A selection of podcasts, limited series and individual episodes.

Between the Ears
Innovative and thought-provoking features that make adventurous use of sound and explore a wide variety of subjects. Made by leading radio producers.
(ongoing)

Click here for a few of John’s favorite episodes

Container Ship Karaoke
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0002zky
This episode is a great example of building an experience of a place through field recording. “Nathaniel Mann joins lonely seafarers on a giant container ship for some modern sea shanties. No bottles of rum, but some heartbreaking ballads and deep water sounds.”

Healing Hertz
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m0013835
Composer and conductor Hannah Catherine Jones explores how this particular frequency for A rose to dominance in the western world. It’s a story that encompasses a century-long argument between several countries, and which also involves BBC radio and even telephone ringtones. Featuring new music she has composed specially for the programme, Hannah experiments with how it feels to reject the default tuning and embrace other frequencies. She presents a question in sound: what are we missing in the vibrations we don’t hear?

Bone Music
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000bdjg
Bone Music tells the story of an ingenious Cold War recording technology – using hospital x-ray plates to capture music forbidden in the USSR. Soviet bootleggers began making Bone Records in the later 1940s as troops returned victorious from Germany laden with records – classical, jazz and most of all, popular songs by Russian super-stars living in exile – singers like Alexander Vertinsky and Pyotr Leshchenko. Soon teenagers all over the country were buying the wafer-thin flimsy records that opened up new worlds of sound from Minsk to Vladivostok. Bootleggers risked interrogation and even long prison sentences for distributing the music that mattered, running risks hard to imagine in our digital age of infinite musical abundance and instant sharing.

Right Between the Ears
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b51ypf
When Ken Hollings underwent surgery at Moorfields Hospital for a detached retina he experienced an unexpected symphony inside his head, right between the ears. The sounds have haunted him ever since. Musician Martin McCarrick also found himself in a terrifying and unsettling world of head noise that began with a perforated eardrum and ended in a rare medical condition. He too has never forgotten the unexpected world of noise he heard between his ears and has set about recreating it. In this binaural edition of Between the Ears Ken Hollings goes in search of his primal sound.

Sonic Art Boom – The Art of Noise
https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b03c0703
Dan Jones commemorates the centenary of ‘The Art of Noise Manifesto’, by Luigi Russolo, with an exploration of that mysterious, invisible and vigorous form – Sound Art.

Feeling Body
https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m001dpfd
feeling body is part of a series of pieces reflecting on the physical and psychological experiences during and after an extended period of illness (long-COVID). The work draws on multiple symbolisms, from The Nine of Swords in the Minor Arcana, to the undercurrent of water, where long baths were a point of solace during the experience of debilitating symptoms. Interspersed with perspectives of internal and external interactions, voiced by the composer in multiple ways as well as a by Kiswahili text-to-speech voice, and with additional sounds from performers Yaz Lancaster (voice, violin) & Michael O’Callaghan (trumpet), the piece blurs the lines between a perspective from the time of illness and one in retrospect, underlining an inevitable consequence of illness: how it arrests, irreversibly, one’s awareness of their living body.

Blind Guy Travels
How would you describe a world you’ve never seen? Blind Guy Travels invites you into life without sight. Join host Matthew Shifrin as he experiences a Marx Brothers comedy, creates an online dating profile, collaborates with LEGO to develop instructions for blind builders, and prepares for college graduation.
(ongoing series)

Crucial Listening
Experimental musicians and sound artists discuss the albums that are important to them. A bi-weekly podcast from ATTN:Magazine.
(ongoing series)

Ears Have Eyes – The Hibernation Project
Named for the intersensorial experience of navigating wild spaces at night (when our ears prick like eyes squinting into the darkness) EARS HAVE EYES asks: what can the invisibility of sound illuminate? How does the intimacy of listening open our eyes to ideas we might otherwise overlook? What can sonorous spaces hold that physical spaces cannot? How do we look with our ears, and listen with our eyes?
(ongoing series)

Eons: Mysteries of Deep Time – What did the Past Sound Like?
How do we start to reconstruct the soundscapes of the past? Using modern environments, living representatives of ancient groups, and fossil anatomy, paleontologists have attempted to figure out what the past sounded like. And so far we’ve found the lead singers change, but the backup singers remain familiar.

