麻豆约拍

A series which encourages guests to "think with the heart and feel with the intellect." In this second programme, Murray Lachlan Young invites concert pianist James Rhodes 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 James 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. The sounds on James' list include the hubbub of concert audiences arriving and chatting before a performance, a Zippo cigarette lighter, the flicking of light switches, and Chopin's Polonaise-Fantaisie. These, and James's other sounds, are knitted together with audio suggested by his passion for music education. The result is unpredictable but leads to surprising conversation and some unexpected improvisation on the grand piano at which James and Murray sit together in studio. 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.