Slow Radio

In 2017, audio producer Phil Smith travelled to Ukraine to attend his friend's wedding. There, somewhere between the cities of Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv and Odessa, he fell in love with the soundworld of the sleeper train: its steady hypnotic rhythms, the melody of hurtling through time and space, the calls of distant tannoy speakers drifting across platforms in the dead of night, the chorus of snores from sleeping passengers. Revisiting these recordings, seven years later, this Slow Radio journey offers echoes of a country in calmer times, when such trains were not a means of logistics transportation or symbol of desperate escape (as witnessed in the February of 2022) but conduits of restful imagining.From the opening establishing shot - the sound of whistles and shunting engines, off in the distance - we are moved along in a river of wheeled luggage through the cathedral acoustics of a station building to take our seat in the carriage of the overnight train. The scenes are unhurried as bunks are unfolded and brief snatches of conversation overheard. We set off - a gentle accelerando of wheels and rails - and time stretches: there are no voices now, just the music of the train's motion through the night.Produced by Phil Smith A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3

Relax with a mix of music and natural sounds, recorded by Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners. Three dawn choruses from across the UK, starring woodland, garden and sea birds, follow on from the very different dusk chorus from the remote Greeenland town of Ilulissat, which features hundreds of huskies. Recordings made by Julie Moody, Alice Smith, Ted Reed and Michael Bawtree.

Time unravels in this hypnotic audio journey...In this edition of Slow Radio, we tumble inside the delicate mechanism of the clock - our attempt to contain and mark the steady rush of time itself. Musical and rhythmic, this surreal audio composition moves between the meditative beat of a single timepiece through to a cacophonous eruption of melodious chimes and cuckoos. The Clock will air just after Big Ben's midnight chimes play out on the BBC, 100 years after London's most famous clock was first broadcast on New Year's Eve 1923.Featuring audio first recorded for the documentary Time Flies on BBC Radio 4, as well as new recordings and compositions built from the sounds of Big Ben's internal mechanism and ringing bells.Produced by Eleanor McDowall A Falling Tree production for BBC Radio 3

How does the Berlin urban landscape sound?Using a unique approach that combines field recordings and photographs translated into audio, the Uruguayan and Berlin-based artist Darío Dornel, aka Kirap, takes listeners on a captivating journey through the city's hidden soundscapes.Pictures of recognisable city places are translated into sound using audio software through Bitmap's code conversion. A wide range of sounds is generated using various sound design tools and techniques. These sounds are combined with field recordings from the same places, creating an immersive sound exploration trip.The journey starts at an old Berlin district, where listeners are greeted by the songs of birds, we then explore a street market in Neukölln, a demonstration on the old Prussian road, to finally listening to the day fading out at a train station, and welcoming the night at a known corner in Mitte.Whether you are a local or a first-time visitor, this sound piece offers a fresh perspective on Berlin's urban landscape and a new way to experience the city by uncovering hidden features initially unnoticed. Take advantage of this chance to imaginatively travel to Berlin and discover the sonic landscape that makes this city unique.

Relax with a mix of music and natural sounds, recorded by Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners. We start in the Himalayas and end in an urban forest in Dehli, getting there via Kardamyli beach in Greece and the Thames footpath in Oxfordshire. Recordings made by Naryndra Kumar, James Hadley, Kate Sandars and Michael Lidgley.

YA Z AN, a Palestinian Berlin-based artist, travels around his hometown of Ramallah, located in the heart of the West Bank. During his journey, YA Z AN encounters sounds that comfort and remind him of home. He uses binaural technology to collect audio pieces from the verdant Palestinian landscape and sculpts them with sounds from everyday life to create a complete surround sound experience.Setting off with a ‘oud player singing folklore music during a post-wedding ceremony and followed by a walk to home where family is gathered at a dinner table chit-chatting about food and how it is prepared, the recent events that resulted in the death of martyrs in Palestine and the earthquake that occurred in Syria/Turkey. Progressing through the day, Yazan goes down to the city centre farmers market (Al-hisbeh) where a number of street vendors are shouting out the prices of their products.Upon joining friends to hangout, the journey travels further to a jam session when surprisingly the rhythm of the community turns into a small choir.The journey ends with Sufi singer Shadi Al-ahmad intoning his voice in his historical Palestinian home with a cross vault ceiling that accents his baritone.

