WHO USES BBC MYTRACKS SERIES
WHO USES BBC MYTRACKS TV

It stopped me in my tracks – partly because of how lush the sounds were, but also because I could tell straight away that the repeated melody sung by the bird was – to human ears – in a western musical scale. It immediately made me think of when I was working in the BBC’s own archives about 10 years ago: we’d been doing some audits of unlabelled natural history material, and I stumbled across a DAT of a bird in the Sumatran rainforest made by a recordist called Sue Western.

WHO USES BBC MYTRACKS SERIES

I dunno about intellectual development – I tend to go for the emotional jugular first when I’m writing something!īBC Sounds had already started developing ideas for a series based around the act of listening to recordings of the natural world, in partnership with the AHRC, and they asked me to throw some ideas at the brief. The podcast series has been described as an “eco-sci-fi thriller”, could you expand more on this? What has been the main inspiration and intellectual development behind the podcast series? But with Forest 404 I found myself referencing Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand Of Darkness and The Word For World Is Forest a lot the journey of those books, as much as anything else. So I guess the ‘story influences’ are pretty much different for everything I do, too. I often feel like when I write for radio I’m using the same part of my brain that I use to make more abstract music – a bit like I’m reaching for the listener in a similar way. I like to take ideas and processes from one kind of art form and carry them into others. So I’ve had an education of contrasts, basically.

WHO USES BBC MYTRACKS TV

I started my career as a composer for screen, then over about 20 years gradually shifted into writing scripts for stage, then radio, then TV and film… and over that time I variously had a record deal, I did stints as a critic writing about live art and performance, I worked in libraries and archives. Here, the series’ writer Timothy X Atack provides CLOT with more insight into the series and his creative process.įor our audience that is not familiar with your work, could you tell us a bit about your background and influences? While we are likely clear of another meteor destroying today’s existent ecology, it’s human activity that could actually do far worse.įorest 404 helps us experience life after an entire denuding and automation of our world (what in the series is called the Fast Times) and asks us to seriously reconsider the importance of songbirds, whooshing wind through the treetops, and the rush of streams into the seas. For the same reasons the dinosaurs disappeared, shrunk, or evolved, so did the trees. They provided shade for many species of dinosaur. The neighbourly Coastal Redwoods of mine (and their cousins the Giant Sequoia and smaller but hardier Metasequoia) once grew across much of the northern hemisphere. What may be the most interesting aspect of the series is a 10 minute online experiment designed to assess the effects that natural sounds have on well-being. The Mental health effects of being in nature is topic one, how humans are changing the sound of the planet is another. Pan, unable to understand what she has discovered, becomes obsessed with finding the source of the deliciously compelling sounds.Īccompanying talks and soundscapes in the podcast series riff on themes explored in the thriller. Refusing to explore this idea from one angle, the series features a sci-fi thriller set in the 24th Century, with a protagonist named Pan who discovers 21st Century recordings of a rainforest. This powerful connection with our arboreal stalwarts is explored in the BBC Radio podcast series Forest 404, which asks us to imagine what happens if the woods disappear from history.

It’s a chance to escape an ever more crowded, seemingly disconnected, arguably downright perilous society. It’s a chance to see living organisms that witnessed the first cave dwellers.

It’s a place to slow down and put things into new perspective. It’s a vital link to the natural forces that control the planet.

The forest offers me, and all of us, so much.

It’s the perfect place to recuperate from the Time Square of Hipsterdom. Now I live just north of San Francisco, a 15-minute walk to Muir Woods-the only old growth forest of coastal redwoods in the Bay Area-with the Pacific Ocean just beyond. For years, the crashes of garbage trucks, beeps from delivery trucks, and clangs from inside taco trucks ricocheted through my apartment day and night. As a former, longtime resident of Williamsburg Brooklyn, I didn’t use to sleep.

Who uses bbc mytracks