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‘Nature is music. I’m not asking you to get all theoretical here – I’m saying, just listen.’
There are vanishingly few places left on land untouched by human-made sounds, and those quiet areas are shrinking every year. No one knows this better than the US sound recordist and acoustic ecologist Gordon Hempton, an Emmy award-winner who specialises in capturing the sounds of nature. At once a profile, a guided meditation and a call to action, Being Hear follows Hempton as he records sounds on Washington State’s Olympic Peninsula – a National Park that contains the continental United States’ only rainforest. Combining Hempton’s measured words with striking scenes and sounds of the park’s lush vegetation, rippling waters and diverse animal life, the film suggests that ensuring that parts of nature remain untouched by human sound starts with us listening attentively and with intention.
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Mood and emotion
A century of letters captures the emotions of life in a new city, far from home
21 minutes
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Ageing and death
Death is a trip – how new research links near-death and DMT experiences
9 minutes
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Technology and the self
Adaptive technologies have helped Stephen Hawking, and many more, find their voice
5 minutes
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Gender and identity
‘When you’re done, you stay human!’ What gender transition means to John
6 minutes
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Stories and literature
Solaris and beyond – Stanisław Lem’s antidotes to the bores of American sci-fi
7 minutes
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Ecology and environmental sciences
To renew Yosemite, California should embrace a once-outlawed Indigenous practice
6 minutes
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Music
Before the Beatles dropped acid, a BBC workshop was creating far-out sounds
6 minutes
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Philosophy of language
For Ludwig Wittgenstein, language is a game, but not a frivolous one
43 minutes
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Art
Is paying with hand-drawn banknotes artistry or forgery? The knotty case of J S G Boggs
10 minutes