Explore every episode of the podcast Slow Radio

In 2017, audio producer Phil Smith travelled to Ukraine to attend his friend's wedding. There, somewhere between the cities of Ivano-Frankivsk, Lviv and Odessa, he fell in love with the soundworld of the sleeper train: its steady hypnotic rhythms, the melody of hurtling through time and space, the calls of distant tannoy speakers drifting across platforms in the dead of night, the chorus of snores from sleeping passengers. Revisiting these recordings, seven years later, this Slow Radio journey offers echoes of a country in calmer times, when such trains were not a means of logistics transportation or symbol of desperate escape (as witnessed in the February of 2022) but conduits of restful imagining.

From the opening establishing shot - the sound of whistles and shunting engines, off in the distance - we are moved along in a river of wheeled luggage through the cathedral acoustics of a station building to take our seat in the carriage of the overnight train. The scenes are unhurried as bunks are unfolded and brief snatches of conversation overheard. We set off - a gentle accelerando of wheels and rails - and time stretches: there are no voices now, just the music of the train's motion through the night.

Produced by Phil Smith A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3

From the medina of Marrakech to the palmeries in Zagora, join sound recordists Andrea Campisi and Silvia Malnati as they embark upon a roadtrip in sound, leaving the capital city to journey across southeast Morocco. Across four movements of contrasting energies, bound together by the motif of the muezzin’s call to prayer, we listen to an immersive musical suite comprising binaural field recordings and on-location sound.

I. Allegro: In Marrakech medina we take a walk through a maze of streets and stalls before arriving out onto the iconic Jemaa el-Fnaa square. Here, we’re met with the hypnotising sound of pungi flutes and, as the sun sets, of gnawa musicians, jesters and Said Anazoure’s intricate banjo playing.

II. Largo: We leave the city behind to seek refuge in the mountainous region of Ourika. Here, we hear sounds of village life, as well as the distant voices of children reciting the Koran from behind the school’s door.

III. Scherzo: Having crossed the Atlas mountains, we descend towards the Draa Valley and its oasis, tuning in to the sound of the palmeries just outside Zagora. As night falls, crickets take their place alongside the mating calls of cats under the stars.

IV. Finale: We resume our drive, headed for a village outside Aït Benhaddou. A local family invites us to spend the night inside their tigmi, a traditional house, and attend an Ahwach ceremony with the musicians of Ahwach Asfalou.

With special thanks to Hamid Boukhch, Said Anazoure, Ahwach Asfalou (Mme Ijja, Hiba, Iken, Oumaghlif, Bendrisse, Hanafi, Ait houssa, Tabrahimte, Belmadan, Mr Haji, Mr Ifliisse, Almsalla, Belaabass, Benhdouch, Boularia, Ait Bikouch, Khalfi) and Alexa Kruger.

Produced by Andrea Campisi and Silvia Malnati A Reduced Listening production for BBC Radio 3

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds. A special edition featuring the Sounds of the Earth mixes of music and the incredible sounds of the insects, birds and animals featured in BBC One's Wild Isles series.

The nature sounds were captured by the audio team at Silverback Films, with audio post-production from Wild Buffalo, and kindly shared with Radio 3’s Sunday Breakfast team for the weekly Sounds of the Earth feature.

Episode 3/5. In 1705, the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach set off from his home in Arnstadt to walk 250 miles to Lübeck, there to meet his hero, the composer and organist Dietrich Buxtehude.

In the third of five "slow-radio" walks in which writer Horatio Clare searches for Bach's footsteps - and his ghost - the route takes us through the beeches of the Oderwald and on into the town of Wolfenbuttel.

Welcome to another Slow Radio podcast.

In this episode, there are the mesmerising sounds of storm Erik tearing through the rigging and halyards on the boats in Blyth harbour, Northumberland.

We glide to Ouse Washes in the Fenland country where Bewick's swans, coots, lapwings, reed buntings and skylarks fill the air with song.

And in the evening heavy seas of Gossabrough on Yell Island, Northern Shetland, there are eiders, Arctic terns, fulmars, skylarks and wrens.

The music includes Tom Waits’s No One Knows I’m Gone performed by The Unthanks, Troyte (Elgar’s evocation of a thunderstorm), Hoagy Carmichael’s Skylark, Alan Hovhaness’s Prayer of St. Gregory and Jim Ghedi’s folk masterwork Fortingall Yew.

Radio 3 transports listeners to Trinidad, just off the coast of Venezuela, immersing them in the sounds of the Caribbean island, with writer and actor Elisha Efua Bartels as a guide.

