Speechification

Forgive me as I stray a little northwards from my Antipodean lair to bring you this quite wonderful edition of Studio 360, presented as usual by Kurt Anderson. It’s devoted to amateur inventors and ‘mad scientists’, with Nikola Tesla as the super-dense object bending the show’s waves around him. The programme lovingly and carefully explores Tesla’s pioneering work in radar, radio, alternating current and just about everything else in the modern world - which was all to little acclaim at the time.

Mike Daisey relates the life of Tesla in a hilarious and bewitching set of excerpts from his one-man show. With a delivery like Emo Phillips with the fast forward button held down, be sure to stay for the story of Tesla’s death ray. Just after the story of Tesla x-raying Mark Twain’s head.

The WYNC Director of Engineering takes Anderson to the top of the Empire State Building, to see the big machines that carries the sound WYNC upwards into the sky - and then gets him to put his hand in them. Then there’s a gentle section on garage inventors from Kansas. Samantha Hunt, writer of a new (fictional, but barely) book on the extraordinary life of Tesla. Plus some notes on the popular perception of the mad scientist, from a mildly disgruntled, real (not mad) scientist. Beautifully produced of course, this is just great, great radio. There’s lots more info at the S360 site.

Studio 360: Nikola Tesla: Strange Genius (mp3)

Here’s a beautiful thing. A 40-minute feature from RTE’s Documentary on One strand about Amos Oz, Israeli novelist and humanist. It’s a lovely programme, based on his 2005 memoir A Tale of Love & Darkness. Oz is fascinating and humane and I could easily have filled this post with luminous quotes from the programme.

An intriguing detail is that it’s an adaptation of a programme originally made by Barbo Holmsberg for the Finnish state broadcaster YLE (I wonder if it’s Holmsberg narrating the programme). Anyway, for me that’s another hint of the speech radio richness that must exist out there beyond the English language fortress (MP3).

The Irish State broadcaster’s equivalent to Radio 4 (which, confusingly, is called Radio 1) has a show called The Curious Ear. Ronan Kelly records people and events with the kind of wry, slightly sideways attitude you normally get from features on NPR (like the Lost and Found Sounds shows from last week). You don’t get this kind of stuff on Radio 4. It’s too gentle, a bit purposeless. I think people would complain. Anyway, this one’s about the World Draughts Championships which took place in Buncrana, Co. Donegal in October. Lovely (MP3, podcast and here’s a page showing all the RTE factual podcasts. Lots of good stuff here).

Here’s a lovely example of the kind of material that the Kitchen Sisters gathered for their Lost and Found Sounds show on NPR (the show itself is off the air). This one’s got stories from early radio in Nashville, a really marvelous train whistle and the legendary Sam Phillips from Sun Records. I ripped this MP3 from a 2000 Real stream. There are lots of other shows - all excellent and unbelievably varied - here and you could, if you felt like it, give the Kitchen Sisters some money to help them make more.

This is at the top of my pile of miscellaneous audio and I remember loving it when it went out. But only on googling it just now did I discover it was part of a series of programmes called Thinking Earth, across Radios 3 and 4, and the World Service. Only fragments seem to be Listen Again-able which is a shame because I really fancy the Radio 3 contribution - Earth Mapping; ‘a meditation on mapping with international artists who each tell us a story of a map that it important to them’. (You only get ‘meditations’ on the radio don’t you?) If anyone happens to have a copy of Earth Mapping please let us know.

Anyway, the Radio 4 contribution is An ABC Of The Night; 26 short pieces from 26 different parts of the globe, all recorded at night. It’s great stuff, with music and sound design from Nina Perry weaving it all together. And there’s a photo gallery here. (MP3 here)

You want half-hour features about obscure musical instruments and their eccentric inventors? We’ve got half-hour features about obscure musical instruments and their eccentric inventors. Yes we have. This one’s about the Concertina - about the whole category of ‘free reed’ instruments, in fact. About the whole period in history that produced the ‘free reed’ instruments (the second quarter of the 19th Century) and about Victorian physicist Sir Charles Wheatstone, its inventor. Really good stuff (MP3).

I’m sure I’ve raved about Radio Lab (from WNYC) before, but in case you can’t take a hint, here’s another opportunity. There are two programmes here that are as good as any you’ll ever hear, especially in the tiny world of science broadcasting. The first is Space (MP3) which attempts to explain our tininess in the universe’s massiveness through devices like really affecting interviews with Carl Sagan’s widow. The second is about Musical Language, (MP3) and contains fascinating stuff about how the brain adapts to new musical sounds (using the Rite Of Spring as an example). The site also has some great links to things like Diana Deutsch’s audio illusions. Both programmes are well, well, worth listening to.

And if you’re a bit more of an audio/radio nut, you can listen to this lecture/conversation at the Apple store in New York where they talk about how they make the programme, with the helpful addition of genius film editor Walter Murch on the elements of storytelling. Makes you glad to be alive in the age of radio.