 Gweithio. Welcome to the British Library and welcome to the Long Player Conversation 2017. My name is Roly Keating. I'm chief exec here at the BL. It's wonderful to see so many of you here. I'm sure I know many of you are members. You've all got a sense of the collections of the British Library, but even those who know and love this place aren't always aware that we are also the home of the National Sound Archive. Some six and a half million recordings growing all the time, of course, in almost every conceivable and imaginable format. And wonderful is this collection is, it is in fact at risk, because if you know anything about technology, technology fades, it fails, the carriers fade, the actual technologies. So we are just at the beginning of one, for those of you who care about audio and sound, which of course is one of the great themes we're going to be touching this evening. We are just at the beginning of a campaign we call Save Our Sounds to digitise and preserve as much of the nation's sound heritage as we can before time takes its toll. And this extraordinary legacy of recordings, whether it's music or conversation or accent or nature disappears from the national heritage. And we have 10 partners across the UK, wonderful generosity of the Heritage Lottery Fund to support that. And it's not just about preservation, it's about thinking about the future of how an institution like this collects and preserves new sound, the radio that's broadcast, the oral history that is the true memory of a society, and of course the future sounds of the natural world as well. So as part of this, we are as ever at the British Library, creating a programme of events. Tonight's event is part of what we're calling our season of sound, six months of all sorts of things happening in and across and around the library, including I hope some of you have been to visit Listen in the main hall, which is the wonderful free exhibition celebrating 140 years of recorded sound. And then when it came to think about talks and conversations, of course we found ourselves naturally drawn to our friends at the Long Player Trust, and you'll hear more about this in a moment, but those who look after and celebrate an extraordinary work of art, which I first encountered when it began around the turn of this century Long Player by Jim Finer. And each year Long Player hosts a conversation, just to say, because there'll be a proper introduction in a moment, I'm particularly thrilled that we are hosting tonight's incarnation of Long Player's conversation. Natural and environmental sounds are one of the great, great glories of the British Library's sound collection. We've been collecting this heritage for many, many decades and continue to do so, and there is no one better than Chris Watson to talk about that and explore the issues it raises and the techniques used to capture the audio memory of the world beyond the human on this planet. And then our other interlocutor tonight, you will know from many, many parts of his extraordinary career, but I just want to say that of course, and I've known David on and off for many years, when we first launched and even conceived of launching our campaign to save our sounds, David Attenborough was, with typical generosity, one of the very, very first to step forward to help promote it. So we're extremely grateful both to David and to Chris that they've come here tonight. But to introduce the context and the background and our special guests, please can I hand to the chair of the Long Player Trust, Gareth Evans. So welcome, Gareth. Thank you. Well thank you so much, Rowley, for your kind comments and for setting the scene. All your comments I absolutely agree with and endorse. Many thanks to John Fawcett, to Anna Susanna, everyone here at the British Library of course for making this event possible. And similarly to everyone at the Long Player Trust, the trustees, especially to Michael Morris, to Sarah Davies and of course to the composer of Long Player, Jim Finer. As Rowley says, it's wonderful for the Long Player Conversation 2017 to be here for a number of reasons of course, not least because it's part of the season of sound and because the idea of the library itself, its relationship to time to the preserving of the past for its presentation in the present for the future is absolutely in keeping with Long Player's own mission. It's about an archive of time of course and of world knowledge for the future and about its presentation. And I hope that Long Player has all those elements in the mix, which I'll come to shortly. It's also about precision of course and classification. Without proper classification of libraries, nothing of course, if you put a book back on the wrong shelf, it could be gone forever. But that precision should open up conversation rather than close it down in a reductive way. And of course the idea of classification overlaps between the bookshelves and all forms of archiving and the natural world. So precise of course is the library's own classification system that the green room that we've been enjoying the pleasures of before coming on stage is actually green, which is important because it's not always the case green rooms can come in a whole range of colours, tones and hues, but the green room as you'd expect is green. You were listening to Long Player as you came in and Long Player is a thousand year long, never repeating piece of music. It started playing on the 31st of December 1999 and it will continue until that same date in 2999 when it will start again. This was composed by Gem Finer and produced by Artangio, it's now held by the Long Player Trust as Roly said. And what it is is a thousand year long piece of music, but of course what it really is is a framework for thinking about priorities, about relationships, about our engagement of course with time and space