Framework Radio
framework is consecrated to field recording and its use in composition, and began broadcasting at a time when a new community of sound artists with a special interest in found sound was developing, a community spread across the globe that, thanks to the internet, was no longer limited to a specific geography. framework sees itself as an outlet for this ever-growing and developing community, a folk-tool in a new folk movement, a community driven exchange point for creators and listeners alike. Framework website

Isabella In the Forest
Izabela is unusual as a young woman recordist, in a profession dominated by men – all the more so because she has been blind from birth. She developed a special sensitivity to birdsong ever since her family gave her a tape recorder at the age of 12, and she at once turned its microphone towards the sky. She identifies species entirely though her ears, with an extraordinarily detailed depth of field.
Hearing the forest through Izabela’s acute ears, we venture into her world as well as that of the wilderness she loves. Recorded on location in Białowieza, we also hear night and dawn recordings that bring all sorts of surprises to the microphone.

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Listening Across Disciplines
An Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC) funded network project which brings together artists, musicians, scientists, technologists and social scientists as well as scholars and practitioners from the humanities to work across disciplinary boundaries on the recently emerging focus on sound and listening.
(23 episode)

Many Minds – A Hidden World of Sound
Consider the peacock. Its plumage is legendary—those shimmering, iridescent colors, and those eerie, enchanting eyespots. But what often goes less appreciated (at least by us humans) is that this chromatic extravaganza is also a sonic extravaganza. The peacock’s display operates in infrasound, an acoustic dimension that we simply can’t hear without assistance. Which raises a question: If we’re oblivious to the full vibrancy of the peacock’s display, what other sounds might we be missing out on?
Episode with Dr. Karen Bakker, Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia and author of the new book, The Sounds of Life: How Digital Technology is Bringing us Closer to the Worlds of Animals and Plants.
(1 episode)

McSweeneys – The Audio Issue
Combining art, fiction, audio, and a slew of unclassifiable print objects in a custom box, McSweeney’s 64 is a riotous exploration of audiovisual storytelling, coproduced with Radiotopia from PRX (home to genius, independent audio creators including Song Exploder, Criminal, Ear Hustle, and more). Each piece in the issue establishes its own relationship between audio and print—the contributor’s unique experiment in weaving the mediums.
Included are Rion Amilcar Scott with a short fiction piece featuring two alternative audio endings; Pulitzer Prize-nominated composer Kate Soper with a transhumanist, interactive software upload; DeafBlind poet John Lee Clark on the limits of accessibility; Claudia Dey, Jason Reynolds, Renee Gladman, Sharon Mashihi, and more taking us on audio tours of our own homes; Aliya Pabani with a radio drama whose plot is complicated by a 24″ x 30″ illustrated poster; Ian Chillag with an absurdist, interactive phone tree; James T. Green, Catherine Lacey, and This American Life’s Sean Cole with voicemail dispatches to the editor; National Book Award-finalist Kali Fajardo-Anstine, Aimee Bender, and Kelli Jo Ford with short stories that braid in audio; and so much more.


Medium Rotation – Triple Canopy
This series, asks how we understand ourselves and others through listening—and what the obstacles to listening reveal about our society. Omniaudience also testifies to the power we exercise as listeners to act in concert with each other, and to amplify voices that might not otherwise be heard.
(8 episode)

Noise a Human History
What if history had a sound track? What would it tell us about ourselves? This thirty-part BBC Radio series explores the human dramas that have revolved around sound at various points in the last 100,000 years, allowing us to think in fresh ways about the meaning of our collective past.
(30 episode)

Oceans of Noise
Wildlife recordist Chris Watson begins a three-part journey into the sonic environment of the ocean, celebrating the sounds and songs of marine life and investigating the threat of noise pollution
(3 episode)

