times has shades of comedian Jacques Tati's film Playtime.

Translation: David Bellos

Narrator: Alain Mayor

Mix: Jean-Philippe Renoult

Producer: Dinah Bird.

A radio version of Georges Perec's avant-garde book about asking for a salary raise.

'A distant sound is heard. It appears to come from the sky and is the sound of a breaking string. It dies away sadly.'

~Between The Ears focuses on the many attempts to produce this sound, ranging from musical saws to gun-shots. Guests include Paul Arditti, who mixed industrial, musical and bird sounds for the production by Sam Mendes, and musician Leafcutter John, who accepts Radio 3's own Chekhov Challenge, recording his experiments to find a resonant breaking string sound for the 21st century.

Exploring attempts to produce a famous stage direction in Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard.

'A distant sound is heard. It appears to come from the sky and is the sound of a breaking string. It dies away sadly.'

~Between The Ears focuses on the many attempts to produce this sound, ranging from musical saws to gun-shots. Guests include Paul Arditti, who mixed industrial, musical and bird sounds for the production by Sam Mendes, and musician Leafcutter John, who accepts Radio 3's own Chekhov Challenge, recording his experiments to find a resonant breaking string sound for the 21st century.

The challenge to find 'the sound of a breaking string' demanded in The Cherry Orchard.

And the time-honoured tradition of the Irish hurley stick maker is where gentle craftsmanship and player's dreams collide.

Neil McManus hurls for Cushendall (Ruair퀀 Ӏg G.A.A.) and is visiting local craftsman and hurley stick maker, Michael Scullion. Like his father before him, Michael carves only from ash, hand-picking the trees from which they're hewn.

Michael Ennis hurls for Ballycran and has gone to see his local hurley maker, Barry Reynolds. With ash become ever scarcer, Barry uses only modern materials in the sticks he lovingly fashions.

As Neil McManus and Michael Ennis' opposing teams prepare to clash on impeccable playing fields in the village of Cushendall in the Glens of Antrim, we're immersed in a journey from stick to pitch.

But it's not just the hurley sticks that can break in what might just be the fastest - and most ferocious - field sport on earth.

Produced and narrated by R　is퀀n Kelleher, BBC Northern Ireland

Sound Supervisor: John Simpson

Additional Sound Design: Jason Martin, Barney Smyth

The ferocious Gaelic game of hurling meets the gentle craft of the hurley stick maker.

In 2010, there were times when it was hard to remember that the situation at the San Jose copper mine in Chile, where 33 men were awaiting rescue, was reality, rather than reality TV. The media circus that descended on the Atacama Desert - setting up camp at the top of the mine - created an atmosphere, at times, almost of a game show. Yet the mine disaster in New Zealand that followed shortly afterwards, with its tragic outcome, disappeared swiftly from the front pages and TV headlines of the world. The thought of such confinement underground is almost unthinkable, unless a splinter of light can pierce its darkness - bringing home to the audience the possibility of salvation.

The fear and exploitation of fear of being trapped underground - from real life to the stories of Edgar Allan Poe - is reflected here, using sounds, media archive, the words of the mining poet and blogger Mark Nowak

(http://coalmountain.wordpress.com), coal miner Willie McGranaghan, and Newfoundland sound man Chris Brookes. The very natural fear nascent in all of us of being buried alive, and the contradictions in the low-status dangerous work of the miner, and the treasure it produces, are powerful themes which create the most compelling horror fiction and news stories alike.

Producer Sara Jane Hall.

Evoking life working in coal mines and the accompanying fictional and real-life dramas.

Myths have grown up around the bell. Does a green dragon spirit protect it? Will it only rise again when the right leader comes to power? And do those who try to take the bell always come to great harm? November 2015 sees the freest general elections in Myanmar of its 50 years of military dictatorship. As the parties scramble to convince their people to vote for them is now the right time for the giant bell to rise?

The Dhammazedi Bell juxtaposes the story of the bell and its many rescue attempts with the modern story of Burma and its forthcoming election.

Juxtaposing the legendary largest bell in the world and Myanmar's November 2015 elections.

Writer/Producer: Stuart Russell

A Soundscape Production for BBC Radio 3

It's 1938 - there's been a brutal murder in Fife and the local 'egg dealer' is missing.

Professor Shawn Sobers of the University of the West of England, Director of the Freedom in the City Festival of Learning - a seven-month festival exploring Ethiopian and Rastafari cultures - and Trustee of Fairfield House CIC in Bath, is our guide for this fascinating story. And the Emperor's pianola, once lost without trace, is now found, restored and played for the first time since the late 1930s/early 1940s at a celebratory gathering at Fairfield House.

For the Emperor, the pianola and its music were his solace of the soul at a time of great uncertainty and turmoil as his country fought the fascist invaders, now reunited at last.

The pianola, like Haile Selassie's exile itself, served to build bridges between communities of different faiths, cultures and nationalities and all through the healing power of music. It continues to do so today.

His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Emperor of Ethiopia, King of Kings, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, was a man described as the 'conscience of the world' and 'Father of Africa'.

The Emperor and the Pianola is a Reel Soul Movies production for BBC Radio 3.

Professor Shawn Sobers uncovers the fascinating story of The Emperor and the Pianola.

Night terrors, flashbacks and the hidden cost of war - this Between the Ears explores the inner lives of women who care for former service personnel suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

We hear a delicate and often wrenching patchwork of audio diaries and interviews recorded in kitchens, living rooms and bedrooms at moments when couples hit breaking point or encounter unexpected moments of tenderness. This fierce and intimate portrait reveals the true impact of military campaigns on British families - and the sacrifices made by a generation of women who refuse to give up on the soldiers they love.

Produced by Eleanor McDowall with Matthew Green

An intimate exploration of living with a partner who returns home traumatised by war.

In a painting in Manchester City Art Gallery, a zebra rears up, black and white striking against the terrible night scene. The sky reddens in the distance from a vast explosion in 1940. War artist Carel Weight painted the zebra that galloped out of the zoo in to the maddened city. The animal escaped unscathed, but thousands of animals didn't.

Four panels show the journey of the terrified zebra and close on his hooves are sketchy figures, trying to capture the fleeing animal. One of them may have been a keeper at London Zoo at the time, called Shelley. In this feature, it's an imaginary Shelley who tells us what happened, recalling the night the Zebra House was bombed, along with the goings-on at city zoos during World War Two. Between archive footage, the rumble and shock of explosions, the voices of non-human creatures and of human historians, we hear how animals in zoos fared, along with the terrible fate of 400,000 cats and dogs, killed in September 1939, on the orders of their anxious owners who feared the onslaught of war.

It was at London Zoo that Julian Huxley, then Secretary of the Zoological Society, would try and spare the animals the sounds of bombing and sirens drowning out the destruction with gramophones playing the music of Sibelius.

Animals were central to the way Churchill imagined the conflict. Visiting London Zoo in 1939, as war loomed ever closer, Churchill learned that the zookeepers were primed to shoot top predators: the lions and tigers if they escaped. As recorded by Huxley in his memoirs, Churchill replied ‘What a pity!' before staring into the middle distance and conjuring for him an extraordinary and disturbing apocalyptic fantasy. Churchill's vision was a London of fire, burning wreckage, the noises of war, and big cats roaming the bombed out streets in search of dead bodies.

Peter Markinker is the voice of Shelley.

Contributors include the historians Marianne Sommer, Richard Sam Deese, Hilda Keane and Andy Flack; Archivist Sarah Broadhurst and Curator Hannah Williamson.

Devised by David Barnes and produced by Kate Bland

A Cast Iron Radio Production for BBC Radio 3.

We follow the zebra that escaped from London Zoo into the city during an air raid.

The Princess is played by Emily Watson.

The piece is structured between the Princess's dialogue as she walks through the palace and the conversations Levy has to find out what's wrong with her. Our key contributors are the psychoanalyst Susie Orbach, historian Erin Sullivan and Consultant in Emergency Medicine, Dr Fiona Lecky with music composed and arranged by Chris O'Shaughnessy.

