If I talk about Mars, I get to talk about everything.

I can talk about things like what's the boundary between life and non-life.

I get to talk about the climate emergency.

I get to talk about Silicon Valley billionaires

and the gap between the rich and the poor

that is ever widening by the day.

I get to talk about AI.

The second you start thinking about Mars,

it's this really important symbol for so many different people.

Focus on that, you get to talk about the entire world.

However you imagine the creative life or working practices of an opera composer,

I doubt you visualize someone recording the sound of Martian dust.

It feels like coarsely ground sugar.

Or messing around with a tank of helium.

So you can get this very sort of industrial sound of like a valve being released.

You're listening to the documentary in the studio from the BBC World Service, which looks inside the workings of the world's

most inventive artistic minds. I'm Katie Derrim, and in this episode, I'm trying to keep up

with Irish contemporary composer and vocalist Jennifer Walsh. How slowly can I move from one pitch

to another? So instead of going, ah, going like, ah.

Jennifer has created musical works inspired by Barbie dolls, skateboarding, and the meaning of time itself.

She's a polymath who sees meaning in unlikely places, humor in the absurdity of everyday life, and who somehow

brings all this together into deeply moving performances. Now she's launching herself into a whole

...