Use BBC.com or the new BBC App to listen to BBC podcasts, Radio 4 and the World Service outside the UK.

Find out how to listen to other BBC stations

Episode details

Radio 3,08 May 2026,89 mins

Attenborough at 100: The Wild Life of Sound

Late Junction

Available for 28 days

On Sir David Attenborough's 100th birthday, Verity Sharp presents a mixtape that celebrates the ways in which recorded sound and acts of listening-imagining can bring us into a close relationship with other species. Assembled as a collaboration between artist and researcher Rebecca Lennon and writer Ella Finer, the mixtape moves through musical and sonic worlds that variously abstract, reimagine and commune with human and more than human presences. Breath, vibration, rhythm, waggle - we meet the heartbeat of a swan, the voice of a whale, the purr of a cheetah, the sonorous lives of bees, foxes and street dogs. Finer’s concept of “the wild life of sound” speaks to something that the sonic and the creaturely realms share in common: a freedom from ownership, a resistance to neat categorisation, a space where connection can happen. Produced by Alex Yates A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3

Programme Website
More episodes

Tracklist

  1. Track
    Artist
  2. 1.
    Rachel Musson Duets With A Nightingale
    Rachel Musson Duets With A Nightingale
    Rachel Musson
  3. 2.
    Awaken the Insects
    Awaken the Insects
    Hannah Peel & Beibei Wang
  4. 3.
    Lion Attack, Cattle Massacre
    Lion Attack, Cattle Massacre
    Himba people of Namibia