This is a magical tale on the one hand and a partial history and analysis of mental delusions on the other.

We follow the 23 year old Alexandra Amelie as she walks sideways around the doors and ornaments of the royal palace. She is wearing a white dress, certain colours and smells distress her.

Delusions of being made from glass were quite popular in the 16th century. The stories are extraordinary and include 'The Lawyer Made From Glass', by Cervantes which tells of a man who believed his body was made from glass. He wears loose clothing, sleeps in straw, walks in the middle of the road to avoid injury from falling roof tiles, and is so scared of people approaching him when they give him food, he fixes a bucket to the end of a pole so fruit can be deposited in it.

For Levy, Alexandra Amelie is a sort of early cyborg, a collision of flesh and technology. Woman and piano have merged, the piano being an instrument of communication.

Deborah Levy considers the life of the princess who thought she'd swallowed a glass piano.

A bonshu is not hidden in a belfry, but housed in an open wooden tower. They don't have clappers, but are struck by huge tree trunks, suspended from ropes, swung against them from outside. Each Old Year is rung out with 108 booms from every bonshou throughout the land. Each has its own voice and character. Every Japanese person has the right to one strike, which consumes the sins of the old year and purifies them for the new. These great bells are essential to Japanese identity, which, through them, Stephen Gill explores.

We hear the New Year bells, recorded in the city and the countryside. There is the Gion bonshou, which at 30 tons is more than twice the weight of Big Ben. The heaviest in the land is the Rengein bonshou which weighs 37.5 tons. It takes 20 monks to swing the beam to sound it. Ikkou Iwasawa, who runs the foundry where it was made, explains the mystery of creating such huge bells - as one is being cast. The Rev Eishou Kawahara, the head priest of Rengein, whose bonshou can be heard 40 kilometres away, reveals their spiritual meaning, and the impact they have on people.

Stephen Gill has lived in Japan for many years and speaks the language fluently. He weaves haiku poems about them and weaves these into stories and recordings of famous bells.

Producer: Julian May.

Stephen Gill depicts bonshou, bronze bells in every Buddhist temple in Japan.

Obsessed with finding out the identity of the moustache's owner - an unlikely inheritance from his Great Aunt Sylvia - musician David Bramwell sets off on a quest to record s退ances and psychics, the effects of mind altering Amazonian plants, hippies and phantom orchestras - a soundtrack pulling the audience into the world of a Victorian deceased freak show host - Ambrose Oddfellow.

The Haunted Moustache is a meditation on one man's obsession with freak shows, synchronicity, the occult and the existence or not of a spirit world. Drawing on the tales of Victorian spiritualist fakery from magician Paul Zenon, the gothic charms of The Last Tuesday Society, the magical early electronica of musician Sarah Angliss, not to mention a cup of tea shared with a Wiccan Priest in suburban Shoreham, Bramwell travels from the wilds of Woodhall Spa in Lincolnshire, where the moustache's owner is recalled on the stage of the magical 1920's Kinema in the Woods, before ending in a Brighton council flat, with Dali muse Drako Oho Zarhazar, sharing the messages concealed in his tattoo.

David Bramwell probes Victorian psychic phenomena as revealed by a false moustache.

This programme, combining interviews with music and the sounds of the sea, the wind, the land, the dying houses, explores how people cope with natural calamity: with anger, stoicism, distress, and art.

One winter, Ron and Judith Backhouse watched as first their fence, then their shed, and finally three trees slipped over the cliff at the bottom of their garden on a private estate above Scarborough. 'The crack is running up towards our next door neighbour's house,' says Ron. 'It's maybe five or ten metres away from his bungalow now and we're connected to him. So if he goes, we go, too.'?

Artist Kane Cunningham bought a condemned bungalow on the same estate so that he could live in it, use it as an artistic installation and document its demise. Since he moved in, the neighbouring three houses have been demolished for safety reasons, and he reckons his is next.

'You can't fight Nature,' he says, 'so you may as well celebrate its destructive force. Houses aren't immortal, and neither are we, despite what we may want to believe.'

As I listen to the soft wailing through the wall,' says Lyz Turner, whose family have lived here for three generations, 'I feel the house knows what's coming. Since Domesday there's been a dwelling where I live, and it seems all the voices of the past, whoever lived here, all the people from the lost villages under the sea, are crying for us now.'.

A snapshot of houses and people threatened by the sea on the east Yorkshire coast.

The piece engages with the question 'who has the right to write?', and how might that right be earned? In totalitarian regimes writers are denied freedom of expression, but individually writers often inhibit or censor themselves, feeling that their words lack value or authority.

As William Burroughs put it: 'You pay or you get nothing. You can't dodge the Muse's check. The Muse don't like welshers. A writer becomes a writer by PAYING...' But Blegvad's writer seems to be writing/riding for free, gratis. He's hiding on the train without a ticket. The penalty he risks if caught is 'rendition to another zone/where due process is unknown' - a terrifying prospect.

He's on the run from the authorities - the Conductor played by Andy Partridge of XTC and the Sheriff played by David Thomas of P耀re Ubu. The two legendary musicians contribute memorable comic cameos. The piece ends when Blegvad's 'free writer' is awarded a dubious accolade by Agatha Christie, played by Harriet Walter.

Drama about a writer suffering hallucinations on a train travelling through time and space

Produced by Andrew Carter

A BBC Radio Cumbria Production

When Vaughan Williams wrote his most famous work in 1914, the skylark would have been a ubiquitous presence in the British countryside, but today the skylark is on the 'red list' of conservation concern. This bird may have inspired one of the most famous pieces of classical music ever, but now we're facing an increasingly silent sky.

~Between The Ears explores what we have lost, presenting The Lark Ascending in a new light, with a fresh, electronic arrangement. Here, the soloist is the skylark itself - captured by sound recordist Chris Watson in Northumberland.

Naturalist and broadcaster Lucy ‘Lapwing' Hodson explores the relationship between The Lark Ascending and the birds disappearing from our skies. Along the way, Lucy meets concert violinist Jennifer Pike at Vaughan Williams's childhood home, producer and nature beatboxer Jason Singh, and writer and conservationist Laurence Rose.

Over 150 years after Vaughan Williams was born, the contrast between the popularity of his most famous work and the steady decline of skylark numbers in the UK has never been as stark. Composer Hinako Omori's electronic re-imagining of the piece explores this contrast in Conversation With A Lark.

Produced in binaural sound, immerse yourself in the skylark's world by wearing headphones for the best listening experience.

Producer: Rebecca Grisedale-Sherry

Mixing Engineer: Marvin Ware

Vaughan Williams's most famous piece reworked and reimagined in music and field recordings

Spoken in the remote forest region of Ālvdalen - a place thick with forest and steep valleys - Elfdalian used to be the main language of the area, but Swedish has increasingly become dominant and few young people speak it today.

In a collage of forest sounds and local voices, travelling through Ālvdalen, this programme explores some of the mysteries of the language and its links to Sweden's ancient, Viking past. Maja meets up with young people to hear about new efforts to keep the language alive, and talks to older people who speak it as a first language about how it survived while other ancient European languages did not, and what it can reveal about the people and their culture.

Producer Jo Wheeler

A Freewheel Production for BBC Radio 3

A journey through the mysteries of the endangered Swedish forest language, Elfdalian.

The second of Glenn Gould's three sound documentaries, to mark Canada Day 2016.

March 1939. Broadcaster Hans Hollander, grandfather of writer and musician Julia and actor Tom, receives a letter that becomes his family's passport to freedom. The BBC's KA Wright invites Hans to come to London to discuss Janacek and the whole of question of Czech music asking, 'How soon do you think you could come, and how long would you be able to stay?

After years of trying to fall in with the anti-Semitic bureaucracy, the Hollanders fear for the future; the letter offers them a possible escape. On 15 March 1939 - the day Hitler's tanks roll into Prague - they take the train from Brno, constantly in terror, watching as people they know are taken off the train by the Gestapo. The BBC letter is enough to effect safe passage to Britain. Once there Hans and Kenneth Wright share their passion for Czech music with Wright orchestrating the Bohemian folk songs Hans brought with him from his homeland.