Through the sounds of three Port-of Spain gardens - her home by the river in Diego Martin, a garden in the lush valleys of St Ann’s, to a house up in the hills, Elisha reflects on the rich tropical sounds of the island. Frogs, hummingbirds, parrots and occasional rainfall form a slowly shifting, vivid soundscape. We pass through cycles of warm sunshine, then heavy tropical rain, each change reflected in the types of calls we hear from the birdlife and frogs. These aren’t rarefied idylls though - on a warm evening parrots noisily flock through, disturbing the peace. Sometimes a radio or the sound of a party drifts up from the valley below; dogs bark, cockerels crow.

Elisha describes the extent to which she’s both sustained by, and living at the mercy of, the wildlife around her – the parrots so loud she can’t hear the TV, the frogs soothing her to sleep at night - and how the sounds evoke a strong sense of 'home' for her.

A montage of music and natural sounds from ravens on the Norwegian tundra around Tromso; upwelling of cold water currents at night in the deep waters of the Pacific Ocean off the Galapagos islands; a MacGregor’s bowerbird in a New Guinean rainforest displaying its vocal talents to attract a mate, and the splashes of ice laden water moving and lapping on the shore of a river on Hokkaido Island, permeated by distant calls from goldeneye and whooper swans passing overhead.

Travel writer Horatio Clare walks in the Black Forest in Germany, thinking about the Romantic tradition of the Wanderer, and observing the sights and sounds of the forest

The slow build of a midsummer dawn chorus in Snowdonia, North Wales, interwoven with the sounds of the brooks, streams, and rivers that creep through the hillsides down to the lake by the village: this programme is a tribute to the landscape and past poets of the heart of Snowdonia.

An isolated farmhouse near Trawsfynydd was the birthplace of the iconic Welsh shepherd-poet Hedd Wyn. But there were hundreds more like him in this mountainous corner of Wales: the sons and daughters of tenant farmers, artisans and workers, who left school at 14 but were nurtured by the community, the chapel and the eisteddfod system, and emerged as writers skilled in the craft of strict metre poetry.

They left behind englynion – short poems in restricted syllables (like haiku), that often describe the landscape. Punctuating the serene Trawsfynydd soundscape, we intersperse englynion, by poets from the area, hearing them first in Welsh, and then in English. The poems, written a century ago and further back, draw on ancient traditions, and distil visual images into gems. Hedd Wyn’s most admired is translated as: “I have walked by sweet streams in the nervous wind of the hill pastures, the sunlight a white arm about the old neck of the mountains.”

The impression is of a landscape haunted and re-populated by the poets that were moved during their lifetimes to write about their extraordinary surroundings – land they often worked hard on and tended themselves, and knew intimately.

With readings by poet and musician Gwyneth Glyn

A montage of music and natural sounds from a nightingale singing in a reforested WWI battlefield in Belgium, a sunrise over Wolverton Creek in north Norfolk with curlew and pink-footed geese, the Ngorongoro mountain crater in Tanzania with tropical boubou and weaver birds, and a national park Karnataka, India where you'll hear croaking frogs and wild gaur bellowing to one another.

A montage of sounds from the forests around Squam Lake, New Hampshire during the Fall, including the songs of the Carolina wren, red-breasted nuthatch and rufous-sided towhie; a Northern flicker tapping insistently on a tree trunk; red squirrels and chipmunks foraging for food, a pair of loons calling distantly from the misty lake and a barred owl hooting as it begins its nocturnal hunt.

Irish cows make their way up to the winter grazing grounds high above Galway Bay

Episode 2/5. In 1705, the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach set off from his home in Arnstadt to walk 250 miles to Lübeck, there to meet his hero, the composer and organist Dietrich Buxtehude.

In the second of five "slow-radio" walks in which writer Horatio Clare searches for his footsteps - and his ghost - the putative route takes him into the Harz Mountains and up to its highest point, the Brocken Summit.

Across Britain, 352 BBC transmitters stand, mostly on the tops of hills broadcasting sound, music and voices invisibly across the country. In this slow radio episode, Matthew Herbert and a group of recording engineers visited some of these transmitters in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England to listen to what the transmitters were hearing at exactly 11.30 at night - the time of this broadcast. Starting at the transmitter atop Crystal Palace and then moving through the country to finish in snowy Aberdeen, hear how the sonic landscape changes the further north travelled.

Transmitter is a production from Munck Studios with Matthew Herbert for BBC Radio 3, recorded by Pete Stollery, Hugh Jones, Dan Pollard, Ella Kay, Robbie McCammon, Pieter Dewulf and Cameron Naylor.

