Slow Radio

Writer and poet Susan Richardson invites us to a seal pupping beach on the Pembrokeshire coast; a world that has inspired tales of shape-shifting selkie folk and mermaids.

We stand above a cove. The air is filled with the haunting cries of the grey seals below us, and a soap opera of their lives unfolds. Through the human-sounding calls of the pups, the grunts and splashes of the bull seals as they are looking to mate again, and the sea birds and lapping water, we're immersed in the sonic world of one of the most remarkable coastlines of Britain. Susan considers the mythical stories around the creatures through poetry and her own observations, the ways their lives have intertwined with human ones, and the ecological threats they face in reality.

Produced by Cathy Robinson for BBC Cymru Wales

A montage of music and natural sounds including whale song and Tundra swans.

A montage of music and natural sounds including an Antarctic fur seal and her pup, Yellow-billed storks, and a Himalayan snowcock.

Britain has lost 90% of its traditional orchards. So, seven years ago the villagers of Haselbury Plucknett planted a Somerset orchard: 35 cider apple trees, all old varieties with names as gorgeous as their colours - Kingston Black, Sweet Crimson King, Slack-me-Girdle. "Make sure a rainbow goes into your cider barrel," says Matthew Bryant, filling his bucket with windfalls. In the tin shed at the back of his house Bryant, the cider expert and author James Crowden and friends gather to turn apples into cider, in the slow old way - and Radio 3 gathers all the sounds of the process. Apples drum as they pour into an ancient apple mill. Someone cranks the wheel and crushed apples splatter out as pomace. Matthew and James layer straw on the cider press, built in about 1850. They spread the pomace on the straw adding layers to build the 'cheese'. As the crew screws down the beam, apple juice gushes. They wind it up again. Matthew takes a huge knife, cuts the splayed sides of the crushed cheese, placing the trimmings on top. The pressing begins again, the torrent of juice subsides until it drips like raindrops from a thatched roof. John Keats witnessed this 200 years ago. In To Autumn he writes: "Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,/ Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours." The juice goes straight into the barrels. "Just leave it," Matthew says. "The natural yeasts will work their wonders. As it ferments, it fizzes and hisses. When that singing has stopped, it's time to bung the barrel." The cider will be drinkable by new year, but it's best left until you hear the cuckoo in the spring. "What's wonderful," says Matthew , "is that that's when the trees are coming into blossom, and the whole thing is starting again." Producer: Julian May

A montage of music and natural sounds from the Abernethy Forest in the Scottish Highlands, coniferous woodland that is home to chaffinches, wren, willow warblers, mistle thrush, Scottish crossbills and more; we meet an Oscillated Turkey, native to the rainforests of Guatemala; we’ll warm your cockles with the sound of thermal mud pools at Poikili Hot Springs in Papua New Guinea; and from mud pools to marshland – we finish in Louisiana USA with the sound of cicadas and common grackles.

A journey in sound across the lands intimately associated with Al-Andalus, medieval Moorish Spain and Portugal. Starting in Granada at the glorious Alhambra Palace, we hear the running water of the fountains that adorn the palace as well as the sound of modern day Andalusia, with flamenco singer Juan Pinilla. We then move to Alfama and Mouraria in the old Arab quarter of Lisbon, where we hear the melancholic melodies of fado, as well as the trams that transport both tourists and locals around the city.

We then travel south, to Loulé in the Algarve, before crossing the sea to Morocco, and the sounds of the old Medina in Fez. It is the sound of the sea - across which invaders travelled and refugees and exiles escaped - that we end on.

In 1968 Redzi Bernard's mother arrived in Lalibela - Ethiopia's holy city - on a mule after an arduous trek through the mountains. Earlier this year Redzi recreated her mother's journey and when she arrived in Lalibela she discovered a timeless world.

Just before dawn on a Sunday, she enters an church complex - all below ground level - where hundreds of pilgrims gather in white robes, incense burns, and drums and incantations fill the air.

Ethiopian Orthodox priests lead ceremonies and devotees pray with eyes closed and palms stretched upwards. As day breaks, birdsong and light filter into the scene and slowly pilgrims start to drift away.

To hear Redzi's Ethiopian journey in full go to BBC Sounds and search for 'Journey of a Lifetime'

Think of the American South and one man-made sound plays out evocatively across the landscape: the horn of a passing freight train. For a century and a half it's been almost synonymous with the idea of America, particularly where the rural blends with the urban. In the city of Nashville, Tennessee - 'music city' - the last century has been accompanied by another signature sound: the honky tonk bar.

In this leisurely half hour, we witness the musical arrival of a freight train as it crosses the public highway into downtown Nashville. The rattle of the tracks and sonorous horn dissolve into the sounds of Broadway, the strip where every premises has windows open onto the street, spilling music out to draw tourists in. And between the bars, buskers plug the gaps.

It takes about half an hour to walk up and down Broadway from the Cumberland River - past honky tonks throbbing with Dolly Parton and Lynyrd Skynyrd covers, street renditions of Louis's Wonderful World and pedal-powered bars pumping out hits for bachelorette parties.

The sounds which compete for our attention within this cacophony provide as vivid a snapshot of contemporary Nashville as the freight train horn that sits so snugly within this cityscape, framing the downtown walk.

Produced by Hannah Dean with recordings by Alan Hall.

Renowned field recordist Chris Watson follows the sound of signal bells, and finds himself in a Gate Box on a stretch of the East Yorkshire railway, listening for trains and birds with signalman Dave Beckett.

In the fifth of five "slow-radio" walks in which writer Horatio Clare searches for Bach's footsteps - and his ghost - the route takes him from the village of Roseburg along the Old Salt Road to Mölln, and on to the city of Lübeck.