over a much longer span than our own lifetimes, or even the lifetimes of our civilisation. And it's about thinking how we might change our perception of our relationship to all these elements and offer a kind of different way of perceiving the priorities as I've said of our reality. It's inherently optimistic of course because it wants to carry on for at least a thousand years, but how it will be carried and communicated is obviously up to future generations to take forward and think about. But all of this depends on our relationship with the natural world, which of course is changing very fast. Urgency is rising as much as it looks like the sea levels will. And the question is how we can communicate the situation we find ourselves in now to ourselves and of course to future generations. What is the best way of communicating things? Often threshold moments of perception happen around this idea of communication. We can think of the radical shift in how we perceive citations, whales, when the discovery of the whale song and what it meant in the 70s. And this leads me to that obviously a well-observed truism that about a hundred years ago many people had horses but of course only the rich had cars. Now a hundred years later many people have cars but only the rich have horses. How the stables have turned. Now that's a slightly cringe inducing comment. I'd like to thank my son Tom for bringing that insight to my attention. But it does reflect how our relationship with the natural world is changing. And what kind of tools can we bring to this relationship in terms of advocacy for a better future? We bring of course sound and image, we bring voice and narrative. We can think about concern and anger even but we can also think about wonder, celebration and joy. Seeing is not only seeing if in the right hands in the right eyes it can be looking, listening of course is not only hearing. Proper listening is a very different thing indeed. When life and work merge into the single space of experience you know you're in for a different story and a different scale of encounter. And that's exactly what we have with our wonderful guests tonight as Roly has suggested. Chris Watson started his musical and creative life with the influential band Cabaret Voltaire and after moving into television he has become the world's leading sound recordist of wildlife and natural phenomena as well as diverse human activity. He's an installation artist, a sound artist, he records for the label touch and of course he is across our televisions and our radios with extraordinary encounters with sound. If it can be listened to and heard there's a fair chance that Chris has recorded it. I would like to say of course that he's also almost definitely recorded the sound of one hand clapping but I think when we come on in a minute to welcome our guests I'd like you to bring all your flesh based digital devices together, not just one of course. David Attenborough needs no introduction. He is a pioneering broadcaster, naturalist, filmmaker across the arts and humanities. The pioneering controller of BBC Two, the director of programmes for BBC One and Two whose interest in the natural world goes back to the earliest years of his childhood. There are simply no better conversation lists to come and engage with this theme in the framework of Longplay and the British Library than the two you're about to give the warmest welcome to. Please do welcome Chris Watson and David Attenborough. Thank you. Amazing. I always enjoy our conversations over the years but there are a few places like this that we've had the chance to have a... Most of the places are like the North Pole or the Mato Grosso or somewhere. Actually I remember, the place I remember is the Galapagos Islands. I can't even remember what programme it was for but you were doing a piece about Marine Iguanas coming out of the water to warm up but also to expel salt from the nostrils. We were going to do it at the hottest part of the day. We were going to do it at midday and we were on the equator and we turned up this piercing equatorial heat on a piece of exposed lava. I remember Gavin came to us and said, I'm sorry, we can't shoot at the moment. The sun's in the wrong place. The equator at midday. Perhaps you should have thought of this a bit earlier. But it was at those moments that we retired into conversation and there were the aspects I always enjoyed. I enjoyed them because you're such a great sound ally because you started out as a sound recordist. I started out as a television producer I suppose really but it's difficult to think back in 1952 which is when I joined television. Hardly any sound or picture were recorded. Everything was live up at Alexander Palace and I was a producer and when I wanted to go to Africa for the first time and shoot 60 millers of film. We had never shot before. We hadn't got enough money to pay your exorbitant fees to see a recordist. Charles Lagus was a cameraman and I was a recordist. That's what you call foot de mure. I didn't understand it at all. I just thought you took a microphone and you turned the thing on. It's just a bit different from that. Well, not much actually. It was that that I always found inspiring about, let's see if this works, about your work. Yes. That's just such a cool posture for a sound recordist. I've modelled myself on that for years. You're not doing badly. But that thing that I was slinging around my neck was the only portable recorder that there was in 1964. It ran on, I think it was 12 YouTube batteries, sections of broom handles. It was very heavy. The reason I'm holding the microphone there was that the microphone actually doubled as a speaker so if I wanted to hear what I was doing, I put it to my ear. Well, I think what we can do, because we've managed to collect some recordings thanks to Cheryl Tipp from the