Shifting Soundscapes

Seriously...

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary

4.1 • 885 Ratings

🗓️ 12 July 2024

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

“Sound is the barometer of the health of the planet.”

It's almost 60 years since 11-year-old Martyn Stewart made his first recording near his house in Birmingham using a reel-to-reel machine borrowed from his older brother. From that day forward, he set out to capture all the natural sounds of the world, amassing nearly one hundred thousand recordings.

Now, musician and sound artist Alice Boyd retraces his steps to three locations in Britain to document how these environmental soundscapes have changed, revealing vanishing ecosystems, amplified human noise and the return of endangered species.

(Photograph courtesy of Tom Bright.) With archive from Martyn Stewart's library, The Listening Planet. Location recordings and original music by Alice Boyd. A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4

Transcript

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0:00.0	This was an impregnable fortress. The only way you get out was in a wooden box.
0:05.0	The controversial maximum security prison impossible to escape from.
0:09.0	And one of the duties of a political prisoner is the escape.
0:12.0	The IRA inmates who found a way. of a political prisoner is the escape.
0:12.5	The IRA inmates who found a way.
0:14.5	I'm Carlo Gableer and I'll be navigating a path
0:19.5	through the disturbing inside story of the biggest jailbreak in British and Irish history.
0:25.0	The narrative that they want is that this is a big achievement by them.
0:28.5	Escape from the Maze, listen first on BBC Sounds.
0:36.0	BBC Sounds, BBC Sounds, Music Radio Podcasts.
0:40.0	Welcome to Seriously from BBC Radio 4. I'm Vanessa Kasule. This podcast finds the world's best
0:47.0	audio documentaries and puts them all in one place. So the Blue Bell Woods is in a little suburb of Birmingham,
1:10.0	more Bartley Green, and it was my place, my sanctuary. I used to love going there as a kid.
1:20.5	There was always the alarm call or the blackbird that as soon as you walk through that threshold of the woods,
1:29.0	the blackbird would call to tell everyone there's someone in the woods and I used to lay in the
1:36.6	bracken just to lay there and the sunlight flickering through and the smell of the bracken and the beautiful blues are the bluebells that were growing in between the trees and the thickets.
1:52.0	You know, it was everything you ever wanted as a kid to have open spaces
1:56.2	and freedom and no worries about the kind of worries you have today. When I was 11, I started to record.
2:10.0	When I was 11, I started to record.
2:14.7	I say it's the blackbird, but I'm sure it was probably the Skylark
2:18.2	because the Skylark used to fascinate me. My brother was four and a half years older than me. He was in a rock band at school and he couldn't sing. You know, he was terrible. He was a great guitarist, but he couldn't sing. He was terrible.
2:33.0	He was a great guitarist, but he couldn't really sing.
	...

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