This project caught our imagination just recently and now we’re visiting the blog everyday to see if they’ve posted a new sound. Two gentlemen, David Hendy, a professor of media and communications and the programme’s presenter/author, along with producer, Matt Thompson, have embarked on a journey around the world to capture and collect sounds for a thirty-part series for BBC Radio 4. Their mission, they say, is to create “…a vivid and richly textured exploration of the role of sound in the past 100,000 years of human history. Recorded on location around the world, it will take us from the shamanistic trance-music of our cave-dwelling ancestors, the babel of ancient Rome, the massacre of noisy cats in pre-revolutionary Paris, and the sonic assaults of trench warfare, right through to our struggle to find calm in the cacophony of a modern metropolis. This is not about sound in the abstract: it is about sound as a matter of life and death, pain and pleasure, feeling and intellect. People, and their past behaviours, are at the heart of it”.

The series starts on 18 March and an accompanying book will be out around the same time. More info as we get it or do as we’re doing and visit the blog here.