basic.fm

I am delighted to have a selection of my audio works featured on basic.fm, a new broadcast project being undertaken by the Pixel Palace at Tyneside Cinema in Newcastle. Throughout the next couple of weeks the station will be playing a special eight hour show, composed from a collection of audioworks produced by international artists.

Have a listen - there's a great variety works being featured and the programme is continually cycling so you're always going to tap into something weird, wonderful and interesting.

You can browse the full schedule of participating artists and works here and tune in anytime here.

You can also listen to the pieces I have featured below:

The Trip

http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/the-trip

Adam as Machine

http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/adam-as-machine

Bury St Edmunds

http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/bury-st-edmunds

Audio piece: The Dustbin Man Cometh

A processed and layered piece constructed from a single recording of a dustbin truck captured outside of the Royal Institution of Great Britain. Headphones recommended. http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/the-dustbin-man-cometh

The piece was produced for exhibition at an In The Dark live listening event on Cityscapes and presented within the Glasshouse Bookshop at the Wapping Project on Wednesday 22nd March 2012.

If you have ever been woken up in the early hours by this sort of noise, I’m sure you’re aware of the complex mechanical racket that they make. It’s a great collection of sounds – clangs, squeaks and crashes - I really wanted to capture and then pull out elements of this noise, turning them into an evolving, glitchy cascade of sound that would fill the listening space it was to be presented in. Anyway, have a listen below.

In The Dark: Cityscapes

The Wapping Project Bookshop (21/03/12)

On Wednesday night I curated a listening event for In The Dark, held within the intimate confines of the Wapping Project's Bookshop, which just happens to be in a Glasshouse. If you've never been to an In The Dark event before, think of it as a film screening, but for radio, sound and audio stories.

The pieces chosen were all tied to the theme of 'Cityscapes', tapping into the many stories, textures and soundscapes that resonate from urban environments. The selection spanned a range of styles and formats, from more conventional narrative / documentary pieces to the more abstract, capturing the essence of urban decay through sound.

The features were also blended together with a collection of field recordings which I'd taken from around London, as well as those taken elsewhere, including a Parisian recording form Soundlandscapes blog.

Some notes on a few of the pieces featured:

Out of the Blocks

Included on the playlist was a 7 minute edit of 'Out of the Blocks', as recently featured on the Third Coast International site. Produced through a collaboration between radio producer Aaron Henkin and electronic / Hip-hop producer Wendel Patrick, the piece presents a sound rich documentary profiling of an entire city block in Baltimore, 'documenting the stories, voices, and people who populate the 3300 block of Greenmount Ave.'. What makes this piece stand out is in its interesting use of music, which was scored exclusively by Patrick adding greater texture to the voices and the stories they tell. [youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oj0JQF63lZQ]

You can listen to the short edit on the Third Coast site where there's also a nice interview with the pair. To listen to the original full hour edit of the documentary go on over to Wendel Patrick's site.

Gateshead Multistory Car Park

Towards the end of the night we delved into the darker side of urban decay, with an excerpt from the Langham Research Centre's menacing sound profile of the Gateshead Multi-story Carpark, originally produced for Radio 3's Between the Ears.

The piece was recorded entirely on location and laid down on reel-to-reel tape, where it was manipulated further, slowed down and looped. Everything heard in this feature was derived from sounds captured within the Carpark and you can really get a sense of the menacing and repressive tone that this concrete behemoth exuded:

http://soundcloud.com/langham-research-centre/gateshead-multistorey-carpark

The Dustbin Man Cometh

One of the regular noises I come across living in a city, is the early morning mechanical chaos of the dustbin collection. To finish of the night, I played a piece which I'd produced specially for the event - a heavily processed sound piece created from the single recording of a dustbin truck collection.

If you have ever been woken up in the early hours by this sort of noise, I'm sure you're aware of the complex mechanical racket that they make. It's a great collection of sounds - clangs, squeaks and crashes - I really wanted to capture and then pull out elements of this noise, turning them into an evolving, glitchy cascade of sound that would fill the listening space it was to be presented in. Anyway, have a listen below:

http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/the-dustbin-man-cometh

--

The next In The Dark event will be held on the 4th April, aboard the Lightship95 with guest curator Martin Johnson

Interview: Dr Matt Green and the Sound of Coffee

Before Christmas I started working on an ambitious new project for Unreal City Audio who are producing multi-part audio tours exploring offbeat strands of London history. I am currently helping to produce part of their Coffeehouse series, which will eventually end up as an interactive iPhone App.

