Slow Radio

A montage of music and natural sounds from the world’s northernmost freshwater lake in Siberia where you’ll hear the calls of Lapland buntings, oriental golden plovers and ptarmigans. We also visit Ein Bokek Canyon in Israel, where the chirps of graceful warblers compete with the rasping sounds of Tristram’s grackles. Then we head to Dyfed in Wales, where an early morning chorus of chaffinches and wrends is joined by the gentle bleating of sheep and lambs on the hillsides. We end in Tanzania, and the Olduvai Gorge, where calls from slate-coloured bou-bous and yellow-necked francolins combine with the distant braying of donkeys and far-off spotted hyenas.

Episode 4/5. In 1705, the 20-year-old Johann Sebastian Bach set off from his home in Arnstadt to walk 250 miles to Lübeck, there to meet his hero, the composer and organist Dietrich Buxtehude.In the fourth of five "slow-radio" walks in which writer Horatio Clare searches for Bach's footsteps - and his ghost - Horatio Clare searches for his footsteps - and his ghost - the route takes him along the banks of the River Ilmenau from Medingen to Bienebuttel.

Nightingales singing, with musicians responding to them, in the Sussex woods. They are joined under the trees by Clive Bell playing bamboo flute, and by folk singer Sam Lee. .

Composer Iain Chambers takes a sound recording field trip around Orford Ness in Suffolk. This site – an isolated shingle spit on the Suffolk coast – once played a key role in the UK's development of radar and ballistics. Since buying Orford Ness from the Ministry of Defence in 1993, the National Trust's policy has been one of 'managed decline' – these buildings are now overrun by nature. The excitement felt by Bletchley Park's wartime codebreakers was once felt here too: Britain's greatest scientific brains; 400 civilians; the unacknowledged thousands of Chinese migrant workers, were solving a singular puzzle: how to build a nuclear weapon. Bomb-making justified as deterrence. Today, Orford Ness gives an insight into what a post-apocalyptic built environment might look and sound like. Air ducts once used to ventilate missile laboratories now burst open, exposing the packed nests of roosting birds. This programme takes listeners into buildings that are otherwise out of bounds, revealing the abundant wildlife now ruling the roost in the bomb ballistics buildings – we hear seagulls 'playing' the buildings with their cries; bees and skylarks; baby jackdaws duetting with the crunch of gravel footsteps; external metal stairwells transformed into aeolian harps: giant wind chimes peacefully intoning their pentatonic melodies towards the slow-moving vessels on the horizon. Producer: Iain Chambers An Open Audio production for BBC Radio 3

A montage of music and natural sounds from a canal in The Camargue where nightingales and swifts greet the morning and from an oasis in Oman where cinnamon-breasted rock buntings are singing happily near a gentle waterfall. We also take a journey along the South Tyne in Northumbria, and as the water bubbles away you can hear the calls of crossbills, meadow pipits and a goshawk. Finally, there’s a dawn chorus and a dramatic thunderstorm on the Parana River in northern Argentina, close to the borders of Brazil and Paraguay.

Immerse yourself in this river setting with Petroc Trelawny - with sounds of the Severn recorded along, and within, the flowing water.

Nathaniel Mann joins lonely seafarers on a container ship for some modern sea shanties.

Slow Radio for Radio 3's Along the River week. Musician Tim Shaw and producer Julian May collaborate with a Northumbrian burn to create a piece - The Water's Music'He made his habitation beside the water's music'. This line, from a poem by Martyn Crucefix, lodged in the mind of radio producer Julian May, inspiring an ambition - to collaborate with a brook to create a composition. By moving rocks and logs might the sounds of the stream be adjusted, 'tuned', and might a piece of music slowly emerge? Tim Shaw is a sound artist and musician based in Newcastle. After auditioning several he finds a musical burn on a moor in Northumberland. He and Julian May record the sounds it makes, from the tiny tinkling trickle near its source to its disappearance under a bridge of resonant drainpipes, via niagarous waterfalls and sombre pools. They intervene, building a ladder of rocks to create a chord as the water flows down. They use hydrophonic microphones, recording underwater to capture the music of the burn from its bed. They tie these hydrophones to bits of wood, letting them drift downstream as 'sound pooh-sticks'. There is life here; in a pool by the burn they record strange pings, the sounds of tiny aquatic creatures. Sploshing about in chest high waders they stretch a rod across the burn with microphones attached at intervals along it. Recording first one, then another they create stepping stones - in sound. In the first part of the programme Tim and Julian gather the sounds and explain what they are up to. They then present the composition they (mostly Tim, the musician) make out of this, a piece in three movements for Northumbrian burn, rocks, logs, hail and aquatic beasts, a piece of slow radio -'The Water's Music'.Producer: Julian May Sound Artist: Tim Shaw

The magical North Pennines landscape of deaf shepherd-poet Josephine Dickinson, which is the backdrop to her real and imagined sound world.

A montage of music and natural sounds from a dawn chorus on a lakeshore in southeast Sweden, the liquid call of the Australian magpie from a mangrove swamp in Queensland, hippos grunting and splashing in Malawi’s Shire River, and skylarks singing overhead while curlews intone their desolate cries around Deadwater Fell in Northumberland.