With its peak at 2410 metres in altitude, the North Grigna is an imposing quasi-mythical character in the local culture of the Lombardy region. Those who get to its top can take in a 360-degree view over the Alps, Lake Como and the plains around Milan. Celebrated by Leonardo Da Vinci in his Codex Atlanticus for its rocky ridges, the mountain is also the protagonist in an Italian Alpine folk song entitled The Legend of the Grigna. The lyrics speak of a beautiful female warrior who is turned into a dangerous mountain, divine punishment for her having asked a sentry to fire an arrow at her suitor.This song - sung in Italian by a local choir - frames our ascent on foot to the top of the North Grigna. As the singers recount the story of the warrior, warning us of the dangers of the hike, we pass through woodlands of beech and larch trees, and encounter small pastures where sheep and donkeys graze. There are rain showers, steep slopes, scree and snowy paths to battle and rare encounters with other intrepid Alpinists. The target is the Rifugio Brioschi, a wooden hut at the peak of the mountain where fellow hikers raise a glass and share tales from the climb before turning in for the night.With special thanks to the Coro Grigna for allowing us to attend their weekly rehearsal and record La Leggenda della Grigna, and to fellow hikers Hannah Mackaness, Monica Malberti and Valentina Rossini.Produced by Silvia Malnati A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds, from rooks on Orkney to a midwife toad chirruping in south-west France. Plus bats in Lancashire and nightingales in Sussex. Recordings by BBC Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Stephanie Fritchley, Aidan Semmens, Simon Tuck and Paul Richens.

Beekeeper Anthony Smith looks after several hundred beehives across Herefordshire and South East Wales. This episode of Slow Radio takes us to one of his apiaries where we eavesdrop on Anthony’s activities. It’s the middle of the summer, and the bees are at their busiest.Many of the sounds of bees and beekeeping have barely changed for thousands of years, whereas others are distinctly modern. We’ll hear single bees collecting nectar as they move from flower to flower, and clusters of bees jostling against each other inside a busy hive. The beekeeper releases puffs of smoke to calm his bees as he inspects their work and we can hear the subtle differences in buzzing between a colony with or without a queen.Over in the workshop, or ‘honey room’, we witness the processes that transform a frame of honeycomb into a pot of honey, from the spinning of the frames to the filling of the jars.A Tandem Production for BBC Radio 3

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds. A special edition featuring the Sounds of the Earth mixes of music and the incredible sounds of the insects, birds and animals featured in BBC One's Wild Isles series.The nature sounds were captured by the audio team at Silverback Films, with audio post-production from Wild Buffalo, and kindly shared with Radio 3’s Sunday Breakfast team for the weekly Sounds of the Earth feature.

Across Britain, 352 BBC transmitters stand, mostly on the tops of hills broadcasting sound, music and voices invisibly across the country. In this slow radio episode, Matthew Herbert and a group of recording engineers visited some of these transmitters in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England to listen to what the transmitters were hearing at exactly 11.30 at night - the time of this broadcast. Starting at the transmitter atop Crystal Palace and then moving through the country to finish in snowy Aberdeen, hear how the sonic landscape changes the further north travelled.Transmitter is a production from Munck Studios with Matthew Herbert for BBC Radio 3, recorded by Pete Stollery, Hugh Jones, Dan Pollard, Ella Kay, Robbie McCammon, Pieter Dewulf and Cameron Naylor.

