Speechification

Perhaps I’m in danger of overloading you with Chris Watson, but the sound recordist is already a firm favourite with the Speechification crew, thanks to his emphasis on creating radio that not only tells a story but also captures the sounds of life.

He popped up again this morning on Midweek, in a too-brief 8-minute interview where he gives a glimpse of how and why he works. Ostensibly he’s talking about a new exhibition about tropical rainforests he’s got on at the Sunderland Museum called Whispering in the Leaves, but along the way he manages to describe capturing the sound of glaciers moving, Mexican railways and vultures gnawing away at zebra carcasses on the Masai Mara.

Fascinating stuff. It’s about 23 and a half minutes into this stream, or you can listen to the MP3

(Incidentally, I’ve always wondered about Radio 4’s propensity to take the same show - a gentle series of interviews with three or four interesting people - and slap a different presenter and a different name on it. You’ve got Start the Week, Midweek, Woman’s Hour and In Our Time are all essentially mild variants of the same concept. I hope they name a new show “just-over-halfway-through-the-week” for continuity purposes.)

Geoff Emerick and James Lock are two pioneering sound engineers who helped shape the sound of the last 40 years: Emerick as the teenage tech behind the experimental sound of the Beatles and former Decca guru Lock as the classical mastermind behind recordings like Pavarotti’s Otello.

In The Sound Makers (here’s the homepage and MP3) Paul Gambaccini - who’s going through something of a purple patch on Radio 4 at the moment - guides them along as they dole out reminiscences of working on some of the most legendary recordings of our lifetimes… including Emerick’s tale of how he got “a letter from the management” about his microphone positioning during the recording of Revolver.

Half an hour didn’t feel like quite enough - sound geeks will probably be itching for more by the end, as the discussion broadens out - but it’s intriguing listening that had me reaching for my record collection.

I’ve always found the sense of disgust to be one of the most bizarre and intriguing human emotions. After all, we’re the only species to develop an instinct for the revolting, and it has become a crucial part of the way we develop socially.

Luckily, Radio 4 science strand Frontiers had a piece on a couple of weeks ago tracking different pieces of research into disgust (here’s the MP3). Things got really interesting when the show started to go beyond measuring disgust and explored how our morals 0- and perhaps even political tendencies - are defined by it.

This intriguing mini-series featured short interviews with people “who hold views totally at odds with the prevailing orthodoxy”.

I’m not sure I agree that Dick Taverne - the Lib Dem peer and head of Sense About Science - counts as a scion of counterculture (after all, ‘orthodoxy’ depends where you’re coming from) but in his interview with Kamran Nazeer (here’s the MP3) you do get an idea of why adherence to scientific principles seems increasingly radical.

John Steinbeck called them “the last free men”, and American mythology has a special place for the rail-riding hobo. This unencumbered hero, the happy-go-lucky bum, is an icon that occupies strange territory today, being so at odds with materialistic 21st century society.

Hobo Heaven (MP3), a documentary dredged up from the BBC World Service archives, tries to find out the truth behind these images of the itinerant boxcar rider - and goes to the National Hobo Convention (held every year in the tiny middle American town of Britt, Iowa) to see whether the hobo’s freedom is just a myth.