In 2017, audio producer Phil Smith travelled to Ukraine to attend his friend's wedding. There, somewhere between the cities of Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv and Odessa, he fell in love with the soundworld of the sleeper train: its steady hypnotic rhythms, the melody of hurtling through time and space, the calls of distant tannoy speakers drifting across platforms in the dead of night, the chorus of snores from sleeping passengers. Revisiting these recordings, seven years later, this Slow Radio journey o...
Feb 25, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast From the medina of Marrakech to the palmeries in Zagora, join sound recordists Andrea Campisi and Silvia Malnati as they embark upon a roadtrip in sound, leaving the capital city to journey across southeast Morocco. Across four movements of contrasting energies, bound together by the motif of the muezzin’s call to prayer, we listen to an immersive musical suite comprising binaural field recordings and on-location sound. I. Allegro: In Marrakech medina we take a walk through a maze of streets and...
Jan 28, 2024•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a mix of music and natural sounds, recorded by Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners. Three dawn choruses from across the UK, starring woodland, garden and sea birds, follow on from the very different dusk chorus from the remote Greeenland town of Ilulissat, which features hundreds of huskies. Recordings made by Julie Moody, Alice Smith, Ted Reed and Michael Bawtree.
Jan 09, 2024•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Time unravels in this hypnotic audio journey... In this edition of Slow Radio, we tumble inside the delicate mechanism of the clock - our attempt to contain and mark the steady rush of time itself. Musical and rhythmic, this surreal audio composition moves between the meditative beat of a single timepiece through to a cacophonous eruption of melodious chimes and cuckoos. The Clock will air just after Big Ben's midnight chimes play out on the BBC, 100 years after London's most famous clock was fi...
Jan 01, 2024•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast How does the Berlin urban landscape sound? Using a unique approach that combines field recordings and photographs translated into audio, the Uruguayan and Berlin-based artist Darío Dornel, aka Kirap, takes listeners on a captivating journey through the city's hidden soundscapes. Pictures of recognisable city places are translated into sound using audio software through Bitmap's code conversion. A wide range of sounds is generated using various sound design tools and techniques. These sounds are ...
Nov 05, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a mix of music and natural sounds, recorded by Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners. We start in the Himalayas and end in an urban forest in Dehli, getting there via Kardamyli beach in Greece and the Thames footpath in Oxfordshire. Recordings made by Naryndra Kumar, James Hadley, Kate Sandars and Michael Lidgley.
Oct 13, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast YA Z AN, a Palestinian Berlin-based artist, travels around his hometown of Ramallah, located in the heart of the West Bank. During his journey, YA Z AN encounters sounds that comfort and remind him of home. He uses binaural technology to collect audio pieces from the verdant Palestinian landscape and sculpts them with sounds from everyday life to create a complete surround sound experience. Setting off with a ‘oud player singing folklore music during a post-wedding ceremony and followed by a wal...
Oct 01, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast With its peak at 2410 metres in altitude, the North Grigna is an imposing quasi-mythical character in the local culture of the Lombardy region. Those who get to its top can take in a 360-degree view over the Alps, Lake Como and the plains around Milan. Celebrated by Leonardo Da Vinci in his Codex Atlanticus for its rocky ridges, the mountain is also the protagonist in an Italian Alpine folk song entitled The Legend of the Grigna. The lyrics speak of a beautiful female warrior who is turned into ...
Sep 24, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds, from rooks on Orkney to a midwife toad chirruping in south-west France. Plus bats in Lancashire and nightingales in Sussex. Recordings by BBC Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Stephanie Fritchley, Aidan Semmens, Simon Tuck and Paul Richens.
Sep 20, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Beekeeper Anthony Smith looks after several hundred beehives across Herefordshire and South East Wales. This episode of Slow Radio takes us to one of his apiaries where we eavesdrop on Anthony’s activities. It’s the middle of the summer, and the bees are at their busiest. Many of the sounds of bees and beekeeping have barely changed for thousands of years, whereas others are distinctly modern. We’ll hear single bees collecting nectar as they move from flower to flower, and clusters of bees jostl...
Aug 29, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds. A special edition featuring the Sounds of the Earth mixes of music and the incredible sounds of the insects, birds and animals featured in BBC One's Wild Isles series. The nature sounds were captured by the audio team at Silverback Films, with audio post-production from Wild Buffalo, and kindly shared with Radio 3’s Sunday Breakfast team for the weekly Sounds of the Earth feature.
Aug 11, 2023•38 min•Transcript available on Metacast Across Britain, 352 BBC transmitters stand, mostly on the tops of hills broadcasting sound, music and voices invisibly across the country. In this slow radio episode, Matthew Herbert and a group of recording engineers visited some of these transmitters in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England to listen to what the transmitters were hearing at exactly 11.30 at night - the time of this broadcast. Starting at the transmitter atop Crystal Palace and then moving through the country to finish ...
Jun 25, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds. This springtime special features a blackbird singing at daybreak in Newcastle, a nightingale in the Umbrian foothills, central Italy, and a newly born lamb communicating for the very first time with its mother in a field in Wiltshire. Recordings by Radio 3 Breakfast listeners Sarah Couch, Nick and Val Bale, and Tom Perrett, plus master sound recordist Chris Watson.
