Get curated editors’ picks, peeks behind the scenes, film recommendations and more.
‘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.
video
Nature and landscape
‘A culture is no better than its woods’ – what our trees reveal about us, by W H Auden
5 minutes
video
Consciousness and altered states
‘I want me back’ – after a head injury, Nick struggles with his altered reality
7 minutes
video
Nature and landscape
California’s landscapes provide endless inspiration for a woodcut printmaker
10 minutes
video
Animals and humans
Join seabirds as they migrate, encountering human communities along the way
13 minutes
video
Art
Background music was the radical invention of a trailblazing composer
17 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
In art, the sublime is a feedback loop, evolving with whatever’s next to threaten us
9 minutes
video
Beauty and aesthetics
Can you see music in this painting? How synaesthesia fuelled Kandinsky’s art
10 minutes
video
Knowledge
Why it takes more than a lifetime to truly understand a single meadow
11 minutes
video
Knowledge
An Indigenous myth and a geological survey elicit two ways of knowing one place
4 minutes