David Hendy presented the recent 30-part series ‘Noise: a Human History’ on BBC Radio 4. In it, he explored the history of sound and listening. He and his producer Matt Thompson set themselves the challenge of trying, as far as possible, to evoke the sonic atmosphere of the deep past or of particular moments in history without using any off-the-shelf sound effects. In this talk, he discusses the various strategies used in the field and in the studio for using sound to tell the story of sound.

David Hendy is Professor of Media and Communication at the University of Sussex and a former BBC radio documentary producer. His series, Noise: a Human History, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 earlier in 2013, and is currently airing on several radio stations in the US. The book to accompany the series is published by Profile in the UK and by HarperCollins in the US. In 2010 he wrote and presented Rewiring the Mind, a five-part series for Radio 3, and Between Two Worlds, a feature-length drama about the Victorian physicist and spiritualist Oliver Lodge, also for Radio 3. His research interests include the role of sound, images, and communication in human cultures across time. He’s especially interested in the role of modern ‘mass’ media – radio, the press, cinema, television, the internet – in shaping popular life and thought in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. He’s currently writing his fifth book, Media and the Making of the Modern Mind.

www.sussex.ac.uk/profiles/131073

Twitter: twitter.com/DavidjHendy

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