National Sound Archive who's dug out a lot of your old recordings, which are held here in the library. This is Sierra Leone, isn't it? It is, yes. Was this the first zoo quest? It was, yes. This is what I would call now an atmosphere recording. So it's a scene setting recording. As far as I was concerned, this was really central stuff. And actually, background, I mean, we're a swamp, absolutely alive with frogs of several different types. Let's hear it. All singing. It's really good. I mean, it's 1954. It's an exceptional recording. I think what to bear in mind is that was a very early tape recorder, but it was a reel-to-reel recorder. And actually, they're really good quality. I mean, they're still... And the microphone was just that very big thing. Yeah, but it worked as a device for capturing a scene of the place. The thing I like about that is that it's the most eloquent way of describing a place. You don't need... Yeah, that's what I like about it. And about that technique. But you very quickly adapted different techniques and started to focus more as well on things like that. Well, that's still the L2 recorder down there. Yeah, so that's the reel-to-reel recorder. But what I'm interested in is that, a parabolic reflector that you're using. Is this Guiana? Yes, that's right. Because that's something that was... I mean, I've got photographs of an American ornithologist Miles North from Cornell University in the 1930s, 1932, using a parabolic reflector. There is no digital device that's been invented since then that improves upon the ability of a parabolic reflector to focus sound. It acts like, as it were, searchlight and reverse. I mean, it focuses all the... Yes. There we are. And that's rather better than that because that's made of how many minutes I had. The thing I like, yeah. So what happens with this, this is a very special curve, parabolic curve, x equals y squared. Microphone, at the focal point of that, any sound that hits the dish, parallel to the axis, and that's the key, it has to be very accurately aimed, any sound that hits the dish parallel to the axis will be reflected back to a common point called the focal point. So if you can try to put a microphone there and aim your dish accurately, it will pick up sounds with a 10-degree axis. It's still... I mean, it's tempting to talk of it as though it's a searchlight, but actually it doesn't bring you the sound as if you were close up, does it? Well, it amplifies. It doesn't have electronic amplification, so it's acoustic amplification. So it amplifies what you're pointing it at, but it doesn't amplify sounds to the side. I've got a good example because I've got a recording that Cheryl found of that very trip. These are howler monkeys, which did you know what they were at the time? No, I heard this... I was sleeping in a hammock. I've never been to South America jungle before, and I heard this noise. That's not actually distorted. You think it's almost like a train in a tunnel or something. Well, I can imagine hearing that at night in the dark in a hammock. And actually... I'll be quiet, I'll be quiet. Actually, they're monkeys. Howler monkeys. And they sing at night. They have big throat pouches, which amplify the sound, and it's a spacing mechanism which the trout troops use and sing competitively with one another. I'm sure the jaws have some effects on the sound as well. Well, I suppose so. They move the jaws, I think, because they do it, but of course they have this big balloon-like... Yeah, yeah. So, I've got one of my recordings I'd like to play now. This is a reflector recording made with this reflector, but again, what it demonstrates is the ability to pick out sounds of individuals, and this is a recording of a Robin song, so common, garden bird. In fact, there's one probably singing in Euston Square this evening because this is the winter song of a Robin. One of the fuel birds that sings in winter. But this was the song that accompanied... You did a tweet of the day. I think it was at last Christmas. And this is the song that accompanied it. It's actually recorded in my suburban garden in Newcastle, but it demonstrates, again, how the reflector works. So something which an ordinary microphone just can't do, so it's still of significant use to me today. And there's no replacement of it. There's nothing better, which is what the interesting thing is than that, and it's acoustic amplification. So it's noise-free. There's no hiss or electronic noise associated with it. And although that was very big and cumbersome, it worked on vowels. I don't mind telling you. And I think there were eight or ten vowels in it and carrying that around with delicate vowels. It was very dangerous, very unreliable. And I desperately wanted a better thing than that. And I went to the best tape recorder in this country. I think the name is Ferragal. It was. It was Ferragal. And they were the standard BBC tape machines, reel-to-reel. And I said, what I wanted is something smaller and I can easily carry about. Can't you modify this device? And this chap who he was, he was fairly senior in photograph. I don't think he was a managing director, but he was fairly senior guy. And he tapped me on the knee, he said, laddy, when you've got a world beta, you don't mess about with it. And the company was in bankruptcy within five years. Well, Naga was adopted as the... And then the Swiss. So I'm interested again how you developed the featured sounds of birds. And in this case, this was a trip to Papua New Guinea and a family of birds. I know you're very interested in the birds of paradise. Indeed, yeah. Well, we, there was in 55, 56, and I was desperate to see birds of paradise, which had haunted me since I was a child. Mainly because they're so beautiful and astonishing. But we had got to the situation whereby you couldn't very well show a picture of a bird