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds. This springtime special features a blackbird singing at daybreak in Newcastle, a nightingale in the Umbrian foothills, central Italy, and a newly born lamb communicating for the very first time with its mother in a field in Wiltshire. Recordings by Radio 3 Breakfast listeners Sarah Couch, Nick and Val Bale, and Tom Perrett, plus master sound recordist Chris Watson.

This Slow Radio experience features sounds from the BBC television programme Wild Isles: a chance to revel in the extraordinary sounds recorded and created for the series, without voice-over or music.Using an aural collage of clips, the half-hour soundscape takes a journey from mountain stream to the sea, around Great Britain and Ireland. It utilises sounds from the Freshwater and Oceans episodes and begins with a specially recorded introduction by Sir David Attenborough.From there, the sounds of cascading streams and waterfalls give way to the call and shuffle of a common toad. Around the caves of County Cavan bats use sonar to navigate. Their ultrasonic clicks can be heard, slowed down. A cuckoo sings beside a chalk stream while a spider catches a pond skater in its web.The distinctive low call of the bittern introduces the Suffolk reed beds, where great crested grebes perform a mating dance, beaks clashing. Further towards the sea, a colony of knot are scattered by a peregrine falcon, and in the Shetland Isles, a sea otter grunts and snorts around the rocks.A thunderstorm at sea heralds a seal colony at Blakeney Point, Norfolk, where two males fight. Then the eerie calls of Manx shearwater, who visit each year from South America, are followed by the chatter of many gannets, in and out of water.The Corryvreckan Whirlpool in Scotland pulls us under for an array of fantastical subaquatic sounds: cuttlefish, sea gooseberries, melon comb jelly; the squelch of a royal flush sea slug, spider crabs leaving their shells, and the scream of a scallop, devoured by a starfish. Dolphins break the surface, and a bluefin tuna skims across the waves before we sail out into Cardigan Bay.Audio post-production: Wounded BuffaloSlow Radio producer: Sam HicklingWild Isles sound team: Sound Editors – Kate Hopkins, Tom Mercer Dubbing Mixers – Oliver Baldwin, Dan Brown, Olga Reed, Graham Wild

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds, from the Atlantic rainforests of Brazil to Eastern Banjo Frogs in Adelaide, Australia. Plus a dawn chorus in Cornwall and chaffinches in Noja, Northern Spain. Recordings by BBC Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Bob Castell, Kate Wilson, Peter Halmkin and Kevin Cox.

There’s a gentle rhythm to everyday life in a Hindu temple, that follows carefully choreographed rituals linked to the care of the deities - creating a rich aural texture from dawn when the gods are woken, to nightfall when they sleep. The sounds wax and wane; each part of the day has its own soundscape and the priest presides over it all. You’ll hear the constant sound of bells as a backdrop, rung by devotees as they approach the shrines, focussing their minds and alerting the deities to their presence.The deities, or murtis, as they are known in Hinduism, represent the different aspects of God - in the form of beautifully carved statues. They are worshipped and cared for as the physical representations of God.This episode of Slow Radio takes us to the Shree Sanatan Mandir, a Hindu temple in Leicester, where we recorded sounds from inside the temple across a whole Saturday. The mandir is one of the oldest and largest mainstream Hindu temples in Leicester, housed in a former Baptist chapel. There is one main ‘prayer hall’, home to 5 main shrines. But there are 17 shrines in all, representing the major Hindu deities including, amongst others, Krishna and his consort Radha; Ram and his wife Sita, his brother Laxman; as well as Hanuman, Ganesha, Shiva and Ambamata. In the wider temple building there are also other meeting rooms and halls.During the recording you’ll hear worship across the day - singing and prayer, readings from sacred texts, meditation for the women’s group and quiet times for private devotion or chatting to the priest. You’ll also hear Illa Majithia and Anil Chauhan from the temple committee explaining some of the sounds.But the programme starts with the sound of volunteers cleaning the temple at daybreak, as the priest opens the curtains around the shrines, waking the deities, before washing them, dressing them in fresh clothes and decorating them with garlands of fresh flowers brought by the devotees, who are gathering for early morning worship.Produced by Jo Dwyer. This is a Loftus Media production.