Julia Hollander goes in search of KA Wright to discover an unlikely saviour. An outsider driven by artistic curiosity and a passionate belief in the international language of music. She seeks out and revives the music Kenneth and Hans made together, and Tom reads from his grandfather's letters.

Janacek's 'In The Mists' is performed by Julia Hollander, KA Wright's 'Nocturne' is played by Peter McMullin, and 'Bohemia' sung by Julia Hollander with accompaniment by Peter McMullin, an expert in KA Wright's music. Hans Hollander's letters, translated by Anne Varty, are read by Tom Hollander.

Producer Dixi Stewart, with assistance from Hannah Dean and Mark Burman.

How the music of Janacek and a letter from the BBC saved the Hollander family from Nazism.

The Man With the Blue Guitar - Kerry Shale performs the Wallace Stevens poem, inspired by Pablo Picasso's painting 'The Old Guitarist', with new music for blue guitar by Martin Simpson

In 1903, during his blue period, Picasso painted 'The Old Guitarist', an image of a musician who despite his destitution - he's in rags and looks starved - continues to play. This picture inspired the American poet Wallace Stevens and in 1937 he published 'The Man with the Blue Guitar', his long, musical poem reflecting on the role of art and the imagination. 'You do not play things as they are', he writes, to which his musician replies 'Things as they are/ Are changed upon the blue guitar.

In the 1970s David Hockney, who already knew the painting, came across the poem and was inspired to create a series of etchings 'inspired by Wallace Stevens, who was inspired by Picasso.

This edition of Between the Ears takes the process of a inspiration step further; it's a performance of the poem by Kerry Shale, with new music for 'blue guitar' composed and played by the great guitarist Martin Simpson ('England's Ry Cooder'). There are thoughts on the poem and the painting from the American poet and critic Dana Gioia*, who was until recently the Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts; Sue Hubbard, the British poet and writer on visual arts, and David Hockney himself. These elements are melded to create a new piece for radio - 'Between the Ears: The Man With the Blue Guitar

Producer: Julian May.

We hear the voice of the path itself `The Milk Walk` (Y Wac Laeth in Welsh) the route that both the milk and the Cardiganshire dairy workers took to London during the last century. We meet Mae, a young girl who took the milk train to work in a dairy in London in the 1960's, and Jac Alun, a sailor from a local farming family who moved to the city to sell milk during the Depression.

These three monologues are interwoven with personal testimony from those who currently live and work on the edge of the land: Jon Meirion Jones (son of Jac Alun); local farmer Steffan Rees; artist Lilwen Lewis; marine biology student Tom Malpas and Nia Wyn Jones from the North Wales Wildlife Trust.

Stories of migration and milk both past and present are woven into a musical soundscape that paints a picture of humming dairy farms, strange underwater worlds where dolphins echo-locate, coral ticks, and where houses are ‘tippling' into the sea.

The Path is performed by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Mae the girl by Sara Gregory

Jac Alun the sailor by Matthew Gravelle

Written by Samantha Wynne-Rhydderch

Composed and Produced by Nina Perry

Painting by Lilwen Lewis

An Open Audio Production for BBC Radio 3

A radiophonic poem following the flow of milk east out of Wales while the land flows west.

The mind's eye is something most of us take for granted - the 'secret cinema' inside our mind, turning sounds into shapes, characters into faces - it sometimes seems like a sixth sense. For those who have it.

Constantly viewing our own personal visuals, we are powerless to control it, and no one else can see it but us.

A man hitting his head with a bible' or 'A tree being chopped down'?

'A row of frogs' or 'The bulging eyes of Malcolm McDowell in A Clockwork Orange'

Using a series of soundscapes, we hear the visual musings of a range of people: an architect, a school boy, a DJ, an artist amongst them - playing with the way people's own personal experiences influence their mental pictures.

But what about those who have no pictures in their brain?

'In my late 20's I was on a management course doing a relaxation exercise, and they asked us to imagine dawn. And I thought dawn? Well I know it's pink. But I couldn't see it, I couldn't imagine it.'

Gill Morgan, doctor

First recognised, but not named in 1880 by Francis Galton, aphantasia, as Professor of Cognitive and Behavioural Neurology Adam Zeman has recently called it, is being explored by neuroscientists around the world. It may affect 2% of the population, and studies have shown that there is a sliding scale of non-imagers.

Some barely notice any difference in their relationship with their own personal history, but for others this may include an inability to recall life events.

From talking to close friends it became obvious to me that 'the mind's eye' was not a figure of speech, phrases like, 'it takes you back' exist because that's what they do'.

Nick Watkins, theoretical physicist

Encouraging Radio 3 listeners to become aware of their own 'secret cinema', 'Between The Ears' trepans into the little grey cells that bring imagination to light - giving a glimpse inside the film-reel unspooling in our brains.

Contributors: Professor Adam Zeman, Doctor Nick Watkins, Dame Gill Morgan, Michael Bywater

The voices of Susan Aldworth, Francesca Vinti, Luca Goodfellow, Emma Kilbey, Ford Hickson, Ian Goodfellow, Danny Webb and readings by John Dougall and Dilly Barlow.

Soundscapes featuring Alexander Frater in Goa in the monsoon

Artwork by kind permission of artist Susan Aldworth. Music sourced by Danny Webb.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall.

Soundscapes exploring how personal experience influences our mind's eye.

In this 'Between the Ears' on Radio 3 the critically acclaimed writer Tahir Shah, who has made Morocco his home for the past six years, explores the square from the inside out in search of its centuries old primal energy. In a meditation drawing together the storytellers, transvestite players, boxers, master musicians, cigarette sellers, snake charmers, medicine men and many more, Shah explores the halkas, or circles, where they gather their crowds to enchant and engage. The sounds of the square tell their own story and as he moves between night and day and circle to circle, he looks for order beneath the apparent chaos; within it he finds an oral tradition and an ancient life force defying the onslaught of mass tourism and globalization.

Writer Tahir Shah explores the square Djemaa el Fna in Marrakech.

In the maternity unit at Birmingham's Heartlands Hospital, the heart rate of an unborn child gives cause for concern. Across town at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, patients with critical heart conditions are closely monitored hour by hour. Downstairs in A&E, staff begin their shift not knowing what awaits them.

~Between The Ears marks the 70th anniversary of the NHS with a unique composition depicting two Birmingham hospitals as they care for patients from cradle to grave. In four movements, the rhythms of the health service are accompanied by a special choral work written by award winning composer Alex Woolf, an alumnus of the BBC's Proms Inspire Scheme.

The NHS Symphony is recorded in binaural stereo which simulates how the human ear hears sounds. For a fully immersive experience, the programme is best listened to on headphones.

The Bach Choir are joined by members of the Barts Choir, the Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Choir and the Royal Free Music Society Choir

Conductor: Mark Austin

Solo soprano: Julia Blinko

Composer/pianist: Alex Woolf

Producer: Laurence Grissell.

The rhythms of life in the NHS captured in immersive stereo and specially composed music.

An attempt to make some sense of a difficult and elusive modern masterpiece. The poem was published in 1955. It tells of a fishing trip after herring but much else including the difficulties of writing and of turning experience into words. Its fresh-made language has found it many admirers but it also kept it from many other readers. Perhaps a radio adapatation can unlock it.

Jonathan Davidson's adaptation of WS Graham's poem about a fishing trip.

The city is the summer home for over one and a half thousand nesting pairs. Nobody's quite sure why nightingales have adopted the city so enthusiastically. Maybe it's Berlin's enlightened policy towards park management which leaves areas of untended scrub and dense bushes providing ground-nesting nightingales with perfect cover.

Whatever the reason, this blossoming of nightingales means that their song has become the soundtrack to countless moments in Berlin's residents' lives: lovers listening to the nightingale's melody in the depths of the night; a childhood memory of illness soothed by hearing the song - and the German name Nachtigall - for the first time; and a visit to one of the few architectural remnants of Germania, Hitler's megalomaniacal plan for a new city on the site of Berlin.