The tours are being developed as a series of 'legs' with an emphasis on narrative and rich sound design, so are suitable for listening both on location or elsewhere.

The Coffeehouse tour currently in development guides the listener along a mysterious and often dark path of London history, tracing the rise of coffee into the forefront of mainstream culture. The main challenge (and joy) of this project is in recreating an authentic and immersive sound which will pull the listener into the rich narrative written by historian, coffee expert and project co-founder Dr Matt Green.

The tours aims to provide what Matt describes as a 'cathartic voyage of discovery' into an alternate London history, not often visited by mainstream guides or tours. You can hear more about these tours, including how each leg is developed and produced in an interview I recorded with Matt: [audio "http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13042873/Matt%20Green%20Interview%20Piece.mp3"]

You can listen to a brief extract from one of the pieces I've been producing which takes place in George Yard (see map below) - in it we hear the flames of the great fire beginning to engulf the streets of London. Suspicion has fallen upon Turkish coffee vendor Pasqua Roseé whose mysterious new drink has been generating a lot of unease with many of the locals (and it appears they're out to get him!) but not everything is as it seems...

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/37815988" iframe="true" /]

[googlemaps http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?q=george+yard+london&ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=George+Yard,+London+EC3V+9DH,+United+Kingdom&gl=uk&t=h&layer=c&cbll=51.512614,-0.085837&panoid=57aJzD6wKh2ZrrbllJFKvw&cbp=13,36.59,,0,0.62&source=embed&ll=51.508903,-0.085874&spn=0.012821,0.036478&z=14&output=svembed&w=425&h=240]

In addition to the audio tours, Matt has also adapted the material into a series of 'live' walking tours, which he presents accompanied by actors and musicians, and are already being met with critical acclaim. He will be giving tours throughout March and April, to find out more and book a place drop by his website here.

You can also keep up to date with Unreal City Audio via their twitter (from which they also tweet unusual facts about London history).

The D-Word

Why is death such a difficult subject to talk about? From hospital mortuary to the grave, The D-Word explores our complex relationship with death through the perspective of those who deal with it on a daily basis.

Recently featured on Transom.org, The D-Word is an audio documentary I produced last summer on the subject of death. I'd urge you to visit Transom and explore their excellent site, but you can also listen to or download my piece below:

[audio "http://dl.dropbox.com/u/13042873/The%20D%20Word.mp3"]Download (MP3) (right click)

 View on PRX

The documentary was made in part for my MSc in Science Media Production and explores our relationship with death through the perspective of those who deal with it on a daily basis.

The piece experiments with a braided narrative weaving between interview and actuality recordings, taking the listener into a hospital mortuary, inside funeral homes and across a church yard to explore the concept of death from a number of personal perspectives.

This documentary is also a response to my own experience in dealing with the death of a close friend and you can read more about this in my article over at Transom.org.

In addition to this piece, I also produced two further shorts from the material recored for this documentary. These short audio vignettes experiment with form and sound to explore some of the themes touched upon by pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton.

Adam as machine (more info)

http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/adam-as-machine

Winters Rest (more info)

http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/winters-rest

Chris Watson on Noise

Interview

Last year I interviewed sound recordist Chris Watson on the subject of noise for a piece exploring the use of birdsong at Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool.

Chris is one of the worlds leading sound recordists and is well known for his work with the BBC Natural History Unit, including the recent Frozen Planet series.

There was a lot of interesting discussion during this interview about the nature of noise pollution and the considerable threat it poses to our quality of life. Worrying still, it appears that our noisy modern world is drowning out the natural soundscape and interfering with species of wildlife that rely on sound for communication.

What seems to be most alarming is that we're largely ignoring this problem - our world certainly isn't getting any quieter - and with more of us living in urbanised environments, noise pollution is fast becoming a significant health problem.

As only a portion of this interview was included within the Alder Hey piece, I thought it might be interesting to share some of the additional material. The interview was recorded at FACT in Liverpool, back in April of last year and explores some of the causes and concerns towards noise in the modern world.

http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/chris-watson-on-noise

Additional info

• Further reading on the health effects of noise: a WHO report on the burden of disease from environmental noise

• Nature on BBC Radio 4 is recommended listening if you want to hear more of Chris and his stunning wildlife recordings.

• Touch Music also releases sound work by Chris, you can browse his collection here.