which was obviously singing without showing the sound. But the trouble with the cameras at that time was that they made a very loud noise. We still do. No, no, they don't, Chris. You know, being very sensitive now. Electronic cameras don't make a lot of noise. But clockwork cameras did. They did. Like a concrete mixer. So it took us a long time because of sheer incompetence on our part before we actually found a bird of paradise that was about to display. And it was in the dawn, and it was over a classic species, Count Rajd's bird of paradise. And we found a display site and we went up in the dark and we got set up. And then to start with, the bird came up and landed on a branch. And Charles Lagos, who was a cameraman, my companion, I said, why aren't you shooting, Charles? He said, there's no sun, there's no dawn, there's no light. I can't do anything. I'm filming. So he's filming away. And as I say, this noise was going on with the camera. So I couldn't record if I wanted to. And I kept saying to Charles, that's enough, let me record. And Charles said, no, I've got a bit more. I just want to change lens. Let me play. So finally I shut up. Let me play something. And I turned on the recorder and the bird went, wah, wah, wah! And then it went wah, wah, wah! And then it flew off. So of course, when we came back, the only thing I had to do to try and match his film was to take these two calls and join them on a piece of tape, end to end. So it went round and round and round and round. You've got a picture. I did to pound your embarrassment. No, not a picture, I've actually got the recording. You've got the recording. And then suddenly he flexed his wings and started his dance. In a frenzy of excitement he threw his ruby pooms above his head, shrieking with excitement. When that went out, my old professor of zoology from Cambridge sent me such a nice letter. He said, many congratulations, I've spent my life dreaming about what you've been dreaming about, about birds of paradise, because he was an ornithologist. Birds of paradise, I never thought I would see them. And then I saw it on television and it was so exciting. You must say wonderfully please. But there is an observation which apparently you haven't made anything of and I ought to tell you about now. And that is, I watched that. And the sounds that you had of that bird singing he sung in groups of nine and then in groups of seven. Never two nines together, never two seven together. And I think you should write a learned paper about this for the Ornithological Union. Now I had to reply to him. Unfortunately this was just a piece of tape that was going around. So he had to be altered. But there you are. But what it means is that actually we find it now, even now that perhaps 50 years ago there was a sort of naivete amongst scientists about sound recordings and they were about pictures. They didn't understand the technology and so they were capable of making some really big howlers like that. I stopped him from producing that as learned paper anyway. But conversely filmmakers are informing the scientific community as well. I mean Blue Planet for instance too. Remarkable observations. Natural history. We couldn't exist without or be mad to make a natural history film without getting involved with the scientific community. They point us in the right direction. They tell us all sorts of things we don't know. And of course these days sound recording and picture recording are part of the tools of an observation. Natural history scientists. When we started to work together life of birds probably perhaps 1995 the techniques then I was using were what you've just been describing now. Microphones to record birdsong. Reflectors to record birdsong. But then we started with life in the undergrowth and I had to adapt my techniques significantly because all of a sudden from trying to film and record animals and other birds that were in trees or at a distance we were filming tiny animals in a huge scale but from extreme close up. Yes, the theme of the series we've done lots of themes of programmes and series about birds and lots about mammals but of course the most numerous animal forms on this planet are invertebrates insects primary but many other things I mean slugs and millipedes and so on which aren't insects, spiders and so we I suggested that we did a series what to call it was a problem actually. What do you call it life of something because this was part of life of birds and life of mammals and so on life of something you couldn't call life of anything I couldn't think what to call it and eventually I hit on the idea of calling life and the undergrowth and that enabled us to do all that all these different things which you recorded. So I started instead of using large microphones and very directional microphones I started to use these which we're wearing tonight so-called personal microphones which are made this small so that they're not made this small for any particular sound characteristic they're made small and they're very low profile I imagine that not a lot of recording of invertebrates has been made have they Chris? I mean you certainly were the first to record quite a lot of things Yeah I think again the scientific community are now using techniques mostly of animals in captivity and in studio environments but I was concerned about when we were out on location to capture the sounds that were being filmed in such close up detail by people like Martin Dorm his super close up lenses so I suddenly thought well you know much as I enjoy recording David with these small microphones I could perhaps use your microphone to get in really close to things and that's what we did here in South Africa there's a matabilianz which I was amazed at one because the matabilianz are quite aggressive, well they raid ground nesting termites and I think they were