Between the Ears: Miniatures

Audio-makers from around the world take over The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3's innovative Between the Ears features in miniature – each inspired by one of the five senses.

Producer Neena Pathak has been conducting a smell experiment with her dad, Jitendra. As his health declines, she prompts him with different smells that yield a flood of memories from years ago to more recent. You'll hear a journey through past and present that shows one way to mourn and celebrate someone still living.

Neena Pathak is a writer, producer and editor whose work has appeared in podcasts like Invisibilia, The Daily, This American Life, Still Processing, and Another Round. Her work has been honoured by the Pulitzer Prize Board, National Press Foundation, Asian American Journalists Association, Hearsay International Audio Festival, and Third Coast International Audio Festival.

Sound Designer: Chloe Prasinos
Editor: Eleanor McDowall
Special thanks to: Schuyler Swenson, Joanna Leigh Simon, Stella Tan, Eleanor Kagan, Michael Simon Johnson, Sangeeta and Vilas Mandlekar, Uma Pathak, and the Monson Arts Residency.

First broadcast 27th November 2023, BBC Radio 3
Produced by Neena Pathak

Between the Ears: Miniatures: Smell Smelling 1/5

Audio-makers from around the world take over The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3's innovative Between the Ears features in miniature – each inspired by one of the five senses.

How To Be Cool is artist/composer Max Syedtollan’s surreal and irreverent take on the self-help genre. He narrates a guided hypnosis tape that promises to make the listener cool – but there are sinister motives lurking beneath the surface in this musical and comedic journey through the absurdities of social mores.

Glasgow-based Max Syedtollan works across music, text and performance. He is particularly interested in radiophonic composition and is undertaking a
PhD on its history and practice.

First broadcast 28th November 2023, BBC Radio 3
Produced by Max Syedtollan

Between the Ears: Miniatures: Taste (How To Be Cool) 2/5

Audio-makers from around the world take over The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3's innovative Between the Ears features in miniature – each inspired by one of the five senses.

Hidden Touch - written, composed and narrated by Suvi Tuuli Kataja, Elli Salo - explores the rituals and culture of death through everyday and mythical traditions. The audio work follows Laru Yliskoski, an undertaker, on the last journey of the deceased and shows how the dead are cared for after death.

”Relatives often want to put something in the coffin. It can be anything. An unfinished cross. Liquorice pastilles in the breast pocket. Children's drawings.”

Hydrophone artist, music: Jussi Liukkonen

Suvi Tuuli Kataja is a director, screenwriter and sound designer whose work has been acclaimed at international festivals, including Prix Europa, BANFF World Media Festival and at home in Finland.
Elli Salo is a playwright and dramaturg. She has worked in a variety of roles in radio and sound, theatre, literature and film and her work has been translated into several languages and received awards in Finland and abroad.

First broadcast 29th November 2023
Produced by Suvi Tuuli Kataja and Elli Salo

Between the Ears: Miniatures: Hidden Touch 3/5

Audio-makers from around the world take over The Essay to offer a series of Radio 3's innovative Between the Ears features in miniature – each inspired by one of the five senses.

In a series of instructions, speculative directions and personal knowledges – overlapping images composed of old light – we encounter a choreography of gestures that house the incalculable forms of our living. How are we displaced from what we see? And what kind of unstable authority do we wield over a world constantly evading our grasp?

Naarm/Melbourne-based Jon Tjhia is an artist, writer and editor working through radio and podcast, temporary broadcast, literature, photomedia, intersensory access, music and publishing. His recent work is published or commissioned by Debris Magazine, Chunky Move, Liquid Architecture, Un Magazine, LIMINAL, Weird Noise, the Powerhouse Museum, the Barbican, Avantwhatever and WFMU.

First broadcast 30th November 2023, BBC Radio 3
Produced by Jon Tjhia

Between the Ears: Miniatures: Sight Reading 4/5

How does one live with a difficult diagnosis that offers glimmers of hope, but that also emerges from pathologising histories?

This feature by London-based Tej Adeleye is a neuromantic quest through the psyche to come to terms with neurodivergence, unearthing buried signals that call for a rewiring of values in relation to self, health and society. Delving into the sound of bad crip feelings, this piece tunes into the register of crip negativity to find anti-ableist horizons both internally and in the outside world.

Featuring Faith Becky Oyeri, Jeanet Oyeri Fru from the Justice for Emmanuel Fru Campaign, Wemimo Aliyu, Micha Frazer Carroll, author of 'MAD WORLD: the politics of mental health’, J. Logan Smilges author of Crip Negativity and Robert Chapman, author of Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism

Original composition, “Phases”, by the composer and artist Matana Roberts.

Tej Adeleye is a writer, audio producer and arts programmer. Her arts practice focuses on the connections between past and present black political struggles using multidisciplinary activations, popular education and archives.

Between the Ears: Miniatures: Sound 5/5

From floating in a pond in Vermont to slipping between space and the sky, five audio-makers offer a series of Radio 3's innovative Between the Ears features in miniature inspired by the elements.

Our first edition takes water as its starting point. Erica Heilman is the maker of the independent podcast Rumble Strip, which she produces in her closet in East Calais, Vermont.

A Pond of No Consequence is two old friends, floating on a third-rate roadside pond in northern Vermont, comparing notes on tiny lilypad people and ageing parents and the sweetness of short summers and everyday life.

First broadcast 30th September 2024, BBC Radio 3
Produced by Erica Heilman

Between the Ears: Miniatures: A Pond of No Consequence 1/5

We make documentaries and audio art for radio, podcasts and public spaces.

At the heart of what we do is a belief in the imaginative possibilities of radio. Sounds that can reconfigure the world around you, move you through inner landscapes, sink into your dreams.

We are an intentionally small company that considers carefully the creative, social and political aspects of the work we put out into the world.

Falling Tree has two full-time Directors – Eleanor McDowall and Alan Hall – and we work with freelancers across our projects, including the core Short Cuts production team of Alia Cassam, Axel Kacoutié and Andrea Rangecroft.

We are one of the founding signatories of the Equality in Audio pact. 

You can listen to hundreds of our documentaries in the free, online Falling Tree archive.

Between the Ears: Miniatures: A Pond of No Consequence 1/5

Falling Tree Productions