What does your liver sound like? How about your kidneys, or your lungs? We’re considering right here not of the bodily squelch of fluids mixing or air pumping, however of music. What if our organs – or, slightly, our relationship to them – could possibly be composed right into a symphony?
That is the kind of challenge that may solely be discovered on BBC Radio 4. The presenter and sound designer Maia Miller-Lewis spoke to 5 individuals, every with a singular relationship to at least one very important organ. Then she sketched a soundscape of their tales and handed them over to composer David Owen Norris, who turned them into classical scores – every organ assigned a unique part of the orchestra.
It shouldn’t make sense. Explaining the way it works is a bit like making an attempt to explain synaesthesia – the phenomenon whereby some individuals can hear colors or understand music visually – to somebody who has by no means skilled it. However I’ll give it a go. A girl who wrote a horror novella about donating a kidney interprets the uncanniness of her story into the haunting melodies of woodwind. The highs and lows of the strings are impressed by a Chinese language-medicine practitioner’s resolution to take care of her liver to regain her “emotional equilibrium” after the untimely beginning of her daughter triggered post-natal melancholy. The lungs are represented by brass, after all. Their gentle fluttering and guttural rasping traces the journey of a girl whose lungs collapsed in her thirties. A person who has confronted his childhood trauma by studying to be led by his coronary heart – the “connecting organ” – and changing into an “agony uncle” for others turns his expertise right into a rating for voices, part-choral, part-disco. And the mind is percussion, the rhythmic pings of ideas as imagined by a pc scientist engaged on neural exercise.
These are all introduced collectively so the BBC Live performance Orchestra can “carry out the motion that’s human life”. It’s an eerily surreal but emotive efficiency. I don’t assume I’ll ever take into consideration my kidneys in fairly the identical approach once more.
[See also: Louis Theroux: The Settlers is a deathly warning]