they named after a tribe who would have this technique of this sort of pincer movement maybe copied from the ants in the first place so they would send out scouts to find ground nesting termites and then the ants would swarm and do this attacking from different positions but in silence, in quietness they always moved to attack in absolute quietness and as soon as they had collected and dismembered a lot of the termites they carried their booty and the food, these disconnected termites back to the nest but as they did so they then started to not vocalise but stridulate make this incredible sound ok take two ants starting to gather to return after the raid that's thousands of ants on this little microphone you hear it? yeah I can't well some very high frequency hissing sound well we ought to explain what stridulation is the ants the middle section of the insect has a head and then behind on the thorax there's a little comb on the front of the hard exoskeleton and the ants moved that against the head against the thorax and that makes this sort of like a comb being stridulated and they make this very high pitch noise but I think one of the first to observe all this and to record it and we came to the conclusion that when the matabilians set out they were like a raiding party they were quiet because the scouts had decided which the termite hill was going to be going to raid and they went up in silence and then there was this terrific battle in which bodies were hurting out of the entrances as the termites were being dragged out by the matabilians which are big and ferocious and then ending with the ants carrying these corpses of the killed termites that they come back to the nest to feast on them I know it's anthropomorphic but in fact you really felt that it was a war song a victory song it has to be communicative in some way but it was remarkable and they followed this a trail back as well presumably a pheromone trail but then they were much wider and there was this whole collection of food that they were going back with it was astonishing and that was the one series that really got me interested in recording real detail I remember I think I said to you do you think that they make any of these noises underground and you said well let's find out so I took your microphone off you took my microphone off and that was into a termite into a termite now in the same place you're right it was actually the same day we finished with the filming the matabilians it was a camera at the very end of the series the great upsumming of the series where you stood by this huge termite mound and said if mankind was to disappear from the planet within a month there would be no change if invertebrates were to disappear from the planet then within four weeks there would be absolute chaos but I remember the series ended in disaster with you in desperation because you lowered your microphone into the termite hole didn't you and you pulled it out reveal what happened well this was sadly that microphone has now gone to the great microphone maker repair shop so I dangled down a termite chimney they have the full of these such chimney affairs so lowered this microphone down with a windshield on because I thought oh I've seen again one of your early zoo quests with soldier termites aggressively attacking any intruder into the termite mound so I drop this thing down and I heard this actually can play it and there's a section where you hear it sounds like a fight in a pub but then slowly the termites start to alarm and they bang the heads on the inside of the termite mound which makes this comb-like more rhythmic rattling sound but there the termites around the microphone and then that I thought fantastic no I've got this first time I've ever recorded inside a termite mound so I pull my microphone out to reveal the windshield had gone this had been removed by soldier termites and nine pounds microphone you're laughing now it was at the time it was 15 years ago I remember you saying I the Berins I'll have no shoes it was the hit and Alex said they still have to share the same shoes it was remarkable it was one of the first times I had equipment attacked like that I was pleased to get it there was a whole other series of micro sounds that I enjoyed in that series including these the giant earthworms of Gippsland in Victoria where we went to after this occasion before you recorded to explain for no reason that anybody can be logical logical reason that I can think of this one area south of Australia 11 in the world they have giant earthworms they are huge huge I mean like this and you may say how long is the longest giant earthworm the answer is that it depends how hard you pull it really and you might break it so there's no body can actually tell you what the record is kind of like that and the only way was you walking across the pastures in Gippsland it's suddenly here so someone has pulled a lavatory chain I mean there's suddenly a great swoosh and gurgling noise and you're not grounded and there's nobody there nothing there at all and it's down deep in the soil that there is where water gathers are slurping around in their tunnels and you've got it well the interesting thing was the scientist who we were with used it as a method to survey if these animals were here because I think a road was being carved through some farmland and they cut into a field edge and discovered these earthworms and some of the eggs which were enormous and that's why we were there did we got the sound? and made a whole series of these recordings so this isn't a communicative sound it's as these giant earthworms withdraw into their slimy burrows and the end scene was David doing one of his usual spectacular pieces to camera and then turning and walking off across this field and so I gave this track of what I call worm giant earthworm medley of sounds