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Professor Hendy has travelled the world with an audio recorder and also ransacked the extensive sound archives at the British Library to create 30 short 15-minute talks that take us from echoing cave people to texting teenagers via the shamans of the Siberian plains and the pygmies of the Central African Republic. He has the right kind of voice for the job, light and easy on the ear while also clear and well-paced, drawing us in, not loading us with too much data.
In the first week, he took us inside the caves of Arcy-sur-Cure in Burgundy where archaeologists have discovered fragments of paintings of mammoths, bears, fish, even the delicate outline of a bird, dating back 40,000 years. That’s extraordinary enough, but when musicologist Iegor Reznikoff went into the cave to look at the paintings he found that 80 per cent of them are positioned precisely where, if you make a sound, there is an unusual resonance, an eerie, echoing presence.
The paintings are not close to the entrance of the cave, where the light from outside still penetrates, but deep inside where it would have been pitch-dark and to paint would have been difficult. Here, though, the echoes are more pronounced. If you clap in certain rhythms beside the painting of a mammoth, for instance, the overlapping reverberations sound like hooves galloping towards you from deep inside the cave. Reznikoff believes the images are connected to these audio effects. Sound is as important a part of their creation as the visual image. In effect, the images are signposts into an aural world, connecting the hearer, or rather listener, to another dimension of experience.
We heard the same disembodied sounds (conjured up by Hendy and Reznikoff) that our hunter-gatherer forebears would have heard, creating quite unexpected connections with the past. Perhaps technology is not so brave new worldish after all? The experience of listening to the radio, the way it draws upon the imagination for the pictures to come alive, is not so very different from the aural lives of those cave people in Arcy-sur-Cure.
What, though, would those cave-dwellers have made of the strange aural messages that emitted from Radio 4 as part of Open Air last week? Five artists were invited to create three-minute ‘audio interventions’ into the Radio 4 schedule, disrupting expectations, provoking reactions, creating unusual connections between the listener and broadcaster.
The trouble is that artists are not often the best people to come up with audio ideas. Their focus is on visual stimulii; their imaginations tuned into other kinds of creativity. These interruptions at 9.02 a.m. were mostly quite dull, saying more about the artist’s agenda and imaginative repertoire than what the listener could hope to experience.
On radio, there has always to be attention to the listener. How will he or she hear this? If you try to impose an imaginative agenda, or elicit a prescribed response, it won’t work. For the ethereal to come alive requires an absence, a withdrawal of self.
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Also by Kate Chisholm
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