Slow Radio

A journey on the Flying Scotsman with privileged access to the driver on the footplate.

Composer Iain Chambers takes a sound walk along Suffolk's River Deben, meeting avocets and curlew, and culminating in the musical sounds of Woodbridge boatyard.

Have you ever wondered what goes bump in the woods at night? Hugh Huddy discovers the night time soundscape of a woodland in Suffolk by placing a binaural recording box in a tree and leaving it there overnight. Listening back to the recording, the secret life of the dark woods slowly reveals itself.Producer: Cathy Robinson for BBC Wales

An antidote to today’s frenzied world. Step back, let go, immerse yourself: it’s time to go slow.Listen to the sounds of birds, mountain climbing, monks chanting as you go about your day. A lo-fi celebration of pure sound.

An intimate, breath-close binaural portrait of the intoxicating Indian city of Mumbai.

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.