麻豆约拍

A series which encourages guests to "think with the heart and feel with the intellect". In this first programme, Murray Lachlan Young invites writer Hugh Aldersey-Williams to combine his favourite sounds and his most passionately held ideas in unexpected ways - by feeding them into an electronic device. Murray has not prepared an interview but, instead, he and Hugh respond spontaneously to what the device returns to them in the form of short audio snippets. Neither of them knows which of the sounds, music and speech the device will select, nor how it will combine them. The idea is to throw up connections that might not otherwise have occurred to guests, and to encourage them to think and feel about their concerns and passions in a different way. Hugh's list of sounds include evocations of a childhood spent in central London listening to Guards bands playing marches on their way to Buckingham Palace, and the children's literature he was read by his American mother. From later life, there's the flocking of coastal birds in Norfolk where he now lives and writes. These, and Hugh's other sounds, are knitted together with audio suggested by his passion for linking science and the arts, and for breaking down the barriers between the 'Two Cultures' as expressed by C.P. Snow in the year of Hugh's birth. The unpredictability increases as the device introduces some audio of its own, drawn from the 麻豆约拍 Radio archives, to create even more unusual associations between apparently disparate material, and to alter perspectives on familiar issues. Producer: Adam Fowler An Overtone production for 麻豆约拍 Radio 4.