Between the Ears

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 s...

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...

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...

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, perfectl...

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 U...

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 pr...

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 frie...

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 int...

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...

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...

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...

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 s...

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...

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 event...

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...

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 a...

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 Harr...

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 alarmin...

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 i...

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 t...

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 t...

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 sou...

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 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...

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...