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds, from birdsong and tortoises in the Seychelles to waves and whistling frogs in Barbados, via a bubbling brook in Northumberland and a murmuration of starlings playing in a poplar tree. Recordings by David Fay, Honey Schreker, Kathryn Potts and Rupert Ormond.

High in the mountains snow falls. As it comes to rest on the frozen slopes it become part of an ancient glacier. Over the course of 100 years the glacier will flow down the valley, changing the landscape around it.Using field recordings from deep within glaciers, along with the sounds of the natural world around them, this programme charts an imagined journey of snow and glacier from mountain top to valley floor.Over the course of that journey we hear the sound world change and the increasing impact of human activity on the landscape - the wilderness of the high slopes replaced by the noise of tourism and traffic. There is an irony to the fact that the people who choose to visit the mountains because they love them are also contributing to their changing environment.These unique glacier recordings have been made by Ugo Nanni, researcher at the University of Oslo who specialises in the stability of Arctic glaciers, and field recordist Clovis Tisserand.Producer: Barnaby Gordon

It is January 2022, and in the Upper Manhattan neighbourhood of Harlem all is quiet as people stay at home, preferring not to venture out into the minus-13-degree snow and ice that has blanketed the city.This half-hour soundscape begins with the geese pecking at the frozen lake at the northern tip of Central Park with the occasional sound of a passer by who has braved the weather.As we head north to Harlem, walking up Malcolm X Boulevard, an invitation into the warmth of the Abyssinian Baptist Church is welcome. It is no ordinary service but a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr and we hear sounds of the pastor and gospel choir as they join together in worship.Heading back out into the bracing cold, Harlem is busier. More people are gathered on the streets with stereos playing music, and public transport still in operation, battling against the snow.Sounds of live jazz emerge from local restaurants and wandering inside is a refuge from the weather, joining crowds of brunch-goers enjoying live music, drinks, food and the company of others.It takes about half an hour to walk from Central Park to the Jackie Robinson Park, where a flight of swallows can be heard returning us to the sounds of nature that we heard at the beginning of our walk.

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds: a walk in the Faroe Islands, a deer in the Scottish Highlands, a robin in Northamptonshire and a royal garden in Norway.Wildlife recordings from Chris Watson and Andy Fell, plus Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Louise and Donald Proven.

A settlement first known as Almatu developed on the Silk Road from the 10th century onwards. In the 1920s, the new Soviet authorities renamed the place Alma-Ata ('Grandfather of the apple') and made it the capital of the Kazakh SSR (formerly in Kyzylorda).We start our journey from one of Almaty's Soviet-era train stations, Almaty-2, built in the 1930s, with its paintings by Kazakh and Russian artists and the multi-lingual Tower of Babel representing the journey's start, in conversations and tannoy announcements.We hear the old Soviet engines arriving into the station, disgorging their passengers before awaiting a new intake; we hear the slow steady rhythm of the train, as passengers in varied states of boredom chat to each other and eat meals; we hear the sound of scalding water being decanted from the samovar, to make the harsh tea beloved in these parts for so many years; in the dining car we hear passengers sharing food, drink and stories, as they eat 'Plov' and other traditional food.We step out of the train at various points along the route, such as Turkistan (an ancient trade centre along the Silk Road) and Shymkent, where hawkers with their wares wait to sell food and drink.After 33 hours on board a train, we arrive at Aralsk, a thriving fishing port until environmental degradation and diversion of rivers for agriculture saw the sea massively shrink. We journey by car across the former seabed, see camels at oases and hear the howling winds that sweep across the vast plains and desert, before finally arriving at the gently lapping Aral Sea, a shadow of its former self.Producer: Michael Rossi