“Without Ohropax day and night, I really couldn’t cope,” wrote Franz Kafka in 1922. The author from Prague struggled with the loudness of the city. The Irish composer Gerald Barry revisited precisely this characteristic in his work “Kafka‘s Earplugs” – and in 2023 he celebrated its world premiere by the BBC Philharmonic Orchestra in London. In this podcast episode, Barry speaks to Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson about how Franz Kafka’s auditory sensitivity inspired him. Barry finds it highly appropriate that “Kafka’s Earplugs” has been described as both the most beautiful and the most horrible music in the world. After all, Kafka was said to have been equally contradictory.