This programme gathers memories of the nightingale's lingering, multi-faceted song and the sounds of city evenings to create an audio portrait of Berlin, its people and the bird to whom it's given refuge.

We hear too from a group of musicians who seek out nightingales in the city's parks to play alongside them. They describe feeling their way into the nightingale's song, the call-and-response between bird and human and the sense of each listening to the other. Some even describe themselves as nightingales: they've travelled from far countries to make music in Berlin.

The programme is made in collaboration with Berlin Museum of Natural History's Forschungsfall Nachtigall project that asks members of the public to record nightingales and send in their recordings - along with stories and memories of the bird which has become a symbol of the city.

With the voices of Sarah Darwin, Korhan Erel, Gaby Hartel, Volker Lankow, Christopher and Erika Lehmpfuhl, Charlotte Neidhardt, Philip Oltermann, Sascha Penshorn, Tina Roeske, David Rothenberg and Cymin Samawatie.

Featuring music from David Rothenberg's 'Nightingale Cities' project and 'Berlin Bülbül by David Rothenberg and Korhan Erel.

Location recordings in Berlin by Martyna Pozna?ska and Monika Dorniak.

Producer: Jeremy Grange

Photograph courtesy of Kim Mortega

A portrait of Berlin and its residents through the songs of the city's nightingales.

Those that elude the fishermen, scale the weirs, and escape the herons, grow to maturity in the rivers of England. A decade later, on an autumn night after rain, as silver eels, they begin their return journey to the seaweedy Sargasso sea. What happens next no one knows but no one has ever caught an eel that has spawned, so theymust breed, and die.

James Crowden, Somerset poet, traces their odyssey. Among his informants are Michael Brown of Thorney, who spent 25 years elver dealing and smoking eels. James sees the workings of a smokehouse, its design based on the brick privies European Jews found when they arrived in London's east End.

Brendan Sellick, lives near Hinkley Point Nuclear Power Station.He has been fishing for eels all his life, pushing his 'mud horse', a kind of sledge, out half a mile to the nets at low ride. He remembers glatting: hunting for eels at low tide with dogs.

Andy Don of the Environment Agency displays an ingenious eel pass, allowing the fish to pass obstacles to their migration such as flood barriers - vital as the eel population has plummeted.

At Mick's Eels, near Billingsgate, the whole mystery of jellied eels is revealed - gutting, chopping, boiling - and eating.

The Odyssey of Eels' is full of water, mud, slime and fire. And full of voices, from west and east, and the past. Eel poems by James Crowden writhe through it. (Repeat)

Producer: Julian May

First broadcast in June 2012.

From the Sargasso to Somerset and back, James Crowden traces the writhing odyssey of eels.

Ever since its unveiling, the Marx memorial has attracted a never-ending flow of people, although as Bradshaw predicted the great bronze head has suffered its ignominies, including an attempt by the far right to blow it to pieces. Alan Dein follows the journey Marx made from death to bronze icon and also travels to Chemnitz, aka Karl Marx Stadt, in the former German Democratic Republic. Here the largest head of Marx in the world stares out across the town square. Once a symbol of East Germany's unofficial capital - now a tourist magnet and a source of unexpected stories.

Alan Dein explores Karl Marx's journey from corpse to bronze monolith.

This programme weaves specially commissioned poems (Laurence O'Dwyer) and music that chart the pain and elation of running. It explores Larry's endurance, physical deterioration and injury alongside Matthias's personal determination to become the fastest known runner on the 800km route, the Haute Route Pyr退n退es.

Producer Zo뀀 Comyns weaves location recordings, amateur archive phone recordings, interviews, poetry and tracked runs.

With original compositions by Ruth Kennington, many musical sequences were performed live using real-time generation and manipulation of audio that responded to Laurence and Matthias's stories. Longer composition and looped components relay the repetition of ultrarunning and mimics how the mind works as the runners spend long periods on their own in dangerous and remote locations.

Each sound carries with it the resilience and propulsion of the long-distance runner. It charts how predictive brain studies in the lab might be applied out on the trail, how your mind ‘pre-plays' the terrain, anticipating where to place your feet at speed over long distances.

With thanks to Regan Hutchins, Kevin Brew and Ronan Kelly.

Produced by Zo뀀 Comyns

Original music and sound design by Ruth Kennington

HRP archive recordings Matthias Ekman.

The Racing Mind is a New Normal Culture production for BBC Radio 3

A meditation on ultrarunning through interviews, poetry, location recordings and music.

Khlebnikov's essay imagined all the world-changing possibilities of this new invention, uniting the whole of mankind through the sharing of knowledge, ideas and art.

Farley's poem conjures three voices - past, present and future. In the past, Velimir Khlebnikov (Rad Kaim) sits in his remote telegraph office in the Caucasus, broadcasting his vision of what radio could be. He's able to communicate with a young woman called Heed (Fanta Barrie), although he doesn't realise that she is a voice from the future, another displaced person on a planet in crisis. Radio, for her, is a vital link to other humans and to lost histories. Overhearing both of them is a Listener from 2022 (Paul Farley), who has his own thoughts on the place of radio in human culture.

A moving tribute to our relationship with radio and its potential to connect us across time and space.

Velimir.....Rad Kaim

Heed.....Fanta Barrie

The Listener.....Paul Farley

Sound design.....Nigel Lewis

Directed by Emma Harding for BBC Audio Drama Wales.

A new radio poem in three voices from Paul Farley, marking the centenary of BBC radio.

This is the focus of a new radio poem by Katrina Porteous, whose poetry, recorded all over Holy Island and in the Refuge Box itself, is interspersed with other voices, including island fishermen who remember rescues and tragedies, the coastguard and lifeboat crew, the bird warden, the Franciscan vicar of Holy Island, and a refugee who fled her West African homeland to seek sanctuary in Britain.

Beyond the human voices is the poetry of the place itself, the seals singing, the wheeze of swans flying over Holy Island, sudden jet fighters protecting this sanctuary yet violating its peace and, always, the wind and the sea.

A radio poem by Katrina Porteous about the Refuge Box, off the coast of Northumbria.

Over four movements of rich and evocative music, the listener is transported to the front line of the climate crisis, with stories from coastal Ghana - where entire villages are being swept away by the rising sea - to Norway's Svalbard archipelago in the high arctic where the ice is melting with alarming speed. The dramatic final movement ponders two contrasting possible outcomes to the crisis.

In an ambitious new work originally commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for their Between the Ears strand, Kieran Brunt weaves together electronic, vocal and orchestral elements recorded in isolation by players from the BBC Philharmonic. Each musician recorded their part individually at home and these recordings were then painstakingly combined by sound engineer Donald MacDonald to create a symphonic sound.

Documentary producer Laurence Grissell and composer Kieran Brunt have collaborated to produce an ambitious and original evocation of the causes and consequences of rising, warming oceans.

Credits

Composer: Kieran Brunt

Producer: Laurence Grissell

Electronics and violin performed by Kieran Brunt

Orchestral parts performed by members of the BBC Philharmonic

Vocals: Kieran Brunt, Josephine Stephenson & Augustus Perkins Ray of the vocal ensemble Shards

Sound mixed by Donald MacDonald

Interviewees:

Sulley Lansah, BBC Accra Office

Hilde F倀lun Strøm and Sunniva Sørby, heartsintheice.com

Blaise Agresti, former head of Mountain Rescue, Chamonix

Blaise Agresti recorded by Sarah Bowen

Wildlife recordings by Chris Watson

Newsreaders: Susan Rae & Tom Sandars

Adverts voiced by Ian Dunnett Jnr, Luke Nunn, Charlotte East, Cecilia Appiah

The effects of climate change evoked in words, sounds and a powerful new musical work

The challenges they face become apparent as we follow cellists undertaking a simulated concert with their string quartets and at the same time surgeons going through a simulated vascular procedure. A collaboration between Roger Kneebone, Professor of Surgical Education in the Department of Surgery and Cancer at Imperial College London and Aaron Williamon, Professor of Performance Science at the Royal College of Music in London.

