Noise: A History
BBC Radio 4
“We assume the past was much quieter,” chides David Hendy in the opening seconds of his new 30-part series (weekdays, 1.45pm) on the history of noise (“turning up the volume on the past; making sense of history through sound”). Hendy is clearly walking down a New York street and then suddenly – unusual travel budget alert! – hauls us to a black cave in Burgundy looking for evidence of life from 20,000 years ago. “Put humans in a cave,” whispers David, feeling his way along the bare rock, “and it can become quite unnervingly noisy. If we hum or sing, the cave . . . sings back as if the cave itself is alive.”
How nose-stroking can a lunchtime show get? In the background, terrible sounds recur: groans repeatedly dissolving into the kind of surprised, rising grunt issued by an on-hisuppers Scooby-Doo. “That’s Igor Resnikov,” admits David after a moment, awed. “He’s a French archaeologist conducting an interesting experiment.” No way. Igor communicates exclusively through grunts and taps, uttering not a human word, leaving us to imagine him rocking through weeks of intense glooms, a jungle of bone medallions nestling in a hairy chest, occasionally visited by neuropsychologists and economic historians eager to widen the scope of their funding applications. Igor has been searching for the most aurally resonant places in cave systems for decades, proving that 80 per cent of prehistoric paintings occur in places where the acoustics are particularly unusual. David insists it’s incredibly interesting –but the moment Igor detects something that sounds outré, he turns on his torch and finds a painted bison. “Something drew them to these most inaccessible chambers . . .” ferrets Hendy, a professor of media and communication at Sussex who one suspects is never more than a phone call away from a mixed mezze at the Lebanese opposite Portland Place. “Whoever created this art seems to have chosen acoustically ‘interesting spaces’ as if mesmerised by echoes . . .”
Next up: the alarm calls of the vervet monkey, the “talking drum” and a song to summon rainforest spirits. Put like that, this sounds like the most sub-avant-garde and brilliant new programme on BBC radio. And what a way to intro The Archers!