Throughout our daily lives, we probably don’t pay much attention to the sounds around us—the dripping of the coffee maker, the steady turnover of the car engine, the clicking of our colleagues’ keyboard strokes.
But what is viscerally explained in Living With Nature, which is a 4-part series from a BBC World Service podcast called “The Compass”, there are some environments where the things you can hear are more important than what you can see.
As well as capturing the beautiful tones of running water and wind, Living With Nature offers some incredible soundscapes that most of us have never heard. What’s it like to hear for 1,000 square miles? What’s it like to hear the intimate sounds of a tiger, or listen to ancient Norwegian chanting—ghostly and wolf-like—bellowed from the top of an arctic mountain?
Grab your best pair of headphones, kill the lights, close your eyes, and find out.
The breathtaking audio-technical work of host Chris Watson, a wildlife sound recordist, puts your ears squarely within some of the most far-flung regions of the world. This sonic journey explores the relationship between people as varied as the Masai of Kenya, and the San Bushmen of Namibia, and the beautifully complex natural environments they inhabit; serving to increase the understanding of the interactions available to us with sound and the soundscapes we traverse.
You can choose from four ‘courses’ of the global landscape: the plains, the desert, the mountain, and the forest with tiger sounds (chosen below).
(Listen to the four episodes of this Podcast at the BBC) – Photo by Ovidiu Tudor, CC license