Emerging talent from two BBC talent development schemes - Sound First and Words First - collaborate to create new soundworlds of spoken word and sound design. 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 Poe...
Mar 03, 2024•36 min
Ian Rawes (1965-2021) was a sound recordist best known for creating the London Sound Survey, a huge collection of his recordings of the sounds of London. 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 ...
Jul 03, 2023•29 min
A sonic journey into Japan's unique culture of music cafés and listening bars. Places where people come together to indulge in deep listening in audiophile quality, with venues for fans of everything from classical, jazz, to electronic music. 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 cafés where, for the price of a cup of coffee, they could listen to rare records on the...
Mar 26, 2023•29 min
The permafrost is a thriving ecosystem, teaming with life, mythology, histories and futures, hidden just below the surface. Yet unlike tropical rainforests or the deep oceans, this frozen expanse rarely appears in the cultural imagination. Curator Sophie J Williamson ventures on a journey to discover the life of the permafrost. 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 l...
Feb 19, 2023•29 min
The UKs last remaining coal fired power stations are about to close, bringing to an end our use of coal to produce our electricity. West Burton is one of the last coal fired power stations still generating electricity, and Andrew Carter was able to record a soundscape there before it falls silent for ever. West Burton was originally planned to close in September 2022, but the Russian invasion of Ukraine has extended its operations until the spring of 2023 to help with continuity of supply during...
Dec 06, 2022•28 min
In this piece, the fool stands at the edge of the cliff, looking up at the sky. She asks herself, “How did I get here?” And also, “Where am I meant to go?” Part of our recurring series of miniature audio-works for Radio 3's home for adventurous radio-making - Between the Ears. In this series, five audio-makers from around the world were invited to choose a card from the tarot deck as a creative prompt for their idea. The card at the heart of this edition is The Fool. Featuring: Briana Gutierrez ...
Nov 18, 2022•14 min
Filling out a form, Mido is confronted with a series of boxes to tick. Two familiar boxes emerge from the crowd and stand side by side. One says ‘Male’. The other says ‘Female’. Beyond the Box is an intimate and inquisitive immersion into the nature of these boxes and what life is like living beyond them. Developed through a series of facilitated workshops, producer Christina Hardinge invites friend Mido to explore their personal lived experience of being ‘put in a box’. By integrating the thera...
Nov 17, 2022•14 min
feeling body is part of a series of pieces reflecting on the physical and psychological experiences during and after an extended period of illness (long-COVID). The work draws on multiple symbolisms, from The Nine of Swords in the Minor Arcana, to the undercurrent of water, where long baths were a point of solace during the experience of debilitating symptoms. Interspersed with perspectives of internal and external interactions, voiced by the composer in multiple ways as well as a by Kiswahili t...
Nov 15, 2022•13 min
Marta Medvešek explores a local legend she encounters on her summer vacation in Bol, Croatia – the story of the House in a House. A magical place where imagination meets reality, and fate–possibility. The House in a House forms part of our recurring series of miniature audio-works for Radio 3's home for adventurous radio-making - Between the Ears. In this series, five audio-makers from around the world were invited to choose a card from the tarot deck as a creative prompt for their idea. The car...
Nov 15, 2022•14 min
Researchers Bongani Kona and Catherine Boulle have spent the last year piecing together the story of one woman’s decades-long search to find the remains of her father, a South African political activist who died in 1966. In between visiting old prisons and sifting through archival collections, Bongani begins dreaming about the ghost of his own father, a man he's never met. The quest to uncover the meaning behind these recurring dreams leads to Julia, a spirit medium and healer, who practices one...
Nov 14, 2022•14 min
The joys and horrors of the internet, evoked by stories, sounds and an exciting new electronic and vocal work composed by Kieran Brunt. Opens with an introduction by the composer. 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 Lu...
Jul 18, 2021•29 min
A radiophonic exploration of The Gododdin, a lament for the fallen, bringing to life one of the oldest, yet enduringly relevant, treasures of European literature 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 thr...