The simulated environments have been recorded binaurally from the point of view of each surgeon and cellist so wearing headphones will enhance your experience.

Surgeons and Performers:

Primary surgeons: Dominic P. J. Howard, Alexandra Cope and Yousuf Salmasi.

The patient is played by Norma Jones.

Other members of the surgical team: Dr Aynkaran Dharmarajah (consultant anaesthetist), Kathy Nicholson (scrub nurse), Lilli Cooper, Kat Ford and Howard Tribe (surgical assistants), Alexander Harris (clinical research fellow) and Zinah Sorefan (research technician).

Cellists: Jane Lindsay, George Ross and Linden Ralph.

Other members of the string quartets: Agata Darashkaite, Brigid Coleridge, Christine Anderson, Magdalena Loth-Hill, Louisa Tatlow, Itamar Rashkovsky, Sarah Baldwin and Elijah Spies.

For further photos from the professors and full interviews with the surgeons and cellists taking part, please go to:

http://www1.imperial.ac.uk/medicine/people/r.kneebone/

www.rcm.ac.uk/scalpelandbow

Bioharness readings were taken by Lisa Aufegger.

The sound designer and producer was Lucinda Mason Brown and executive producer Karen Rose.

A Goldhawk Essential production for BBC Radio 3.

A feature comparing the worlds of the medical surgeon and performing musicians.

Originally from the USA, Jack served in the Vietnam War as a medic, treating soldiers and Vietnamese villagers alike, sometimes under enemy fire. After the war he became a Forensic Investigator. The FI is called out to fatal accidents, suicides and any unexplained death to pronounce the victim dead and to check there is nothing suspicious. Jack calls himself a modern day Charon and has witnessed thousands of scenes of tragedy, or stupidity, or plain bad luck.

Many times when driving to an accident late at night Jack would play a CD of his favourite movie, Taxi Driver, which starred Robert De Niro as a Vietnam Veteran who didn't adjust particularly well to life after the war.

Jack got fed up living in the USA and now lives in Ypres, Belgium. Producer Matt Thompson travelled to Ypres to record Jack and a selection of his self-published stories for 'The Empath'.

What is a life like spent in the company of the dead?

Matt Thompson profiles former forensic investigator Jack Sturiano.

The cry rings out once, twice a day from people who catch sight of the shanty boat as it wends its way down the back waters of the USA.

Hand built out of reclaimed redwood by artist, anarchist, and surprisingly practical river boat captain Wes Modes - his aura is that of a modern day Huck Finn, his shipmates are friends and lovers and 'Good dog Hazel' is always on the couch, on guard, or under the table.

In a rich tapestry of watery atmosphere, frustration, intimacy, fear and pleasure, we hear a slipping, sliding adventure, where the smell of pancakes, the slap of water and the smoke of cigars wafts over the waters of Americas great rivers.

On his travels Wes records the stories of people on the river for his 'Secret History' project. He's met shanty boat dwellers from the '20s and '30s, including Anita Smith Cobb who recalls her sister finding Tennessee pearls on the river, and a violent encounter with a wild cat, and Betty Goines who once shot two intruders when she was a child guarding the boat.

In between stories we hear his views on billionaire worship - sometimes in language not for the fainthearted - and how an artist and an anarchist fits into America today.

But living the dream on the shanty boat isn't always straightforward...

Perhaps there would be engine problems; perhaps flames would lick the side of the raft and the local police take an extra interest...

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps...

A wide screen, extravagantly rich textured tale of risk, romance, and tested tempers.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

Special Effects: Barney Quinton.

Frogs, storms and fireworks on the river with a modern-day US Huck Finn-style anarchist.

In a sheep bell-rich melange, we go in hunt of the real thing, with sheep farmer, author of world best-seller 'Driving Over Lemons' and ex-Genesis member Chris Stewart, and academic, writer and potential Bo-Peeper Alexandra Harris.

Those famous shepherds watching their flocks by night were, of course, following in a great tradition - guarding sheep, leading them to pasture, and then probably killing their babies - just like Able, the first shepherd.

From ancient times, the shepherd and the sheep they care for, have been the most consistent of rural sights - they appear in poetry, plays and painting, inaccurately, romanticised, and highly symbolic.

The closest Alexandra Harris has been to real sheep has been wandering past a few woolly bundles on the South Downs. She is, of course, more familiar with the Pastoral in art - from the Greek idyll to Shakespeare's 'A Winter's Tale'. To her - 'shepherding suggests knowing the real facts of life, wisdom of all time coming down through the ages'.

Chris Stewart, who left the UK 25 years ago to pursue a new life as a shepherd in Spain, has 40-plus years of shepherding under his belt. He is more than familiar with the sheep's ways - their smells, herd mentality, incontinence and vulnerability. He knows how to feed one, find one and kill one, when necessary, although he still loves them dearly. To help Alexandra get to grips with the reality of the pastoral life, Chris suggests 'get your own flock of sheep and become a shepherdess....

Enter Paco - hardy Alpujarran mountain shepherd, bachelor and philosopher - although when asked what he thinks about whilst watching his flocks all day, he can only answer 'No, pienso nada!

Let the sheep bells fly....

Producer

Sara Jane Hall

Music

Sheepwrecked - from the traditional

Combined with Yan Tan Tether (Trad)

And Mangare

Peformed by Nathaniel Mann

Count Your Blessings (instead of Sheep) sung by Bing Crosby

Poets

Edmund Spencer

Sir Walter Raleigh

Read by Richard Burton

Sheep and bells

Recording on location in Olias and El Valero, Alpujarra mountains, Spain, and Shearwell Farm, Exmouth

Extra baas from a biscuit tin

Writer Chris Stewart knows a thing or two about sheep. Alexandra Harris knows art. Baa!

An innovative adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's haunting classic Christmas tale, read by Luke Thompson and adapted for radio by Amber Barnfather.

Written as a Christmas present, Forsyth's gripping and much-loved ghost story is a moving reflection on loneliness, fear, gratitude and sacrifice.

A binaural soundscape features specially recorded a cappella pieces, improvised sounds and mouth/body percussion by the Saint Martin Singers, conducted by Charles Talbot. It includes symbolic sound effects using Christmas decorations and Vampire aircraft recordings made at the RAF Museum, London.

Luke Thompson's credits include lead roles at Shakespeare's Globe. In 2013, he was nominated for an Ian Charleson award, given annually to an actor under 30 for a performance in a classical play. This is his debut solo piece for BBC radio.

A small, amateur choir, the Saint Martin Singers owe their origin to a few fire watchers at the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields during World War Two who made music together on the quieter nights.

Sound design: David Chilton

Adaptor/Producer: Amber Barnfather

A Goldhawk Essential production for BBC Radio 3.

Innovative adaptation of Frederick Forsyth's haunting classic aviation Christmas tale.

The Oxmardyke Gate Box is one of the last in the UK to use antiquated mechanical bells to carry semaphore-style messages up and down the line. Soon this system of `absolute block signalling` will pass into history, as computers take over. The bells, like the humans who listen for them, will no longer be needed.

In this feature fusing fact and fiction, the poet Ross Sutherland visits Oxmardyke to meet Dave Beckett, one of the last operators to use the bells. From their elevated position, the pair gaze out over the hinterland near the muddy Humber estuary. It's an area of villages with Anglo-Saxon names: Gilberdyke, Broomfleet and Saxfleet, with remains of the monastery where the Knights Templar would return after international travel. The flat, reclaimed land has an eerie quality, accentuated by a strange local phenomenon known as a temperature inversion (where high density cold air becomes trapped by warm wetter air) causing sound to carry further, meaning passing trains loom larger and echo further than they ordinarily would.

