Summary
A hush descends as Josie Long presents short documentaries and audio adventures about silence.
From an artwork that pulls sounds outside of the range of human hearing within it - vibrations in the soil, the sound of bats in Senegal caught on a supersonic microphone - to a story about the silence which lies between generations in a family.
Winter Forest, Bala, Ontario on 2nd December 2020 Recorded by Jess Shane Originally featured on the Field Recordings podcast
The Inaudible Spectrum Produced by Sami El-Enany
Mokadi Written and read by Sarah Baylis
Four Thirty-Three with Aoife Produced by Phil Smith
Curatorial Team: Alia Cassam and Andrea Rangecroft Series Producer: Eleanor McDowall Exec Producer: Zakia Sewell A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 4
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. |
| 0:05.0 | Hello, welcome to the new series of shortcuts. |
| 0:08.4 | We are back and we are bader than ever. |
| 0:10.7 | If by bad, you mean good and bader, you mean as good as. |
| 0:16.4 | We're back and we're as good as ever. |
| 0:19.4 | And this introduction is testament to that. |
| 0:37.1 | The recording you're listening to you right now was made last winter in Ontario by the audio artist Jess Shane. |
| 1:00.0 | You're standing with her in the woods near where she was living at the time. |
| 1:17.6 | The snow is blanketing the world around you, making it extra quiet. I love that feeling of stillness and hush that snowfall gives. It's almost like an entirely different world exists for a short time written over the one that you're used to. |
| 1:36.3 | I'm thinking about my little urban street earlier this year when the snow fell |
| 1:47.0 | and how all of its sharp corners were completely gone |
| 1:51.9 | and how everyone was slowed down almost to a stop |
| 1:55.4 | to create this very temporary, very otherworldly, stillness and quiet. |
| 2:09.6 | This is Shortcuts. |
| 2:16.5 | Now you can hear the silence. |
| 2:19.5 | Brief encounters, true stories, radio adventures and found sound. |
| 2:25.4 | One of the great thresholds in reality is the threshold between sound and silence. |
| 2:31.7 | Between sound and silence. |
| 2:38.1 | Today, silence. Between sound and silence. Today, silence. Silence. The |
| 2:53.6 | The We're starting the program with a work of sound art which ventures into the inaudible spectrum. |
| 3:20.3 | The composer Sami Elanani has taken sounds that are authentically outside the range of human hearing, |
| 3:28.0 | and then processed them in order to draw them within it. |
... |
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