Audio piece: Winter's Rest

This is a short audio piece which was originally created for the In The Dark Christmas party - however it didn't quite fit the bill in the end, being as it is, devoid of any Christmas cheer. Anyway, I thought I'd better not let it go to waste and instead make it available on here - I suppose this is the obligatory Christmas themed post.

It's another short piece (see Adam as machine) which has fallen out of The D-Word, a documentary I produced over the summer which will be appearing on Transom.org early in the new year. This piece features pathologist, Dr Stuart Hamilton and was recorded in the mortuary at the Sunderland Royal Infirmary back in July. The material I recorded with Stuart at the mortuary only forms a small part of the overall documentary, yet I think it's interesting enough to justify an entire piece on it's own, maybe I'll get around to it one day.

Dr Hamilton explained to me how winter was a particularly busy period for the mortuary staff, with mortality rates increasing in the elderly over the colder months of the year. Another interesting point was that they tended to receive an increase in the number of decomposed bodies at Christmas, but I'll let you listen to the piece to find out why...

http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/winters-rest

I'm not going to go into a massive rant on how important it is to make an effort to spend time with family, because I'm particularly guilty of not doing so. It just seems that the mortuary staff gain a depressing insight into the mistakes we make and how we choose to lead our lives.

Birdsong: An Escape From The Noise

I was interested to read today about a new research project being undertaken, to investigate the psychological impacts of exposure to birdsong. In particular the project will look at how birdsong affects our psychological state, including its effect on mood, attention and sense of creativity.

The research is being conducted as a joint collaboration between the University of Surrey, National Trust and Surrey Wildlife Trust. Researcher Eleanor Ratcliffe, highlighted that there was a real a lack of evidence on the effects of birdsong, stating:

"A great deal of anecdotal evidence suggests that we respond positively to birdsong. However, currently there is a lack of scientific research on the psychological effects of listening to birds."

You can find out more about the project here.

For me the sound of birdsong offers predominantly positive associations. Living in London, I’m now surrounded by a largely synthetic soundscape, which is strongly connected to the stresses and frustrations of city life (the daily commute, working long hours and a persistent sense of fatigue).

Living amongst this hubbub has unsurprisingly increased the value I attribute to natural soundscapes. Standing in binary opposition to the din of urban living, natural soundscapes offer potential for escape, not just from noise, but from all the negative associations paired with it.

It may be that natural sounds can help us escape from a chaotic lifestyle or at least provide a restorative effect from stress. Understanding the psychological impacts of birdsong will allow us to better understand how we respond to such sounds and perhaps learn more about this relationship. If birdsong really does improve our state of mind and / or sense of wellbeing then it could have real potential in it’s application as a therapeutic tool.

Birdsong as a therapeutic tool?

Back in April / May – I produced a radio piece which looked at the use of Birdsong in the healthcare environment. Alder Hey Children’s Hospital in Liverpool has been experimenting with the use of birdsong to improve the experiences of it’s young patients.

Installed in the central corridor is a sound installation playing the beautiful birdsong recordings made by Chris Watson and Alder Hey patients. These recordings are also used with patients during traumatic and painful procedures, often as a way of calming them down or taking their minds off the situation.

Speaking to the hospital’s Arts Coordinator Vicky Charnock, I found out that there was already tremendous anecdotal evidence in support of birdsong as a therapeutic tool. They were also interested in setting up some form of trial in which to test the potential therapeutic benefits of birdsong.

You can listen to and download the piece here:

http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/alder-heys-dawn-chorus

Bury St Edmunds

An experimental sound piece which takes recordings made during a vist to Bury St Edmunds and weaves them into a surreal narrative, morphing between lakeside walks, market criers, street performers and birdsong. Recordings made using a Zoom H4n, edited and assembled on Ableton Live.

Headphones recommended.

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/27315140"]

Bedtime stories for scientists

I remember listening to audiobooks as a child and there were years where I wouldn't sleep unless I had a tape playing in the background. To a child, silence can be pretty ominous and I suppose there is something comforting in having 'someone else' in the room with you, narrating a story as you fall asleep. Even now, when all I seem to crave is silence, there is still something comforting in putting on a pair of headphones and escaping into a world led by the voice of another.

A while back I recorded Lizzie Crouch reading a series of extracts from popular science books - intended as little audio 'bedtime stories' for scientists. At first we thought about adding in additional sound to enhance the recordings, but upon reflection it was clear that they worked a lot better on their own. There are thousands of great audiobooks out there, but I suppose very few cover popular science - so here's an attempt to bring you just that.