Horatio Clare retraces the 20-year-old JS Bach's 250-mile journey to visit his hero Buxtehude in Lubeck. Episode 1 of 5. This is a repeat of an episode originally published in December 2017.

Have yourself a serene little Radio 3 Christmas with the sounds of reindeer, festive music and a secret, enchanted wood. This special edition of the Slow Radio Podcast comprises two very different audio recordings. The first is of reindeer, and more of them than you’d need to pull even a very high profile sleigh. No, this recording, contributed by BBC Four, is of 2,500 of the creatures as they slowly migrate, clinking their bells and eating. And the reindeer are followed by a December sunrise recording made by Chris Watson of Holystone North Wood in Northumberland. Listen out for tawny owls, chaffinches, blue tits, robins and carrion crows.

Benedictine monks speak about their experiences of divine love against a background of chant and sounds that evoke the peace and serenity of the monastery.

This episode of Slow Radio was originally podcasted in October 2017. We're grateful to the monks of Pluscarden Abbey for access to their collections of plainsong.

Benedictine monks speak about how they find focus, against a background of chant and sounds that evoke the peace and serenity of the monastery.

This episode of Slow Radio was originally podcasted in October 2017. We're grateful to the monks of Pluscarden Abbey for access to their collections of plainsong.

Benedictine monks meditate on the subject of work - from cooking to weaving and beekeeping - against a background of chant and sounds that evoke the peace and serenity of the monastery. This episode of Slow Radio was originally podcasted in October 2017. We're grateful to the monks of Pluscarden Abbey for access to their collections of plainsong.

Monks from Downside, Belmont and Pluscarden Abbeys meditate on the subject of prayer, against a background of chant and sounds that evoke the peace and serenity of the monastery.

This episode of Slow Radio was originally podcasted in October 2017. We're grateful to the monks of Pluscarden Abbey for access to their collections of plainsong.

Monks from Downside, Belmont and Pluscarden Abbeys meditate on the nature of silence, against a background of chant and sounds that evoke the peace and serenity of the monastery.

This episode of Slow Radio was originally podcasted in October 2017. We're grateful to the monks of Pluscarden Abbey for access to their collections of plainsong.

Kalahari means ‘large thirst’ in the local language and between November and February summer temperatures can reach well over 40 degrees centigrade. To avoid the dry desiccating heat much of the wildlife has adopted nocturnal habits.

Wildlife sound recordist Chris Watson captures the changing soundscape from dusk to dawn, when you can see very little but hear everything; from the close up sounds of insects to the far-carrying contact calls of spotted hyenas.

Producer Sarah Blunt

Spoken in the remote forest region of Älvdalen - a place thick with forest and steep valleys - Elfdalian used to be the main language of the area, but Swedish has increasingly become dominant and few young people speak it today. In this slow radio edit, we hear a collage of forest sounds and local voices, travelling through Älvdalen, exploring some of the mysteries of the language and its links to Sweden's ancient, Viking past.

Step into Sherwood Forest at night with tawny owls calling to each other in the trees. As daylight comes, a flock of long tailed tits forages through the branches.

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds. This springtime special features a blackbird singing at daybreak in Newcastle, a nightingale in the Umbrian foothills, central Italy, and a newly born lamb communicating for the very first time with its mother in a field in Wiltshire. Recordings by Radio 3 Breakfast listeners Sarah Couch, Nick and Val Bale, and Tom Perrett, plus master sound recordist Chris Watson.

Nestle for a while with coots, moorhens and bearded tits from a reed-bed in Humberside, clapper larks rising up from the grasslands of the Kalahari, autumnal sounds of squirrels and nuthatches from the woodlands in Virginia and a spooky Hallowe’en soundscape from a churchyard in Bedfordshire. And there are short excerpts of music by Elgar, John Barry, Amy Beach, Steeleye Span, Edward MacDowell and the Ahmad Sham Sufi Qawwali Group.

The sounds of battlefields across the world today – from the Somme to the USA, and Afghanistan to Vietnam. Presented by the BBC’s former special correspondent, Allan Little.

A meditation on the meaning of time, whilst wandering through the largest collection of clocks in the country.

Calming birdsong and the crunch of leaves from the New Forest in spring.

Escape from the frenzy of today's world with the dawn chorus from an orchard in the Cotswolds, warblers and skylarks in a Japanese paddy field, and the sounds that accompany the sunset over Florida's Everglades.

Get surrounded by nature - birdsong, rustling leaves and the stillness of the forest.

The music of typewriters, steam engines, foundries and looms. These previously-familiar, now long-forgotten sounds transport us back in time, evoking memories, and creating a strangely meditative effect.