Writer: Ross Sutherland

Contributor: Dave Beckett

Producers: Jack Howson and Joby Waldman

Sound Design: Chris Watson and Steve Bond

A Reduced Listening Production for BBC Radio 3

A signalman on a remote railway line is visited by a traveller. By Ross Sutherland.

The story behind a set of audio recordings from the 1950s discovered on reel-to-reel tapes

We follow a journey of the W12 recorded in the summer of 2019, as it crosses from Walthamstow to Wanstead in East London. Two long term drivers on the route, Godfrey Stewart and Mohammed Shabir, share stories from their working life as it was then and as it is now, in spring/summer 2020 amid the pandemic.

Rhiannon remembers her friendship with the driver of the bus home from school in Montreal in the early 1990s, and recounts how her understanding of the relationship has changed over time. Through these recollections, conversations with Godfrey and Mohammed, and music made from field recordings of the route in 2019, what emerges is a meditation on loneliness, usefulness, and the place a bus route can have in our lives.

Written and produced by Rhiannon Armstrong

With contributions from Godfrey Stewart and Mohammed Shabir

Music by Dinah Mullen with Rhiannon Armstrong

Executive producer Sarah Cuddon

Mixed by Mike Wooley

Transcription support from Harun Morrison and Jo Verrent

A nostalgic meditation on the W12 bus route in east London.

In this imaginative journey through the synapses a work, rest and play - Susan Aldworth, Artist in Residence at York University, slips inside a scanner, under the suprvision of neuroscientists Professor Miles Whittington, and Dr Fiona LeBeau, who she has been working with on a project exploring sleep, to discover whether paying heed to the three second rhythm of the mind can help us work rest and play.

By the time you finish this sentence you will have made up your mind.

You don't know it yet but the three second rule governs your life.

There is a brain pulse, a sequence of internal events that repeats every three seconds.

This also applies to poems and music, even Beethoven's Fifth.

The repetition of phrases three seconds long is easily grasped.

Sentence interpretation is also best understood at three seconds.

It seems that the rule applies also when we are chilling out.

We turn our thoughts inside as we daydream away.

Whether we are choosing a lover,

Reading a poem, painting a picture, or singing,

It seems that maybe we all operate this way.

Our attention span working in bursts of time.

In this programme we will hear a brain working.

mixed with the musings of actor Michelle Newell,

We will build up a sound world of three second pulses.

Get a rhythm of irresistible beats going in the listener.

In the brain of Susan Aldworth, artist and printmaker.

With the mind of Simon Townley, musician and composer,

The wiles of dating coach Shaun (aka Discovery), and

Professor Miles Whitingdon, Dr Fiona LeBeau, Dr Kai Alter.

If you've made your mind up to listen by now, I hope you choose well.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall.

To see why the relaxed brain is happiest, artist Susan Aldworth slides inside a scanner.

On an island of a population of around 250 people, a thousand sheep and many more penguins, Joe also gets a flavour of what happened to the islanders when the volcano last erupted and they were forced to leave their homes, sixty years ago. Cracks in the ground were opening and closing - one sheep fell in! Boats took them to a nearby penguin colony where they sheltered until rescued. Sent to live in the UK, all chose to return to Tristan as soon as it was declared safe by an expeditionary force sent out by The Royal Society.

The island was just as they had left it, the settlement miraculously spared, though all the sheep mysteriously disappeared... there are theories as to why!

Memories of the volcano are mixed with Joe's daily life - the domestic close up sounds of cows birthing, bulls hoisted onto land from bucking fishing vessels and gong clanging to bring the islanders together.

The atmosphere is punctuated by updated versions of traditional sea shanties - performed by the likes of Lou Reed, Anthony, Beth Orton, Rufus Wainwright, Richard Thomson and Tim Robbins.

This rocky outcrop was claimed by the Dutch, the British, the Portuguese, and even an American Privateer, geographically useful to all in its splendid isolation, (even in the 20th century the islanders only heard about the ‘result' of the First World War a year after it finished). Today, we might envy their close community and isolation in a world endangered by today's globalisation.

Joe was lucky to get permission to record during his time there, by the island council, scarred by their previous experiences with the ‘press', most particularly during that 18 months living as refugees in the UK.

From the most remote community in the world - Tristan Da Cunha - the sounds, songs and tales of a whole island committed to socially isolating - together.

With grateful thanks to the people of Tristan Da Cunha.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

Archive: The Royal Society Volcanic Eruption on Tristan da Cunha, 1961

Music: as sourced by Danny Webb from 'Rogue's Gallery' - a series of sea shanties and pirate songs.

And 'Imaginary Songs From Tristan Da Cunha' by Deathprod.

Seal attacks, snapping penguins, angry bulls... a vet's life on Tristan Da Cunha.

30 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee created the very first website. This powerful edition of Between the Ears explores how the internet has dramatically reshaped our lives over the following three decades.

In 1990s Glasgow, a young woman in a physics computer lab glimpses a different future for the world - and herself. In Luton, the web awakens a young man's Sikh identity - a few years on, it will bring him riches. In 2001, a young mother in France finds escape through Wikipedia. Ten years later, an Austrian law student is horrified when he requests his personal data from Facebook -

Over four movements of music and personal stories, the Virtual Symphony moves from sunny optimism to deep disquiet, as our relationship to the internet shifts. Around these stories, composer Kieran Brunt weaves electronic and vocal elements in an exhilarating new musical work commissioned by BBC Radio 3.

Kieran Brunt and documentary producer Laurence Grissell worked in close collaboration to produce a unique evocation of the way in which the internet has fundamentally changed how we experience and understand the world.

Composer: Kieran Brunt

Producer: Laurence Grissell

Interviewees:

Melissa Terras, Harjit Lakhan, Florence Devouard and Max Schrems

Electronics performed by Kieran Brunt

Vocals performed by Kieran Brunt, Lucy Cronin, Kate Huggett, Oliver Martin-Smith and Augustus Perkins Ray of the vocal ensemble Shards

Programme mixed by: Donald MacDonald

Additional music production: Paul Corley

Additional engineering: Ben Andrewes

The joys and horrors of the internet, evoked by stories and a new electronic-vocal work

https://youtu.be/RHt6QIJI9cU also available from the GSA SimVis YouTube channel.

For the first time, a virtual reality experience and radio documentary will bring to life the ethereal magic of Fingal's Cave - the awesome natural structure on the uninhabited island of Staffa, in the Inner Hebrides of Scotland. Using cutting-edge technology, which captures not only the acoustics of the melodic cave, but its awe-inspiring visual scale and beauty, this Between the Ears takes you to a site of natural beauty that has inspired Felix Mendelssohn, Jules Verne, John Keats, August Strindberg and countless others.

Featuring a rich cinematic sound experience, we follow the work of Dr Stuart Jeffrey from The Glasgow School of Art's School of Simulation and Visualisation, and sound designer and composer, Aaron May, as they both - in their own ways - explore the remarkable Fingal's Cave. A few years ago Stuart and a team of archaeologists from the National Trust for Scotland discovered Bronze Age remains close to the cave and near a 19th century building that was used by early tourists as a shelter from the elements. We join Stuart on location as he continues the dig and unearths further evidence of a Bronze Age site, and we accompany him into the heart of the cave during different sea states.

At certain times, the cave actually sounds musical, and this is the reason why local people named it the ‘musical cave'. Stuart explains that inside the cave there is a natural cognitive dissonance that can be very unsettling, indeed some visitors are left feeling on edge. This is because the resonant sounds of blowing and popping, together with booming waves; create a soundscape that does not match the movement of the waves.

During the Romantic period, Fingal's Cave attracted much attention and inspired many musicians, artists and literary figures and poets. Felix Mendelssohn made it ashore in 1829 and was so moved by the unearthly sounds that fill the cave he created the remarkable Hebrides Overture in response. Jules Verne said, 'the vast cavern with its mysterious, dark, weed-covered chambers and marvellous basaltic pillars produced upon me a most striking impression and was the origin of my book, Le Rayon Vert`. During the 19th-century era of romanticism and the sublime, the Germans were particularly enthralled by Fingal's Cave. Not only did they visit, but quirky plays and stories were even set there (including Bride of the Isles about vampires living inside Fingal's Cave).

