Raw, earthy, ear-piercing. It’s hard to decide which was more terrifying and unsettling: the roar of the elephants in Living with Nature on the World Service, or the screaming women and men who we heard letting rip in Garrett Carr’s Radio 4 documentary, The Silence and the Scream. The elephants were recorded by sound engineer Chris Watson, and his producer Sarah Blunt in northern Kenya in the first of their new series in which they use sound as their tour guide and listening as their way of experiencing the landscape. We couldn’t see the golden orb of the sun rising over the miles of flat grasslands peppered with acacia groves and rocky outcrops, but the soundscape created by Watson and Blunt took us there in spirit. It was so vivid, so compelling, the sounds fuelled the imagination. First there was the constant low buzzing of the cicadas, interrupted by shrill bird song, and then at night as the heat eases off, the calls and cries of lions, hyenas and leopards eerily piercing the darkness.
In Kenya, sound is very much a matter of life and death, says Jackson Looseyia, a Masai who still lives on the plains. Sound is a matter of survival to him and his people. It’s through changes in what you can hear around you that you discover whether a predator is on the prowl, far quicker than anything you might see. The changing sounds of the landscape are also tools for the conservationist Saba Douglas-Hamilton. She has been camping out in the wild since she was a child growing up in the Great Rift Valley. One night a lion roared about two feet away from her flimsy, pop-up tent. It was chilling to the bone, says Douglas-Hamilton. ‘So scary, so wonderful and so thrilling all at the same time.’
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