Composer Iain Chambers creates a radiophonic sequence from the huge recording archive of the pan-EU Sounds of Changes project, a collaboration between 6 major European museums to document the huge change within our acoustic landscape.

Writer Chris Stewart takes us to meet some shepherds in the mountains of Alpujarras, plus introduces us to some of his own sheep. Featuring music from Nathaniel Mann.

The woods are the setting for a magical late night duet between a musician and a nightingale. Verity Sharp eavesdrops on shakuhachi player Clive Bell and an unseen yet vocal co-performer.

Nick Luscombe heads out for a late night trip across ‘sleepless town’, Tokyo’s ancient entertainment district, known for it’s bright lights, late night drinking dens and seedy back streets. Armed with his recorder and a local friend for guidance, Nick captures the sound of an all night batting range, late night video game parlours, robot restaurants and Tokyo’s underground as well as the odd character of the night.

Excerpts of this recording were originally broadcast on Late Junction on the 24th April 2018.

This Slow Radio experience features sounds from the BBC television programme Wild Isles: a chance to revel in the extraordinary sounds recorded and created for the series, without voice-over or music.

Using an aural collage of clips, the half-hour soundscape takes a journey from mountain stream to the sea, around Great Britain and Ireland. It utilises sounds from the Freshwater and Oceans episodes and begins with a specially recorded introduction by Sir David Attenborough.

From there, the sounds of cascading streams and waterfalls give way to the call and shuffle of a common toad. Around the caves of County Cavan bats use sonar to navigate. Their ultrasonic clicks can be heard, slowed down. A cuckoo sings beside a chalk stream while a spider catches a pond skater in its web.

The distinctive low call of the bittern introduces the Suffolk reed beds, where great crested grebes perform a mating dance, beaks clashing. Further towards the sea, a colony of knot are scattered by a peregrine falcon, and in the Shetland Isles, a sea otter grunts and snorts around the rocks.

A thunderstorm at sea heralds a seal colony at Blakeney Point, Norfolk, where two males fight. Then the eerie calls of Manx shearwater, who visit each year from South America, are followed by the chatter of many gannets, in and out of water.

The Corryvreckan Whirlpool in Scotland pulls us under for an array of fantastical subaquatic sounds: cuttlefish, sea gooseberries, melon comb jelly; the squelch of a royal flush sea slug, spider crabs leaving their shells, and the scream of a scallop, devoured by a starfish. Dolphins break the surface, and a bluefin tuna skims across the waves before we sail out into Cardigan Bay.

Audio post-production: Wounded Buffalo

Slow Radio producer: Sam Hickling

Wild Isles sound team: Sound Editors – Kate Hopkins, Tom Mercer Dubbing Mixers – Oliver Baldwin, Dan Brown, Olga Reed, Graham Wild

Renowned artist, field recordist and environmentalist Jana Winderen has returned to record natural sounds in this area for many years. In this recording you can hear her capture an icy, dripping brook and hibernating tadpoles beneath the snow. Originally broadcast on Late Junction on BBC Radio 3.

A hyper-real sonic journey through Japan's multifaceted soundscapes. With recordings of the natural environment, human activity, domestic sounds and noisy video arcades plus many of the wonderful ceremonies that are intrinsic to modern Japan. All captured by Nick Luscombe over 20 years.

In 1705, a young composer embarked on an epic journey to meet his musical hero.

Johann Sebastian Bach was just 20 years old when he set out on foot to walk the 250 miles to Lübeck, home to the great composer and organist Dietrich Buxtehude. Horatio Clare retraces the young composer’s steps in an immersive episode of BBC Radio 3’s Slow Radio podcast.

This episode of Slow Radio is adapted from Bach Walks, a five-part series on BBC Radio 3. For more information and to listen again, visit the Radio 3 website.

People with dementias and their carers talk movingly about their everyday lives. This edition of our podcast is a collaboration with Wellcome Trust’s Created out of Mind - an interdisciplinary team of scientists, artists, musicians, broadcasters and clinicians. The voices were originally recorded by Susanna Howard as part of a series of podcasts called Talking Life.

The poet Helen Mort and her friend Andrew walk from The Old Dungeon Ghyll - a famous hikers and climbers pub in Great Langdale - up to Raven Crag where they climb Middle Fell Buttress on a very wintery day at the end of July.

The sounds of a walk along Offa's Dyke, with Horatio Clare.

Sounds of the sacred from around the world, introduced by Neil MacGregor.

A 20-minute watery odyssey - idling down the Tennessee River with the best thunderstorm in a tin shack you are ever going to hear... and some frogs…

In the company of Betty Goines, who grew up on a shanty boat during the depression, Wes Modes takes his recreated shanty out on to the river, to gather stories for his Secret History of American River People project, and to live a life under the cosy tin roof of his shanty - close to the water, and all the elements..

