Hello and welcome to the podcast of the Life Scientific.

First broadcast on BBC Radio 4.

I'm Jim Alleili and my mission is to interview the most fascinating and

important scientists alive today and to find out what makes them tick.

If you haven't seen the work of my guest today, you've probably heard it.

Trevor Cox, professor of acoustic engineering at the University of Salford, has devoted his career to exploring and exploiting sound.

Trevor started his noisy journey by pioneering technologies to improve sound quality inside concert halls and music studios.

Since then he studied how to reduce noise and improve concentration inside secondary schools

and helped architects to design better spaces for elderly people with hearing loss.

But it was after an odorous trip inside a Victorian sewer where he heard some surprising

sounds that he decided to scour the globe to locate the Sonic

wonders of the world, from the singing sands of the Mojave Desert to the avian mating

calls of Bittons in Somerset. He's also the only person I know who's had two

entries in the Guinness Book of Records, one for the longest echo in the world and

the other involving a giant whoopicushion which apparently caused a bit of

consternation at the time as we'll discover later. Trevor Cox welcome to the

life scientific. Thank you. Well Trevor during your scientific career you've made a habit of searching for unusual sound locations.

One of the strangers perhaps was down a sewer.

How did that come about?

Well it was actually a radio interview.

Someone contacted me from Residence FM and said,

I've taken these serious while I'm taking people down in sewers

...