Hearing Voices
Half-hour radio piece, BBC R3, 2004
Hearing Voices is a half-hour radio piece commissioned by BBC Radio 3 for the Between the Ears programme. It won the Silver Award at the 2005 Third Coast International Audio Festival in Chicago, and was broadcast on Radio 3 in 2004 and 2005, and on the BBC World Service in 2006. Described by producer Alan Hall as a “composed documentary”, it hovers on the boundaries between documentation and ethnography.
Xukuri Xukuri
Gosaitse Kabathophane
Thamae Sobe
“Hearing Voices is a ‘composed documentary’ which features recordings of various click language speakers from D’kar in the Kalahari Desert, Botswana. Apart from the voices of various academics from the field of linguistics and endangered languages, every sound in this half-hour piece for radio is derived from the Khoisan subjects’ voices and their environment. Hearing Voices moves seamlessly between documentary and abstraction, language and music, weaving together interviews, field recordings and music in a compelling and adventurous exploration of languages on the verge of extinction.”
BBC Radio 3 press release
“Superb stuff! It was an enjoyable, intelligent, thought-provoking and unique 30 minutes.”
Dexter Bentley, Resonance FM
“Best thing I’ve heard on the wireless for ages!”
Rob Gawthrop, Hull Art Lab
“Hearing Voices presents much more in form and content, and their interrelation, than the current received rules of radio documentary normally allow. From the outset the listener is presented with a capricious sound world where aural objects shift and surprise, and conventions are undermined or mutated. From a northerner’s post-colonial point-of-audition, where issues of representing the subaltern are riddled with dangers, many artists would grasp extant, albeit exhausted and ill-considered practices, or back out of the undertaking altogether. John Wynne, acutely sensitive to the hazards of the task in hand, and passionate about the subject matter, has found an approach that informs, but also questions. And it is within that implicit questioning that is built into the structure and treatment of the materials that a running critique is revealed.”
John Levack Drever, ‘Of Click and Glitch’, Resonance Magazine Vol. 10 No. 1
Hearing Voices — 6 minute excerpt