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds, from the Atlantic rainforests of Brazil to Eastern Banjo Frogs in Adelaide, Australia. Plus a dawn chorus in Cornwall and chaffinches in Noja, Northern Spain. Recordings by BBC Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Bob Castell, Kate Wilson, Peter Halmkin and Kevin Cox.

There’s a gentle rhythm to everyday life in a Hindu temple, that follows carefully choreographed rituals linked to the care of the deities - creating a rich aural texture from dawn when the gods are woken, to nightfall when they sleep. The sounds wax and wane; each part of the day has its own soundscape and the priest presides over it all. You’ll hear the constant sound of bells as a backdrop, rung by devotees as they approach the shrines, focussing their minds and alerting the deities to their presence.

The deities, or murtis, as they are known in Hinduism, represent the different aspects of God - in the form of beautifully carved statues. They are worshipped and cared for as the physical representations of God.

This episode of Slow Radio takes us to the Shree Sanatan Mandir, a Hindu temple in Leicester, where we recorded sounds from inside the temple across a whole Saturday. The mandir is one of the oldest and largest mainstream Hindu temples in Leicester, housed in a former Baptist chapel. There is one main ‘prayer hall’, home to 5 main shrines. But there are 17 shrines in all, representing the major Hindu deities including, amongst others, Krishna and his consort Radha; Ram and his wife Sita, his brother Laxman; as well as Hanuman, Ganesha, Shiva and Ambamata. In the wider temple building there are also other meeting rooms and halls.

During the recording you’ll hear worship across the day - singing and prayer, readings from sacred texts, meditation for the women’s group and quiet times for private devotion or chatting to the priest. You’ll also hear Illa Majithia and Anil Chauhan from the temple committee explaining some of the sounds.

But the programme starts with the sound of volunteers cleaning the temple at daybreak, as the priest opens the curtains around the shrines, waking the deities, before washing them, dressing them in fresh clothes and decorating them with garlands of fresh flowers brought by the devotees, who are gathering for early morning worship.

Produced by Jo Dwyer. This is a Loftus Media production.

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds, from birdsong and tortoises in the Seychelles to waves and whistling frogs in Barbados, via a bubbling brook in Northumberland and a murmuration of starlings playing in a poplar tree. Recordings by David Fay, Honey Schreker, Kathryn Potts and Rupert Ormond.

High in the mountains snow falls. As it comes to rest on the frozen slopes it become part of an ancient glacier. Over the course of 100 years the glacier will flow down the valley, changing the landscape around it.

Using field recordings from deep within glaciers, along with the sounds of the natural world around them, this programme charts an imagined journey of snow and glacier from mountain top to valley floor.

Over the course of that journey we hear the sound world change and the increasing impact of human activity on the landscape - the wilderness of the high slopes replaced by the noise of tourism and traffic. There is an irony to the fact that the people who choose to visit the mountains because they love them are also contributing to their changing environment.

These unique glacier recordings have been made by Ugo Nanni, researcher at the University of Oslo who specialises in the stability of Arctic glaciers, and field recordist Clovis Tisserand.

Producer: Barnaby Gordon

It is January 2022, and in the Upper Manhattan neighbourhood of Harlem all is quiet as people stay at home, preferring not to venture out into the minus-13-degree snow and ice that has blanketed the city.

This half-hour soundscape begins with the geese pecking at the frozen lake at the northern tip of Central Park with the occasional sound of a passer by who has braved the weather.

As we head north to Harlem, walking up Malcolm X Boulevard, an invitation into the warmth of the Abyssinian Baptist Church is welcome. It is no ordinary service but a celebration of Martin Luther King Jr and we hear sounds of the pastor and gospel choir as they join together in worship.

Heading back out into the bracing cold, Harlem is busier. More people are gathered on the streets with stereos playing music, and public transport still in operation, battling against the snow.

Sounds of live jazz emerge from local restaurants and wandering inside is a refuge from the weather, joining crowds of brunch-goers enjoying live music, drinks, food and the company of others.

It takes about half an hour to walk from Central Park to the Jackie Robinson Park, where a flight of swallows can be heard returning us to the sounds of nature that we heard at the beginning of our walk.

Relax with a calming mix of music and natural sounds: a walk in the Faroe Islands, a deer in the Scottish Highlands, a robin in Northamptonshire and a royal garden in Norway.

Wildlife recordings from Chris Watson and Andy Fell, plus Radio 3 Sunday Breakfast listeners Louise and Donald Proven.