The location's rich mythology, including that of mermaids and giants, highlights the sublime aspect of the place. Stuart's wider research, a collaboration with Professor Sian Jones at the University of Stirling, is trying to fill in the gap between how the Romantics viewed it - a site of awe - and how we see it today. `We have become dull souls, seeing it only as a nature reserve,` he says. Stuart hopes to change that perception by investigating whether cutting-edge technology can capture a place's very essence.

And this is where composer Aaron May comes into this story. Whereas Stuart has spent many hours within the magnificent natural structure, Aaron has never set foot in Fingal's Cave. But for this documentary he has created a new musical composition based upon his experience of entering a phenomenally exact virtual reality reconstruction, made by Stuart and his team at Glasgow School of Art. The VR version, features laser scans, photogrammetry and acoustic sound maps. You are able to tour the entire length of the cave and even hear how a piece of music would sound if played within it. A version of this virtual reality experience, complete with Aaron's composition, will be made available for listeners to explore on their smart phones. And of course, Aaron's remarkable and evocative soundtrack will feature in the radio documentary.

Listeners will be able to access a version of the VR experience using their smart phones and a high-end version, running on an HTC Vive, will showcase at the Edinburgh Festivals in August 2019. For those unable to make the trip to Staffa, it's the nearest you will get to experiencing the full majesty of the location.

To view the VR experience in 360 on your smartphone, paste the following link into your search browser: https://youtu.be/RHt6QIJI9cU

Producer: Kate Bissell

With thanks to:

Dr Stuart Jeffrey from the School of Simulation and Visualisation at The Glasgow School of Art

Derek Alexander from The National Trust for Scotland

Professor Sian Jones from the University of Stirling

Shona Noble

Aura Bockute

Singing in Aaron's composition by Heloise Werner and David Ridley

A virtual reality radio documentary brings to life the ethereal magic of Fingal's Cave.

David Holmes puts music to the stories of people across the divide in Northern Ireland.

David Holmes puts music to the stories of people across the divide in Northern Ireland.

Now a thousand-strong eco-community, Damanhur also claims to have conquered time travel, taught plants to sing, visited Atlantis and saved the planet from destruction. Its residents take part in bizarre rituals and regularly work throughout the night in service to the group, yet many still hold down highly-paid professional jobs in the outside world.

Is it another case of a deluded cult or has Damanhur achieved something remarkable in the cynical 21st century?

Sony Award winning presenter and musician David Bramwell (Between the Ears: 'The Haunted Moustache') takes a sound journey through the community, deep into the bowels of its temple, where the Time Machine has been created, listens to a jazz singer improvise with a musical plant, and has a lesson in esoteric physics.

He also attempts to unravel Damanhur's history and purpose, challenging some of its unfeasible claims through conversations with its residents, and attempts to become a Time Traveller himself.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall

Presenter: David Bramwell

First broadcast in June 2013.

A time machine in the world's largest underground temple? Secrets of Damanhur revealed.

`Loving and grieving are joined at the hip,` says spiritual activist and author Stephen Jenkinson. `Grief is a way of loving what has slipped from view. Love is a way of grieving that which has not yet done so.`

Biologist and philosopher Andreas Weber and poet and psychologist Anita Barrows reflect on what is lost as beloved species and places of wilderness continue to vanish; reparations scholar-activist Esther Stanford-Xosei grieves the genocide of communities that were the custodians of ways of living in harmony with the earth; and activist Kofi Mawuli Klu mourns the immense beauty of forests now destroyed.

Every waking moment is a requiem - not what we signed up for. But what did you sign up for? Into what were you initiated? Lacking in ceremony and ritual, grappling with legacies of undone spirit work and ancestral trauma, bearing witness to what is happening within ourselves and around us might `not be everybody's idea of a good time` (Stephen Jenkinson), but it might be what we need to do. It might help us to belong.

Voice of the chorus: Niamh O'Brien.

Cello improvisations: Lucy Railton

Additional words and music: Phil Smith

Produced by Phil Smith.

A call to confront the spiritual questions of our time.

For many growing up and working in Liverpool during the 50s and 60s, The Beatles have cast a long shadow. They breathed the same air, inhabited the same streets and felt the same promise of a new, postwar culture. The story of the 'Fab Four' has been told and told again. But for a young couple like Gwen and her ex-soldier husband Ken, and young people like Barrie (a biology teacher who taught sex education to thousands of 'Scousers' before moving to Manhattan) and Keith (the son of a bookie's runner and Cavern member), the experiences of the 60s formed the basis of their lives - and all played out to a Beatles soundtrack.

The album Revolver confirmed The Beatles' transition from young lovable moptops to maturer, somewhat troubled artists. In a collage of music, voices and location atmospheres, Tomorrow Never Knew accompanies Gwen, Barrie and Keith through the intervening years and, simultaneously, retraces the band's origins to an encounter at a fete in a field next to St Peter's Church, Woolton, with some of those who were there.

Produced by Alan Hall

A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio Three.

If affected by substance misuse, please contact:

www.changegrowlive.org

Revolver and the long shadow of The Beatles on the people of Liverpool.

Tower of Babel recently won the 'Deutsches Horspielpreis der ARD', the highest award for a radio play in Germany. It is a co-production between the BBC and German radio stations HR, NDR, RBB and SWR.

Violin, Daniel Hope

Dramaturg, Ursula Ruppel

Co-director, Tilman Hecker

In co-production with HR, NDR, RBB and SWR.

Robert Wilson's impressionistic interpretation of the story of the Tower of Babel.

This programme unfolds with one of the BBC orchestras on stage tuning up, where we return at regular intervals to hear from musicians about the importance of this moment. Alongside them are cricketers, sprinters, restaurateurs, surfers, singers. All of them know the progress from ordinary life to another life under the spotlight, and they all have ways of coping. Aidan listens to their inner voices, their mantras, the rituals that make the transition seem controllable. He explores the way time shifts, accelerating and slowing, and why the final silence is at once terrifying and magical.

Producer: Tom Alban

Poet Aidan Tulloch explores the transformative space where people become performers.

cross-fade: to 'fade in' one sound or picture while 'fading out' another.

This 'Between the Ears' charts a journey in sound through the UK, moving from west to east, and north to south, in a series of long, very slow and sometimes almost imperceptible fades from one location to another.

This is a journey in sound alone - a journey without a presenter, interviews, or script.

At the heart of the programme are location recordings and sound-scapes from a wide range of places across the country - from the morning boats in a Devon harbour to an evening on the seafront in Skegness, via the daytime streets and quads of Oxford and a street parade in Spalding, to the sounds of rural Scotland and urban Lancashire.

The journey follows a simple pattern, which listeners are invited to puzzle out for themselves.

Producers: John Goudie and Alan Dein.

A journey in sound, moving across the UK in a series of fades from one location to another

Combining narrated fiction with observations from the world of history and culture, the programme uses radiophonic music and sound design to take us inside Charles Proctor's mind.

As Dr Proctor descends deeper into amnesia, we hear voices reflecting on memory: Walter de la Mare, Rabbi Ben Ezra, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Emily Dickinson, William Wordsworth, Luis Bunuel, Harold Pinter, Francis Galton, Rene Descartes, W.B.Yeats, and Elvis Presley.

And we encounter a new age healer, Madam Aladdin (Harriet Walter), a radical who advocates going with the disease. She entreats Dr Proctor to join her Lamp Camp and Illumination Showroom, and embrace amnesia as a way of 'extending the boundaries of the self - of becoming someone else'.

Producer, Iain Chambers.

A Falling Tree production for BBC R3.

A play by Peter Blegvad and Iain Chambers charting the failing memory of a fictional GP.

A man in another room watches her on a screen.

Her loving father?

No.

This man does not know this baby. He's in another country, thousands of miles away. And, each night, he watches a different baby.