Lizzie is going to be posting a new one each week, you can hear the first one below (an extract from 'Trilobite!' by Richard Fortey), but listen to the rest over at her blog.

[soundcloud url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/25348416"]

Making a racket on the Soundwall

So today I was very excited because I got the chance to play around with Lotto Lab's Soundwall - a mammouth interactive speaker array, currently housed at the Science Museum in London.

The wall features a total of 77 speakers and is controlled via the use of a handy touch screen interface. The interface allows the user to essentially bounce sound from three mono tracks (or up to 8 analogue inputs) across the wall in realtime, much to the delight, or perhaps annoyance of everyone in hearing distance.

The simple touch screen interface includes volume faders for each of the three tracks, which are subsequently represented by one of three coloured balls. These coloured balls essentially represent where the sound is localised on the speaker wall; so as the user moves the balls across the screen the sound on the wall pans accordingly. This allows the user to throw sound across the wall in all directions, just imagine a ball of sound bouncing about inside your head and you're almost there... It's certainly very cool to play with.

So I tried out a collection of 'racket' themed samples which I have prepared for use during next weeks Science Museum Lates:

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/23921324"]

... and here's a clip of me standing infront of the wall as David Robertson throws the sound all over the place, you can hear an interview with David in the next episode of Tomorrow's Tentacles:

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/23925050"]

Although the wall's functionality is pretty limited at the moment, it will be interesting to see how its use is expanded. It could certainly do with a few more features, perhaps expanding on the user interface to include a selection of tracks or the addition of effects which could be controlled via the touch screen. Its use as a performance tool is certainly very attractive and I'd love to experiment with it further! - Watch this space.

Weather, walks and slugs

The Trip

An experimental sound piece I produced from recordings made whilst on a trip to Wales.

The piece was inspired and recorded during some coastal hill walking with my parents, and is a response to the peaceful stillness experienced whilst high up on a hilltop - the serenity of which invoked a rather dream like quality and as we looked downwards into the valley, the houses, cars and distant objects came to look like 'toys'...

http://soundcloud.com/eprosser/the-trip

Audio tour: Hospital mortuary

Continuing with the rather morbid theme is another short audio piece based around a hospital mortuary, taken from my ongoing radio project which is probing contemporary attitudes to death. What's interesting is that mortuaries are notoriously hard to find within hospitals, they're rarely signposted and often kept out of sight from patients and staff. It is almost as if death, through an act of denial, is banished from all walks of hospital life, forcing it underground where it remains out of sight and out of mind.

This is perhaps understandable when we consider the way in which modern medicine deals with death. So often is it concerned with prolonging life and keeping a patient alive that death has come to be seen as 'failure' - the inability to sustain life. As such death represents medicine's limits, it reminds us of our own mortality and as such is buried away within the hospital. This isn't just medicine's fault, it's a product of society and our own collective inability to accept death, we seem to live very much in denial, avoiding the 'd' word at all costs.

As a result those who work in hospital mortuaries take on an almost ghost like or gothic quality, whose activities remain in the shadows and unknown to the majority who dwell in the wards above. So what exactly goes on in a hospital mortuary? What do these places look like and who would we commonly meet in such a place?

It is perhaps only through the heavily stylised perspective of television and film that we gain any sort of insight into such places. Programmes such as CSI and Silent Witness are famous for their representation of pathology and post-mortem procedures, but they depict a world which is somewhat detached from the reality of such work. These programmes are slick, full of drama and entertaining to watch; they do little to challenge our relationship with death and present a very skewed image of those who work with the deceased. Instead they seem to maintain a common perception that death is something quite perverse, that mortuaries are dark gothic places and that pathologists run around solving murders (and of course that all bodies end up in the mortuary because of hideous murders).

Obviously these programmes shouldn't to be re-written to reflect reality (probably wouldn't make for very entertaining viewing), but it's interesting none the less to look at how they deal with death and the contrast between fiction and reality.

So the hospital mortuary remains a place largely unknown and unless you were unfortunate enough to visit one (dead or alive), it's unlikely that you'd ever get a chance to peer inside. I certainly had no idea of what to expect when I recently visited the mortuary at Sunderland Royal Hospital. In the end it was perhaps not surprising to see just how normal mortuary life was, from sitting around drinking tea in a staff room to the usual 'office banter' being thrown about as the day went on. Pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton was my guide for the day and he very kindly showed me round, you can listen to a brief audio tour below:

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/20493361"]

Adam as machine

Audio piece

I'm currently in the midst of producing a 30 minute radio piece on the subject of death. To be more specific, I'm exploring contemporary attitudes towards death and doing so through the perspective of those who deal with death on a daily basis.

