Shining circles and silver spools

Flies buzzing, strange rustling, crunching sounds, and then the most chilling screech you’ll have heard all week. Vultures were feeding off the carcass of a zebra in Kenya, recorded by Chris Watson. He had been up before dawn, on the look-out for a suitable carcass to attract the scavenging vultures. He was lucky to find one and clipped two microphones to the ribcage, running the cable to his recording vehicle 50 yards away. By break of day the vultures had appeared and were taking their breakfast.

Watson believes that recording sound at such close quarters ‘really fires our imaginations in a unique way’. He was not the only contributor to The Changing Sound of Radio on Radio 4 Extra (produced by Jessica Treen) to talk about radio as if it is a visual medium. In this compilation of archive programmes, threaded together by Watson’s memories of a life spent in the field and back in a studio creating sound art, it was as if we were given snapshots of the best audio since the 1960s when as a teenager Watson first began recording.