TRANSCRIPT: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/transcripts/A_Mother_Tongue_Transcript.pdf

What is the etymology of your being? 

Axel Kacoutié offers a vivid personal essay reflecting on language, bilingualism and the curated gaps they have to navigate in order to access their culture and sense of self.

“Your language is a spell, an invocation speaking you into existence, rediscovering the contours of your morality, the fabric of your race and gender and how you relate to others and the world…”

Featuring the voices of the poet Raymond Antrobus and performance artist Rachel Cheung, Axel weaves together the thoughts of a number of multilingual people - including Derick Armah, Irina Niculescu, Mauricio Loseto, Olivia Melkonian, Radhika Viswanathan and Rosel Jackson Stern - into a reflection on living between languages and finding yourself in the gaps.

Read the transcript with sound captions here: http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/radio4/transcripts/A_Mother_Tongue_Transcript.pdf

Illustration: Erin Tse

First broadcast 15th November 2021, BBC Radio 4
Produced by Axel Kacoutié

A Mother Tongue

"Without music we’d simply be something other than human beings.” Birthdays, weddings, festivals, funerals and more – pretty much every important human event is marked by music, and our brains take it all in, no matter how distant or vague those memories become. In this episode we meet Paul Robertson, violinist and professor in music and medicine, who has spent years working with people who are ill, suffering from dementia and brain damage. From a distant childhood memory of a fragment of a song to a mass of Rugby fans singing together in harmony, we discover how the music embedded in our memories and dreams can be used by people whose fabric of identity has come under stress and need help to find their way back to themselves.

02 – Music, Memory And Auditory Angels

A zombie growls, a piano plays – this episode of Sound Matters gets into a cinematic frame of mind. In it, Tim Hinman meets two exponents of sound in cinema, both of them want to control how you feel, how you react and how you see the movie on the screen in front of you. Get comfortable in your seat, take that first handful of popcorn and meet film sound designer Peter Albrechtsen who tells us how he makes movies leap out and grab at you using sound, and musician and composer Neil Brand who plays live accompaniment to early, silent films.

03 – Zombie Movie Piano Music

There’s a problem with your brain… well, not your brain specifically, but there’s a problem when it comes to neuroscientists understanding how your brain works when you’re listening to stuff. In the past few years there have been massive advancements in mapping out the parts of your brain that are activated when when you hear. But the closer we look, the more complicated it gets. What exactly, in all that insanely complex network of neural connections, is going on in your head that makes it possible to hear sounds, filter out only the most important parts, and understand what they mean? In our fourth instalment, intrepid host Tim Hinman meets Trevor Cox, a professor of acoustics and perception, and gets the lowdown on what’s up with the brain and how (we think) it cognates sound.

04 – Brains, Cars And Tigers

How can you tell the difference between a good sound and a bad sound? There’s not much that’s more annoying than to be forced to listen to a bad sound – but what do we mean when we call something a bad sound, and is that bad sound heard and understood in the same way by different people? In this final episode of our podcast series, host Tim Hinman argues that it’s all relative –good sound and bad sound. But relative to exactly what? That’s the hard part. Featuring Mark Grimshaw, Professor of Music at Aalborg University and Andreas Hudelmayer, a luthier working out of Clerkenwell, London.

08 – The Good, The Bad And The Smelly

Outer space is a vacuum – it’s full of a whole lot of nothing – so it’s pretty quiet out there. Or is it? Sit back, strap yourself in and lift off into the great beyond. This episode of Sound Matters features Professor Tim O’Brien of Jodrell Bank Observatory in the UK and amateur radio satellite enthusiast Dave Rowntree (you might know him as the drummer in legendary Britpop band, Blur) looking at and listening to sounds from beyond our atmosphere. Also featuring sounds from the Voyager Space Probe, the planet Mars, black holes, pulsars, the solar wind, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first space walk, the space shuttle, aliens, and more. Not so quiet up there anymore, eh?

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Sound Matters

10 - Sounds from Outer Space

“I’ve spent a lot of time recently doing concerts for dogs… They’re the perfect audience.” So claimed musician, multimedia artist and film maker, Laurie Anderson when we interviewed her recently. And, if YouTube is anything to go by, millions of people agree with Laurie: “Funny Dog Singing Compilation”, “LOL Dogs That Sing” and “My Dog Sings With Beyonce” are just a few of seemingly infinite videos shot and posted online by us humans of animals singing. We love it. But Why? Join Tim Hinman as he jumps earsfirst into the musical menagerie of animals that bark, howl and otherwise sing, chatting with Laurie Anderson and the musician, composer, author and philosopher naturalist, David Rothenberg who has jammed with all types of creatures, from bugs to whales and beyond.

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11 - Big Science & Little Creatures

Some sounds go back… way back. In this edition of Sound Matters, we travel to a time before music was music, when man-made sounds allowed us mere mortals to hear the voices of the gods – when the line between making music and making magic meant a whole lot more than just putting together your next party mix playlist. Host Tim Hinman takes us to meet musician and composer Barnaby Brown, who specialises in recreating sounds from long-forgotten instruments, and Peter Holmes, an engineer and trumpet player who rebuilds ancient metal instruments, played by ancient civilisations.

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12 – New Tunes From Old Bones

Third Ear Theme

samples taken from nobody zone, documentary about irish serial killer, kieran kelly.. https://youtu.be/SO1WVmq5qKA

i'd like to thank Ushterek for his input....https://soundcloud.com/ushterek

Third Ear Theme

Third Ear Presents...

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