May 16, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast This Slow Radio experience features sounds from the BBC television programme Wild Isles: a chance to revel in the extraordinary sounds recorded and created for the series, without voice-over or music. Using an aural collage of clips, the half-hour soundscape takes a journey from mountain stream to the sea, around Great Britain and Ireland. It utilises sounds from the Freshwater and Oceans episodes and begins with a specially recorded introduction by Sir David Attenborough. From there, the sounds...
Apr 13, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds, from the Atlantic rainforests of Brazil to Eastern Banjo Frogs in Adelaide, Australia. Plus a dawn chorus in Cornwall and chaffinches in Noja, Northern Spain. Recordings by BBC Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Bob Castell, Kate Wilson, Peter Halmkin and Kevin Cox.
Mar 29, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast There’s a gentle rhythm to everyday life in a Hindu temple, that follows carefully choreographed rituals linked to the care of the deities - creating a rich aural texture from dawn when the gods are woken, to nightfall when they sleep. The sounds wax and wane; each part of the day has its own soundscape and the priest presides over it all. You’ll hear the constant sound of bells as a backdrop, rung by devotees as they approach the shrines, focussing their minds and alerting the deities to their ...
Mar 29, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds, from birdsong and tortoises in the Seychelles to waves and whistling frogs in Barbados, via a bubbling brook in Northumberland and a murmuration of starlings playing in a poplar tree. Recordings by David Fay, Honey Schreker, Kathryn Potts and Rupert Ormond.
Mar 06, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast High in the mountains snow falls. As it comes to rest on the frozen slopes it become part of an ancient glacier. Over the course of 100 years the glacier will flow down the valley, changing the landscape around it. Using field recordings from deep within glaciers, along with the sounds of the natural world around them, this programme charts an imagined journey of snow and glacier from mountain top to valley floor. Over the course of that journey we hear the sound world change and the increasing ...
Feb 26, 2023•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast It is January 2022, and in the Upper Manhattan neighbourhood of Harlem all is quiet as people stay at home, preferring not to venture out into the minus-13-degree snow and ice that has blanketed the city. This half-hour soundscape begins with the geese pecking at the frozen lake at the northern tip of Central Park with the occasional sound of a passer by who has braved the weather. As we head north to Harlem, walking up Malcolm X Boulevard, an invitation into the warmth of the Abyssinian Baptist...
Feb 22, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds: a walk in the Faroe Islands, a deer in the Scottish Highlands, a robin in Northamptonshire and a royal garden in Norway. Wildlife recordings from Chris Watson and Andy Fell, plus Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Louise and Donald Proven.
Jan 31, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast A settlement first known as Almatu developed on the Silk Road from the 10th century onwards. In the 1920s, the new Soviet authorities renamed the place Alma-Ata ('Grandfather of the apple') and made it the capital of the Kazakh SSR (formerly in Kyzylorda). We start our journey from one of Almaty's Soviet-era train stations, Almaty-2, built in the 1930s, with its paintings by Kazakh and Russian artists and the multi-lingual Tower of Babel representing the journey's start, in conversations and tan...
Jan 30, 2023•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast The Reindeer follows the epic travels of a reindeer mother and her young.
Dec 24, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds: sanderlings on a beach in Shetland, a farmyard in Shropshire, urban birds in Buenos Aires and the Red Burn in Argyllshire. Wildlife recordings from Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Ian Reid, Barbara Petty, Susan Robinson and Bob Dickinson.
Dec 14, 2022•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds. Cicadas in Portugal, sheep in Wensleydale and a magnificent dusk chorus in Wiltshire. Wildlife recordings from Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Kate and John Livingston, Geoff and Christine Holland, and Ruth Taunt, plus Radio 3 producer Michael Rossi.
Nov 30, 2022•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds. Sparrows in the heart of the City of London, birds on Shapwick Heath in Somerset, and frogs and elephants in the Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. Wildlife recordings from Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Vaughan Ives, Dora Thornton, Jeremy Warren and Ian Strange.
Nov 08, 2022•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast Poet Owen Sheers explores the strange sound world of the underground spaces of Wales, from slate caverns to sea caves, from Snowdonia to the Gower peninsula. In a new poem, he contemplates these dark and hidden places integral to Welsh myth, industry and psyche. Written and read by Owen Sheers Sound design by Catherine Robinson Produced by Emma Harding
Oct 30, 2022•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds. Cornish waves, Welsh cows, a wren in a walnut tree and rain in the Galician mountains, recorded by Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Adriana Flores, Sean Tobin, Penny Lawrence and Alex Lisle.
Oct 04, 2022•33 min•Transcript available on Metacast The ever-present and changing sound of the wind on Fair Isle.
Sep 01, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds. Featuring recordings of birdsong from Kelso to Senegal sent in by Radio 3 Breakfast listeners listeners Betsy Barker, Caroline Fiennes, Helen Boyles and Ros Bleach.
Jul 22, 2022•39 min•Transcript available on Metacast Join Honey, a 15-year-old fox-red labrador, as she goes about her day.
Jul 03, 2022•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