On Being – Gordon Hempston
Acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton collects sounds from around the world.  An attentive listener, he says silence is an endangered species on the verge of extinction. He defines real quiet as presence — not an absence of sound but an absence of noise. We take in the world through his ears.
(1 episode)

On Listening – Thinking Through the Ear
 This program explores philosophy’s seeming difficulty in grappling with listening and its counterpart – sound – as a powerful deconstructive means to cut through some of the philosophical certainties that underpin classical and modern Western thought.
(1 episode)

On Listening – Jacob Kirkegaard
With projects on the deserts of Oman, the Chernobyl ‘zone of alienation’, Arctic calving glaciers and the tones generated by the human inner ear itself, mapping out Jacob Kirkegaard’s artistic practice is no easy task. He allows himself to be led by wonder, focusing on hidden or unheard layers of sound and sonic phenomena in highly charged contexts.
(one episode)

Phantom Power  
Phantom Power is an aural exploration of the sonic arts and humanities that launched in 2018. Hosted by poet + media artist cris cheek and sound + media scholar Mack Hagood, the podcast explores the sounds and ideas of artists, technologists, producers, composers, ethnographers, historians, cultural scholars, philosophers, and others working in sound.
(ongoing series)

Click here for a few of John’s favorite episodes

Dirty Rat (Brian House)
https://phantompod.org/episode-three-dirty-rat-brian-house/
April 9, 2018 | 00:35:06
This time we talk with a fascinating sound artist and composer Mack met at a recent meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. As his website puts it, “Brian House is an artist who explores the interdependent rhythms of the body, technology, and the environment. His background in both computer science and noise music informs his research-based practice. Recent interests include AI, telegraphy, and urban rats.” If that description looks a little daunting on the screen, the work itself sounds really cool to cris and Mack. We’ll listen to three pieces of Brian’s: a composition that imprints motion-tracking data on collectible vinyl, a field recording from the Okavango Delta in Botswana, and an encounter with the wildlife that put the “burrows” in New York’s five boroughs.

R. Murray Schafer (1933-2021) Pt.1
https://phantompod.org/ep-29-r-murray-schafer-1933-2021-pt-1/
September 28, 2021 | 00:34:23
R. Murray Schafer recently passed away on August 14th 2021. If you’re someone who works with sound or enjoys sound art or experimental music–or you’ve just thrown around the word “soundscape”–you’ve probably engaged with his intellectual legacy. Schafer was one of Canada’s most influential avant-garde composers. He was also the creator of acoustic ecology, the founder of the World Soundscape Project, and the author of the classic book The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World. He brought a musician’s ear to the field of ecology and he brought an ecological perspective to music. And he bequeathed us a generative vocabulary for talking about and thinking about sound. This is the first of a two-part series on R. Murray Schafer. Next month, we speak with two of Schafer’s critics–Mitchell Akiyama and Jonathan Sterne. But today, we speak with three of Schafer’s associates to understand the person, his creative works, and his lasting impact on the study of sound:

R. Murray Schafer Pt. 2: Critiques & Contradictions
https://phantompod.org/ep-30-r-murray-schafer-pt-2-critiques-and-contradictions/
October 29, 2021 | 00:46:11
How to think about the contradictory figure of R. Murray Schafer? A renegade scholar who used sound technology to create an entirely new field of study, even as he devalued the very tools of its trade. A gifted composer who claimed a sincere appreciation for indigenous cultures, yet one who, perhaps, could only love them on his own terms, only as they fit into his sweeping vision for Canadian music. An erudite reader with a deep knowledge of world cultures, who nevertheless dismissed Canada’s most multicultural areas as less than truly Canadian. And a man, who despite a bomb-throwing persona on the page, is described by those who knew him as a kind and generous person. Today we speak to Jonathan Sterne, Mitchell Akiyama, and Hildegard Westerkamp to learn the critiques and contradictions of Schafer. Perhaps the greatest testament to his lasting legacy is the fact that we aren’t done arguing with him.

