Hearing Voices on the BBC

I listen to the BBC a lot here in Berlin. It's actually one of the highlights of living here for me. The channel is so varied, from new pop music to documentaries about the concept of Infinity. And, they are one of the few regular creators of radio documentaries. Last week, I heard one (or sort of heard one) that confused me, and made me think

Sometimes when I mishear things, it inspires me to think about what the lyrics or sound or style could have been - and then sometimes I realize that I come up with the same thing I would have heard if I'd actually been listening. And that's sort of what happened with this BBC piece last week. I was vaguely listening in the kitchen while I was doing the dishes, and I heard lots of dropouts and clicks, and I thought there was something wrong with the radio. And then I thought, wouldn't it be cool if this was part of the piece? Of course, it was.

It's called Hearing Voices, and it's about language death - the extinction of languages. It's part documentary, part sound art, done by a man called John Wynne. Coincidentally, as I sit here and type, I'm wearing a Third Coast Festival (an organization I have mixed feelings about) t-shirt, and the web tells me this piece won an award at the 2005 festival. You can hear a six minute excerpt here, or you can find the whole 28 minute piece here. The piece was also featured in this exhibition. Here's an interesting (if a bit pretentious)article about clicks and glitches - the way the traditional African language comes across on the radio). You might want to skip or skim the first two paragraphs.

As I was trying to find the audio link for Hearing Voices, I ended up streaming the BBC live on my laptop, and hearing a bit of another documentary about the Scottish island of St. Kilda, a barren place that is now uninhabited. One anecdote jumped out at me - a woman telling the story of how hard her mother worked, and that she received an orange for payment. She'd never seen an orange before, and didn't know what to do with it. So sat it on the dresser and eventually it rotted. And that was her payment. Very odd, very touching. Very very BBC.