Jun 16, 2021•29 min
In early summer, as darkness descends, Berlin resonates with the sound of nightingales. You can hear their haunting, ever-changing songs in parks, woodlands and gardens across the city. From Kreuzberg to Treptower, Tempelhof to Hasenheide, Berlin has become a refuge for one of the most celebrated and mythologised birds on earth. 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 Be...
Jun 14, 2021•29 min
Maria Margaronis surrenders to the life of the hive to explore the ancient folk customs around the telling the bees. 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 beli...
Mar 22, 2021•30 min
Bogs have always captured the human imagination, inspiring both fear and fiction. Between the Ears wades into this treacherous netherworld in a search for the lost and found. 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 'Pi...
Jan 31, 2021•30 min
Composer and sound artist Rob Mackay traces the migratory route of the monarch butterfly, from the Great Lakes in Canada to the forests of Mexico, via the shifting coastal landscape of the eastern shores of Virginia. 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 progra...
Jan 21, 2021•29 min
Stories of real life chance encounters, inspired by the 75th anniversary of the much-loved film Brief Encounter. Introduced by Matthew Sweet. 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 path...
Dec 27, 2020•30 min
The dramatic effects of climate change evoked in words, sounds and a powerful new musical work. 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 ...
Oct 18, 2020•29 min
Angry bulls, furious penguins, enraged seals! In the shadow of the volcano 'Between the Ears' gets a microphone close up to enjoy the action, as veterinarian Jonathan Hollins, gives us a taste of life with the remote animals and sea life of Tristan Da Cunha. 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. C...
Jun 28, 2020•28 min
Before the magic of photography, the dazzle of cinema - there was the diorama. 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 182...
Jan 26, 2020•44 min
To view the VR experience in 360 on your smartphone, either click or paste the following link into your search browser: 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 ...
Jun 17, 2019•29 min
Is karaoke the modern sea shanty? 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 b...
Mar 02, 2019•29 min
Julia Hollander, her brother Tom and father Tony tell the story of a letter from the BBC, which saved their family, spawning a rich legacy of Czech music in the UK. 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 wou...
Feb 23, 2019•27 min
The magical North Pennines landscape of deaf shepherd-poet Josephine Dickinson, which inspires her life and work and is the fertile backdrop to her real and imagined sound world. Welcome to her remote hill farm near Alston – near the highest market town in England – where Josephine looks after her sheep and writes her poetry. It’s her in-between land, a place between hearing and deafness, art and reality, home and you listening to the programme. It’s a challenging environment, too: in 2018 the ‘...
Dec 17, 2018•30 min
The patterns and flows of life in the NHS captured in immersive stereo, with specially commissioned music sung by NHS staff and The Bach Choir. 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 ...
Jun 30, 2018•29 min
You can never see through someone else's eyes, but can we, by stealth, tap into people's visual imaginations? 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"?...
Jun 23, 2018•29 min
When Ken Hollings underwent surgery at Moorfields Hospital for a detached retina he experienced an unexpected symphony inside his head, right between the ears. The sounds have haunted him ever since. Musician Martin McCarrick also found himself in a terrifying and unsettling world of head noise that began with a perforated eardrum and ended in a rare medical condition. He too has never forgotten the unexpected world of noise he heard between his ears and has set about recreating it. In this bina...
Jun 02, 2018•27 min
What's the difference between the sheep found in art and real sheep? 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 Abl...
May 12, 2018•29 min
The detection of Gravitational Waves in 2015 was hailed as an astounding breakthrough in the world of physics and a triumph for the. LIGO project, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory. But the discovery was also a triumph for the men and women who had worked at LIGO during tumultuous times. DREVER, LIGO, is the poet Robert Crawford's meditation on the Scottish physicist Ronald Drever, and his role in the search for Gravitational Waves. Music by Jeremy Thurlow. Producer: David ...
Feb 10, 2018•29 min
The three second rule - once more like folklore or hearsay - has been discovered to be the happiest condition for the human brain. 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 ...
Nov 29, 2017•30 min
