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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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Technology and the self
Greetings from Green Bank – the small town where modern technology is banned
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Stories and literature
What makes John Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ so enduringly powerful?
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Human evolution
Far from frivolous, cuteness is a powerful – and still mysterious – force of nature
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Dance and theatre
How a Noh mask-maker summons a lifelike face from a single block of wood
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Family life
On a whirlwind morning, a couple learns if they’re facing an unplanned pregnancy
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The ancient world
What wine vessels reveal about politics and luxury in ancient Athens and Persia
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Art
David Goldblatt captured the contradictions of apartheid in stark black and white
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Philosophy of mind
Do we have good reasons to believe in beliefs? A radical philosophy of mind says no
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Philosophy of religion
How a devout Catholic philosopher approaches the problem of evil
8 minutes