Kate Bush's Sonic Weapon
Curious Cases
BBC
4.8 • 4.1K Ratings
🗓️ 16 June 2017
⏱️ 21 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
"It started while listening to the excellent Experiment IV by Kate Bush. The premise of the song is of a band who secretly work for the military to create a 'sound that could kill someone'. Is it scientifically possible to do this?" asks Paul Goodfield.
Hannah consults acoustic engineer Trevor Cox to ask if sonic weapons could kill. And Adam delves into subsonic frequencies with parapsychologist Chris French to investigate their spooky effects.
You can send your everyday mysteries for the team to investigate to: curiouscases@bbc.co.uk
Presenters: Adam Rutherford, Hannah Fry Producer: Michelle Martin.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | I'm Dr Adam Rutherford. And I'm Dr Hannah Fry. And you are going to send us your everyday |
| 0:10.8 | mysteries. And we are going to investigate them using the power of science. Science. |
| 0:16.5 | I like it. Hello and welcome to the final episode in the current series, series six of the |
| 0:27.3 | curious cases of me and her. Indeed. And in this episode, we try and kill people with |
| 0:34.0 | sound, although not literally. Yes, it's a really music dominated episode because this |
| 0:41.1 | question has been inspired by a Kate Bush song in which she almost definitely admits |
| 0:47.7 | that she tried to build a sonic weapon. Yeah, no, no, she doesn't do that for legal reasons. |
| 0:52.6 | We have to be really clear that she doesn't do this poor good field wrote him about the |
| 0:56.9 | song experiment for which is about the most 80s thing that has ever happened. The video |
| 1:03.2 | of it is amazing. It is astonishing. And it's got loads of like really now famous people |
| 1:09.6 | like Hugh Laurie and Gary Oldman and some seriously dodgy CGI. Some really bad CGI, but |
| 1:15.6 | it's very non metaphorical video. We put it that way. It's true, it's true. And we take |
| 1:20.6 | it quite seriously. Well, you did for legal reasons. I'd like to absolutely separate my |
| 1:25.6 | own view about the metaphorical status of this song. Should we ever listen to the programme? |
| 1:30.0 | Yes, although I think before we move on, I think that it's worth mentioning how very |
| 1:34.7 | lovely one of our podcast listeners have been to us over the course of the last week. |
| 1:38.1 | Yes, they've given us a really lovely warm, fluffy feeling because we, well, we asked |
| 1:43.0 | them to review the programme. Only because we were forced to. Yeah, people came to you |
| 1:48.9 | and they said some really nice stuff. So thank you very much. That really does mean a |
| 1:53.7 | lot. So that was a bit cheesy, wasn't it? It's just nice. It's just nice when people listen |
| 1:58.8 | and you know it's not, you're just your dad saying, yeah, good show some. Anyway, enough |
| 2:03.2 | of that. On with the show. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from BBC, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of BBC and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.