Radio Concrete
Radio Concrete – produced by Hagai Izenberg – is an ongoing experimental sound project which combines field recordings together with radio broadcasting.
(ongoing series)

Radiophonic Travel Agency
Walk, run, swim, drive, float, ride, fly, wheel and meander around the world as we transport you to places near and far, using only the magic of sound. freed from guidebooks and narration and with only your imagination as companion, listen to the world in joyous new ways
(ongoing series)

Radiophonic Broadcast
The Radiophonic Broadcast examines innovations in sound and music. From field recordings and fictional journeys to Foley-inspired performances and music made by fungi, get to know the artists working at the vanguard of sound. This podcast gives equal balance to speech and music. Think of it as two sides of an LP or cassette: the first side contains conversations and interviews; the second – uninterrupted compositions made by or featuring our interviewees. Brought to you by The Radiophonic Institute.

Son[i]a
Son[i]a is a program of experimental music and sound art that takes place at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona (MACBA). The name “Son[i]a” comes from the Catalan word “sonar,” which means “to sound,” and the letter “i” represents the program’s interdisciplinary approach to exploring sound art and music.

Click here for a few of John’s favorite episodes

Alvin Lucier – SON[I]A #226
Lucier always seems ready to disappear within sound. It is as if his fascination with the sound phenomenon leads him to avoid interfering in its manifestation. His work is thus by no means based on self-expression or on compositional interventions. Instead, he allows sounds to “be themselves” without pushing or directing them in any way.

Antye Greie (AGF) – Son[i]a #366
Antye Greie (aka AGF or poemproducer) is a poet, activist, sound artist, sound sculptor, and curator, born in East Germany and based on the island of Hailuoto in northern Finland for over fifteen years. She started out playing in the experimental electronic group Laub in Berlin in the early 1990s, and went on to weave together an ongoing career out of feminisms, activism, collaborative practices, and radical ecology. Her practice, both poetic and political, goes beyond music and takes place between language, sound, listening, communication, and working with others in many platforms, formats, and alliances.

Sound Matters
BANG & OLUFSEN presents Sound Matters: a series of podcasts looking at – and listening to – all the sounds of the world around us. Forthcoming instalments will investigate all kinds of sounds that happen in our noisy cosmos, how we listen to them, the stories we tell about them, and all the ideas, inventions, discoveries, possibilities and ideas that live in the realm of the audible. Written and produced by Tim Hinman and brought to you by BANG & OLUFSEN

Sonic Acts
Sonic Acts is an interdisciplinary arts organisation based in Amsterdam uploading new recordings of presentations, performances, lectures, conversations and more.
Podcasts also available on Spotify and Apple Podcasts

The Dominant Eye (2018)
Responding to the overload of visual media dominating our contemporary senses, Siân Lyn Hutchings and The Noematic Collective develop a series of interconnected projects that foreground the use of sonic interpretation on site.
(14 episodes)

The Listeners – BBC  
Listening is about more than hearing as we discover with people whose professional lives revolve around listening, in one case using listening devices to pick up signs of life.
(2 episodes)

The World According to Sound
Chris Hoff and Sam Harnett are co-creators of The World According to Sound, a radio show that airs on NPR’s All Things Considered and weekly on individual public radio stations. The Washington Post writes that “each episode is 90 seconds, containing a neat little story about an evocative, unusual sound rendered in intense aural detail.”
(Ongoing Series)

Twenty Thousand Hertz
A podcast revealing the stories behind the world’s most recognizable and interesting sounds.
(Ongoing Series)

Variations – Jon Leidecker
VARIATIONS presents an overview of the major landmarks in Sampling Music, following examples in twentieth century composition, folk art and commercial media through to the meeting of all those threads in the present day.
(8 Episodes)


YNK
Electronic Animisms, Cosmic Diplomacies, Sonic Fabulations, Blasted Landscapes / Abundant Futures, Field Studies. Over five chapters unfolding a plurality of sonic expressions, imaginaries and thought, YNK interrogates relations to nonhumans, nature, bodies, and matter. (20 Episodes)