Part of my project took me to the basement of the Royal Sunderland Hospital where I spent the day exploring it's mortuary with pathologist Dr Stuart Hamilton. Recently, as I was listening back to his interview I begun to find myself fixated on a particular section, in which he discusses the way in which he views the human body. He describes his view of life as being very 'mechanistic' and as I listened to him talk about the body as 'pumps' and 'shunts' I was inspired to compose a short piece from his words.

As a biologist myself, I have always considered the human body to represent a beautiful feat of natural engineering. From the minute intricacies of the inner ear to the extent of the circulatory system, pulsating to the rhythm of a beating heart - the human body is living machine. Our consciousness and everything that makes us, 'us' is a product of this machinery and when the machine stops - so do we.

The title of this piece toys with the idea of Adam and Eve and how this throws up a very different view of the human body. However which ever view you take, both are unified in the fact that they find certain beauty in the human form.

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/19409214"]

Soundcloud's audio compression has reduced the quality of the piece somewhat so please get in touch if you'd like a copy of the original file.

Space Transportation System (STS-1 / STS-135)

I'm posting two little audio pieces to mark the end of NASAs space shuttle program which will (with any luck) enter its final mission today with the launch of Atlantis (STS-135) in a few hours.

The first was produced for the latest Imperial College I,Science podcast and features science writer and producer Piers Bizony speaking on the history of the space shuttle program at a Super/Collider event in May.

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/18609588"]

The Second is a short piece extracted from the first, imagining what it might sound like to be inside the shuttle during take-off. The radio chatter you hear comes from Columbia (STS-1), the very first shuttle launch which blasted off over 30 years ago on 12th April 1981. The eventual winding down towards the end symbolises the ending of the project's 30 year run.

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/18609682"]

The BBC has produced an excellent interactive history of the space shuttle program here and a friend from my course has also written an excellent article on the future of manned spaced flight here

Sounds of Science #04

Dark Energy

So most of our universe (over 70%) is made up of something called Dark Energy. We can't see it and we don't really know what it is...

Matter - everything that makes up me, you, planets and stars - appears to make up only a very small fraction of the universe, about 4%. Instead, the universe seems to be filled predominantly by a very strange material known as dark energy and it is this material, with it's anti-gravity properties, which seems to speeding up the expansion of our universe. We've known that the universe was expanding since Edwin Hubble made his observations in the 1920s, however it's only in the last 20 years that we've realised that this expansion is actually speeding up! The problem is that we can't directly detect dark energy and this makes it very difficult to understand what it is and whether it really does exist.

Instead we must rely on indirect observations, looking at light travelling from the far reaches of the universe to determine whether the properties of this light has changed during the time it has taken to reach us. A good way to measure the expanding universe is to make observations of distant supernovae (huge explosions which follow the death of large stars) which act as 'standard candles' or 'lighthouses' because we know how bright these object should be. Measuring light from distant supernovae has allowed us to see that it is different to what it should be if these objects were positioned within a static universe. Instead what we see is changes in this light which indicates that these objects are being flung outwards and away from us via some sort of cosmic expansion.

A nice analogy to describe the expansion of the universe is what happens when two points are drawn on the surface of an inflating balloon. As the balloon is inflated, the two points begin to move further and further away from each other and as the material expands outwards, the distance between the two points also increases. Applying this analogy to the cosmos, we could imagine the same happening with two galaxies being pulled apart from each other as the space they exist in expands.

As dark energy is so difficult to detect, scientists have recently been looking for new ways to independently verify its presence within the universe. Whilst at the BBC I was lucky enough to interview cosmologist Dr Chris Blake from Swinburne University, Australia who has recently published two papers reconfirming dark energy via a new set of methods. Blake and his colleagues produced a galaxy map of over 200,000 galaxies and used this information to look at how these galaxies were distributed and how they grew relative to each other. Through this work Blake and his colleagues were able to reconfirm the presence of dark energy and perhaps most importantly were able to determine some of its properties.

I thought I'd use the audio from this telephone interview and spruce it for the next sounds of science episode:

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/18436704"]

It probably sounds better with headphones (or obviously decent speakers).