Wake Up, Baby! is an atmospheric journey into the sometimes unsettling world of 'reassuring' technology.

The media storm that surrounded the 1932 'baby Lindbergh kidnap', and the subsequent trial, planted the fear of child abduction into the public imagination. In 1937, Zenith produced the Radio Nurse, the world's first baby monitor, designed to fit well into an elegant sitting room, with a transmitting unit in baby's nursery.

The Radio Nurse was a tiny private radio station, casting baby's cries onto the electromagnetic seas. To feel the presence of baby in whichever room you occupied while she stayed safe in the nursery was a kind of magic - wonderfully reassuring to a couple in their big house. But it was prone to interference. You might hear things other than baby: a police radio, a pilot preparing to land, or even someone else's baby, picked up from a similar device nearby.

The problem of stray interference went away in the digital age. The baby monitor, now with pictures as well as sound, became wi-fi-enabled. In recent years, there have been several well-reported cases of devices being hacked. A couple in Ohio heard 'Wake up, baby. Wake up, baby! screaming from their baby's monitor. Someone had taken control of the wi-fi device across the internet.

With contributions from:

Dakin Hart, senior curator, Noguchi Museum, New York

Ashley Stanley, victim of widely-reported webcam hack in Texas

Renate Samson, Chief Executive, Big Brother Watch

Produced by Peregrine Andrews.

An exploration of the sometimes unsettling world of 'reassuring' technology.

If you look down from a high floor in New York, you'll see a landscape of differing levels of flat roofs of low- and high-rise buildings. They have one thing in common, if they are over six stories high they need a roof-top tank to store water. These rocket shaped towers look different according to the light, season and weather and appear to have personalities. Visitors find them particularly fascinating.

Award-winning sound designer Jon Nicholls builds a musical and haunting soundscape. We stand perched on the roof of a high residential building in the Chelsea district downtown and witness the destruction of an old tower and watch the assembly of the new tank. It's like a jigsaw puzzle.

The highly functional towers have inspired artists who take these quaint prosaic structures and reimagine them. Sculptors Rachel Whiteread and Tom Fruin have made life size water towers out of resin and Perspex.

We visit the Museum of Modern Art where Whiteread's luminous water tank has been overlooking the garden for twenty years.

In contrast, we explore a very ephemeral art event - a pop-up nightclub with cabaret music that takes place secretly inside a decommissioned tank on the roof of a deserted building.

And there's local photographer Ronnie Farley, who not only spent 20 years taking pictures of New York's water tanks but also has assembled one in her loft apartment. She says, 'I feel that these water towers are witnesses. They watch us. They look after us.

Sound Design by Jon Nicholls

Produced by Judith Kampfner

Photo credit: Water Tower by Tom Fruin photo Matthew Pugliese.

A soundscape centring on the water tanks atop some of New York City's tall buildings.

Some poets like woods. Some poets like cliffs. Kate Clanchy likes schools: in particular the small, extremely diverse and often challenging comprehensive where she has been working for the last seven years: Oxford Spires Academy.

A school which still looks and sounds like the grammar school it once was - until you look closer and see there are more black faces than white, that most of the cricket team comes from Bangladesh, and that as they have 54 languages between them - Latvian, Nepalese, Hungarian, Kiswahili, Ibo and six kinds of Arabic - the kids have decided to speak English in the idiom of Kanye West, even if they are Lithuanian. This is a community without a majority culture - a place where, as no one is really sure of the right way to do things, eccentricity and creativity flourish.

~Between The Ears takes us into Kate's poetry workshop to meet its multi award-winning young poets. This new Britain is writing a new poem about home: the homes and home countries they came from, the new homes they have found, and the home they are making in their school and in their writing.

With poems from Robert Seatter and Azfa Awad.

Sound design: Eloise Whitmore.

A radio poem from Kate Clanchy and the Very Quiet Foreign Girls.

We have created audio that is inspired by physical acts of walking and talking, transformed into a unique blend of field recordings with music and poetic storytelling. These stories have been created following individual walks in places across the UK, and captures the feeling of the walk, weather, length, difficulty and conversations had. The artist has been on the journey and has bought it back to your ears in unexpected ways. The journey has been reimagined through recorded sound from the walks, interwoven with music by Ross I'Anson. These pieces will take you on a journey and evoke imagery and feelings that will bring you closer to the outdoors.

These pieces are designed to be listened to anywhere with the hope that they inspire others to shove on some walking boots and get stuck into nature. Whether you walk in your hometown or further afield these audio pieces help you to see the joy in the rain, accomplishments through pain and space to breathe.

New Creatives commissions innovative new short films, audio and interactive works from young artists and is co-funded by Arts Council England and BBC Arts.

Storytelling of walks with friends, which will transport you outdoors.

A sonic reflection on Venice, portrayed through the ears of its residents.

English composer Jocelyn Pook asks 'what happens when we die?' Scored with new music.

Sony Award-winning musician David Bramwell heads out over the Downs to Ditchling, Sussex, where Peter Howell and John Ferdinando first met as teenagers - creating the soundtrack for the Ditchling Players' performance of 'Alice', using not only musical instruments, but also kitchen appliances and field recordings, utilising the possibilities of the latest domestic recording gadget - a reel-to-reel tape machine.

Bramwell travels across the Downs to meet folk chanteuse Shirley Collins and her tales of ghostly morris bells; dives beneath the waters of the Ouse with musician Isobel Anderson; is serenaded on the chalky hillsides by God of Hellfire, Arthur Brown; encounters a modern day Puck of Pook's Hill - poet Sam Walker; and finds out about the Ditchling Players from Ian Clayton, member since 1948, and his son Matthew; before enticing Martha Kearney, the young Alice, to recall the production's eccentric Englishness.

For the confused, he grapples with the term 'pastoral psych folk' with former Oz and NME journalist John May, and rare groove aficionado Richard Norris, who moved to Sussex under the influence of this strange piece of musical history.

And what became of those two young musicians? One is now a local surveyor - though he still plays in a band - whilst the other went on to re-master the Dr Who theme tune as a member of the Radiophonic Workshop.

With music from the original album, and composer David Bramwell, 'White Rabbits in Sussex' is a psychedelic journey of its own, blending experimental studio techniques with music and narrative as we traverse the waterways and bottoms, the beacons and duck ponds of Sussex, in search of the muse.

Producer: Sara Jane Hall.

How an amateur production of Alice Through the Looking Glass became a psychedelic record.

Taking the themes of woven hair and woven lives, of history and culture, the programme explores the link between the changing politics of black female identity, notions of black beauty, and how this has been expressed through hair to the present day.

Zena Edwards has been commissioned to write new poetic narratives for the programme.

Producer: Ella-Mai Robey

(R).

A story about black female identity told through the words of poets.

In the company of wildlife recording supremo Chris Watson, Clayton sets off on a burning blue autumn day to watch one of the great corvid happenings, the roost at Buckenham and wonder at the temporal, spatial and collective consciousness of the feathered mass.

During lockdown producer Mark Burman was struck by the sheer communicative din of the crows and magpies-what did it all mean? What are they communicating. Enter Scientist & Dancer Nicola Clayton. She has devoted forty years to studying the corvid mind and their perception of space, self and time. Her research has shown that corvids remember the past and plan for the future, and that they can think about other minds as well as other times. For example, they go to great lengths to protect their stashes of hidden food from the likelihood of being stolen by others who watched or heard them cache. PhD researcher Francesca Cornero spends her days observing the rooks that Clayton reared, analysing how they respond to vocal commands & stimuli. These are wild birds, can they really respond like a domesticated creature like a dog? Choreographer & Dancer Mark Baldwin, former director of the Ballet Rambert has worked with Clayton for almost fifteen years to understand the movement & mind of corvids & how birds & humans can dance the dance of life. Poet Rosie O'Reilly has fused science and culture in her exploration of the deep symbolism of these black winged bird brains.

With readings from Mark Cocker's Crow Country by Gerard McDermott.

The mind and time of corvids has been a never-ending quest for scientist Nicola Clayton.