WS More or Less: Samba, strings and the story of HIV
More or Less: Behind the Stats
BBC
4.6 • 3.5K Ratings
🗓️ 5 June 2017
⏱️ 10 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Trumpets are blasting in this week’s musical episode. But can medical statistics be transformed into a jazzy night out? That was the challenge which epidemiologist Elizabeth Pisani set for composer Tony Haynes. This June, his Grand Union Orchestra will be performing Song of Contagion, an evening of steel pans, saxophones and singers telling the story of diseases including Zika and AIDs.
We met Elizabeth and Tony in an East London music studio, to hear Song of Contagion come together for the very first time.
Producer: Hannah Sander
(Photo: Detail close up of French Horn musical instrument, part of the Brass family of instruments. Credit: Shutterstock)
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know. |
| 0:04.6 | My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds. |
| 0:08.4 | As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable |
| 0:14.3 | experts and genuinely engaging voices. What you may not know is that the BBC |
| 0:20.4 | makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars, |
| 0:24.6 | poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples. |
| 0:29.7 | If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, |
| 0:33.0 | find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds. |
| 0:36.4 | This is the BBC. |
| 0:40.3 | Thanks for downloading the shorter World Service edition of More or Less |
| 0:44.4 | first broadcast on Friday the 2nd of June. |
| 0:47.1 | Hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. |
| 0:52.0 | We are your weekly guide to the numbers all around us and I'm Tim |
| 0:55.5 | Harford. |
| 0:57.5 | Or you have it going if you like, I can play live over the top of it. |
| 1:00.8 | This week Statistics Meet Music in a recording studio under the streets of East London. |
| 1:07.0 | I'm Elizabeth Pizani, I'm an epidemiologist and I've come into a den a hidden music studio where I'm about to hear for the very first time the music associated with a program called Song of Contagion that we've been working on for over a year now. |
| 1:29.0 | This is a big moment for Elizabeth. |
| 1:32.0 | She had a vision for communicating some life or death data in musical |
| 1:36.8 | form and that means she's had to entrust her life's work on medical data to this man who culturally is a world apart. |
| 1:45.6 | I'm Tony Haynes, the composer director of the Grand Union Orchestra and sitting here in the studio with Jerry is a wonderful musician and multi-instrumentalist. |
| 2:02.0 | Here's the tenor. |
... |
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