Useful links:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13462926

 http://preposterousuniverse.com/writings/cosmologyprimer/faq.html#dmde

http://supernova.lbl.gov/PhysicsTodayArticle.pdf

Alder Hey's Dawn Chorus

Our response to sound and noise are influenced heavily by the psychological associations we have with them. Hospitals and their internal soundscapes obviously carry very negative connotations and in the case of young children these negative associations can lead to increased levels of distress and fear. However the reverse of this is also true, certain sounds can have very positive associations and the effect of listening to these sounds can be very positive and powerful.

Several weeks ago, I was walking down the central corridor of Liverpool’s Alder Hey children’s hospital when I became aware of the sound of birdsong. As I continued down I could hear quite clearly the sound of a single blackbird gracefully chirping through the din of the chaotic hospital. As I focused on the sound I found that it brought with it a sense of calm and I begun to lose the feeling of unease that I tend to experience inside hospitals. However, there was no sign of this little bird or any other wildlife inside the hospital, save from the colourful murals adorned across the corridor walls. I quickly realised that what I was listening to was a very special sound installation; playing out the wonderful recordings made by BAFTA award winning sound artist Chris Watson.

I’d come to Alder Hey specifically to talk with their Arts Coordinator Vicky Charnock to find out how the hospital had been experimenting with sound to improve the experiences of their young patients. I also got chance to speak with Chris Watson, the creative talent behind the installation and he explained to me why he chose to bring the sounds of a local park within the walls of this hospital.

The Dawn Chorus installation forms part of the larger Sonicstreams project which is a creative collaboration between Alder Hey and the Foundation for Arts and Creative Technology (FACT); the project aims to creatively explore the impact of sound on the human body.

You can listen/download the radio piece below:

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/12781881"]

Sounds of Science #03

EchoBank

In this Episode I visit Dr Kate Jones at the Zoological Society of London to find out about a bat call reference library they're developing called 'Echobank' which is being used in conjunction with the iBats monitoring program. Scientists at the Zoological Society of London are using Echobank to teach a neural network to identify specific bat species from the acoustic properties of their calls.

Although this may sound pretty niche, it's really cool stuff because the technology has much wider applications. Firstly the team are using it in combination with a smart phone app which can be used by anyone to take bat call recordings. In doing this the team hope to collect global distribution data for bat populations, which Dr Jones is hoping to use to determine whether bats can be used as a 'heart monitor' for the state of the environment. As bats represent one fifth of all mammalian species and exist in a huge range of habitats (from your local park to the tropics), changes in their global distribution could be used to monitor the impact of climate change on the natural world.

Secondly, the team are doing a lot of really important science engagement, working with ‘citizen science’ networks across Europe to gather data on bat populations. The team have been helping groups across Europe to develop and carry out their own monitoring programs, which feed data back to the iBats program. What’s great about this work is that it’s not only efficiently collecting distribution data, but also getting people interested in the state of their local environment. Standardisation is obviously an important factor when collecting data from multiple sources and with this in mind the team have developed the smartphone apps which can be used easily to take recordings and GPS data.

Finally (and what really excited me) was the suggestion that this ‘digital infrastructure’ could one day be adapted to identify any sound producing species from a recording taken on a smartphone. So imagine going out to your local park, taking a recording of a bird on your iPhone and getting probability results back on the identification of the species!

You can listen to the episode here:

[soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/11704888"]

Download it here

Or listen to the edited version as part of Short Science episode 89

Special thanks to Katie Draper who helped out with this episode!

Not bad for an old man... (Apollo 14)

Continuing the Apollo 14 coverage - I was inspired to create a short radio piece on the mission which was broadcast on our 'Science @ 1' show earlier today. Check it out: [soundcloud width="100%" height="81" params="" url="http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/13521655"]

[Update 03/05/11]

This segment was included on Short Science_89

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IhXsjENGrk0&feature=related]

"It looks like you’re about on the bottom step... and on the surface."

"Not bad for an old man."

- Mission Control referring to Alan Shepard as he first stepped out onto the moon's surface. At the age of 47, Shepard was the oldest man to ever walk on the moon.

Merry Science-mas

As we're all gearing up to Christmas I suppose it's time for a little festive cheer - I'm sure you're all familiar with the 'Night Before Christmas' poem, well here it is with a little science orientated revamp! The poem was written (thanks to Ben and Catherine!) and produced as part of my MSc course.

You can listen to it here (to download, right click 'Save target as')

The lovely voices you hear are thanks to (in order of appearance): Tosin, Alex, me, Ben, Chloe, Jack, Catherine and Camilla.

Merry Christmas!

-Ed