Between the Ears

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...

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 t...

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 traditi...

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 D...

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 w...

Karl Marx's penultimate journey was as a corpse in a coffin being trundled up the very steep hill of Highgate to what should have been his last resting place - a three-guinea plot in Highgate's East Cemetery - in March 1883, buried alongside his wife Jenny von Westphalen. The next year a memorial procession to his grave was turned away, but ever since then the Socialist world and the curious began...

'Hey man, you're living my dream...!' 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 alway...

'The old pagan gods, when ousted by Christianity, took refuge in the rivers, where they still dwell' - Old English saying 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...

Alice Oswald's radio poem Rain was commissioned by Radio 3 in 2016 as part of the 70th anniversary celebrations. Written and performed by the poet, Rain was inspired by a visit to Romford Essex, which experienced a dramatic sudden rainstorm in the early hours of June 23 that year. The poem examines the effect this natural atmospheric occurrence has on an urban environment and its population. A ver...

The innovative composer and electronic music pioneer Matthew Herbert physically deconstructs the instruments of a string ensemble while they play one of Beethoven's late string quartets, considered by many to be the epitome of chamber music. In a new commission, with an original performance by the Tippett Quartet, Beethoven's String Quartet in F major Op.135 is lovingly rendered until it starts to...

Last summer the musician Tim van Eyken had to make a distress call while afloat. He was struck by how, at the moment of greatest tension and stress, the language used was calm itself. Instructions were simple and clear. Indeed, during the crisis language itself almost disappeared through the imposition of radio silence (the call 'Seelonce, Seelonce') clearing the airwaves so rescuers could listen...

In a melting magical funnel of musical love (and the odd bit of reverb), musician David Bramwell investigates the unlikely story of how, in 1969, an amateur dramatic production of "Alice Through the Looking Glass", starring a young Martha Kearney, became one of the most sought-after psychedelic records in the world. Sony Award-winning musician David Bramwell heads out over the Downs to Ditchling,...

Newcastle writer David Almond investigates the story of a wild child who was said to roam the Yorkshire Dales near Crackpot Hall in the 1930s - and makes a surprising discovery. 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...

A baby sleeps. 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 subseq...

Monument Valley, which straddles the state lines of Arizona and Utah, is a place most of us have seen and never visited or listened to. The 'true West' of John Ford movies and endless car adverts. Mark Burman takes his microphone through the red dust of history with Navajo guide Larry Y. Holiday. Chased by the storm clouds and lightning, theirs is a trip through nature's own movie set. At the turn...

Imagine a town of harmonica players; sounds a bit surreal? 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. Tro...

Early in 2013 record producer Dan Carey bought a vintage tape machine at a charity shop in Streatham, South London. The Ferrograph recorder came with a box of 7-inch tapes containing an audio documentation of the previous owner's social life as a young man in the 1950s at a time when reel to reel tape recorders were state of the art audio technology. Among the recordings was a poetry reading event...

A funny and moving autobiographical documentary about one of Britain's most brilliant performance poets, John Cooper Clarke; a revealing look at John's relationship with clothes, monkeys and fatherhood. John takes us to a gig, a Savile Row tailors and a journey into his mind exploring his relationship with clothes from childhood to present day, and culminating in his feelings of paternal love. Pro...

A meditation on the cultural representation of comas through music, poetry and interviews with the families of people who have a suffered brain injury. 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 m...

Wilfred Owen wrote that he was a 'poets' poet'. He also wrote, in the preface to 'War Poems', 'Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War'. Owen is, then, a soldiers' poet, and the people who figure in his poems are all soldiers. In this Between the Ears, soldiers, all serving when they were recorded, choose a Wilfred Owen poem, explain why, read it and speak...

Lenny Henry stars in a musical fantasy written by Jakko M Jakszyk and Lenny Henry, woven round the real-life 1964 dinner encounter between the greatest poet in the English language of the twentieth century, TS Eliot and the legendary star of A Night at the Opera, Duck Soup and Horse Feathers, Groucho Marx. Almost exactly fifty years after the meeting in early June 1964, Radio 3's adventurous featu...

Joe is home from school. "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 interv...

Poet Paul Farley imagines himself a sound-recordist taping the Garden of Eden and recalls the impoverished soundscape of his childhood. Growing on the edge of Liverpool in the 1960s and given a simple cassette recorder for a birthday present he went in search of the sounds of the superbs inspired by the bird song records he borrowed from his local library. He pressed play and record on his Panason...

The idea of a nation coming into being: in the track and weave of an oval ball. Owen Sheers' new sound poem explores the complex, often difficult relationship between rugby and modern Welsh identity. "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 betw...

Shadowplay offers a four-part 'symphony of voices' to celebrate 20 years of Between the Ears. It explores the shadows that may fall between the appearance of things and their reality. Making use of the full palette available to the radio producer - documentary, fiction, music, pure sound - four feature-makers address our values, our identities, our romantic inclinations and our sense of worth. 4....