This week on KALW's showcase for the best stories from public radio podcasts and independent radio producers...
“The New Art of Listening,” from Noise: A Human History produced by Rockethouse Productions, March 2013.
What if you could listen to the soundtrack of the entire history of the human civilization. What could it tell us about ourselves now in 2018?
Noise: A Human History is 30-part BBC Radio series that attempts to answer that question. Made in collaboration with the British Library Sound Archive, the series explores the human dramas that have revolved around sound at various points in the last 100,000 years, allowing us to think in fresh ways about the meaning of our collective past.
Today, I want to highlight one of those thirty parts, a look at the “new art of listening” that swept through popular culture in the nineteenth century. Professor David Hendy of the University of Sussex explores how the Victorians stopped shuffling and learned to hush, beginning with a nature walk in California.
Pick up where this installment of the series Noise: A Human History leaves off at bbc.co.uk. It's produced by Matt Thompson.
“Ghost in the mp3,” from the podcast Transistor by PRX, August 2016.
The STEM podcast Transistor takes the time to explore just what is happening to a piece of music as it’s transformed from studio tape into a bite-sized mp3, and just want can be lost in the process. Reported by Emily Richardson-Lorente.
This story was produced in 2015 for PRX's STEM Story Project, and you can hear it along with more STEM reporting on the Transistor podcast. Check it out at transistor.prx.org, and download it wherever you prefer to listen to your podcasts.
This week's episode featured music from: Black Moth Super Rainbow, Monophonics, Twin Steps, and Lowell.
If you have a suggestion for a podcast or an audio project we should feature, please drop us a line at thespot@kalw.org.
Tune in next week for another episode of The Spot, only on KALW San Francisco.