to accompany David walking off into the distance after delivering his piece to camera it didn't get used they preferred 110 piece earthworms which isn't a normal idea that's it and you've got more than that well do you think I don't want to hear it? alright I've got a few more seconds oh I have okay but I have to tell you I rarely heard in South Australia well there were uncommon animals or certainly the discovery of them there's one more from that series I'd like to play which had for me serious significance and again a remarkable discovery I think for the scientific community as well as myself when I got to record it the caterpillar of a large blue butterfly do you want to explain it or shall I? yes well now you go ahead so I mean they're found in this country aren't they? a British butterfly and the caterpillars are collected from the woodland floor by wood ants and taken back to the ants nest and you would think that really is the end of the story for that particular caterpillar so taken into this what you would assume is a very hostile environment however the caterpillar remains in there and it was discovered by somebody from the institute of terrestrial ecology that they stridulate these caterpillars stridulate inside the ants nest and the sound that they produce causes the ants to feed this caterpillar not to kill it and eat it and this caterpillar does this it has a little hard internal organ which you can actually see because the caterpillars are translucent and they vibrate this organ inside their bodies and produce this mechanical sound and that and maybe there's some chemical process as well but then stimulate the wood ants to feed and sustain this animal rather than prey upon it I thought that was an astonishing story and we went down, we were at Mike Salisbury's house for the start of life in the undergrowth and it was on the this sound and this piece was on the six o'clock news and finally because I remember I got a phone call before I went down in the afternoon and I thought it was Gavin some of the camera playing a trick he said oh hello this is BBC news I would like to use your caterpillar sound on the six o'clock news but anyway this is it I thought at the time and this was recorded it had to be recorded in captivity temporary captivity so this was in a radio studio in Bristol recorded with a very special device which sadly I didn't have called a particle velocity microphone which was loaned to me by the I.T.E this sort of parasitism is particularly interesting because the large blue butterfly has only been clinging on to survive it reduced very much in numbers and close to extinction in southern England and lepidopterists simply couldn't understand how they were going to conserve it and it wasn't until they discovered that this relationship between the ants and the way the caterpillars the large blue persuaded the ants to take into their nest and feed it that they were able to work out how to save the large blue because the ants will only live in a particular kind of turf with a particular kind of grass and that depended on sheep so it was a very complex thing but my other illustration how complex the webs of the natural world are yes and how such a simple sound has a profound effect I assume in this case we're hearing it as a sound but in fact it's a vibration so I can only imagine the ants detect the vibration and they can feel the sound through their exoskeletons and maybe the feelers it still must be aware of sound so although they don't have ears they can hear I suppose you're playing with words near field sound so they're sensitive to vibrations within a few centimetres around them at this stage David I have to mention the M word music music yes there's a considerable I know I found it hard in front of an audience to mention this I'm not a great fan of music in natural history films but however again you were probably one of the first people to record what I thought was appropriate music to use in your programs because it was local music it was music from the place and of the place and again you've captured remarkable series of recordings all of which are in the National Sound Archive when you're filming you're also recording local music indigenous music tribal music more generally called world music now quite a remarkable collection this is one of my favourites I think this is from if not all the zoo quest but from the first zoo quest recorded in Sierra Leone music the interesting thing about that that was in 54 and in up country Sierra Leone in West Africa they had never seen a tape recorder before there hadn't been a tape recorder before and so when I'd record something I would play it actually through the microphone play it so people could listen and of course they were enchanced by hearing themselves and the head drummer who was running the head musician was fairly put out that we were being regarded as being so clever and so successful and he said so I played something to him and he listened to it and he said that was a simple a simple piece of drumming anybody could your machine could learn that easily I'll play you something that your machine can't learn and then he he gave a dazzling display of drumming I mean really amazing and he said okay you've tried that of course when I rounded back and played it here he was absolutely I've got an example that I recorded when we had a trip of mammals to Marley to that Dogon village Tirelli and again you made a comment to me I don't even think you made it to camera we were filming women pounding millet with huge pestle and mortars and a lot of them had small babies on cloths tied to the back and you said look at that and he said the first rhythms that a Dogon baby and child and feels is its mother pounding millet so with a very musical rhythm this is what I recorded well of course there's a lot of a lot of research has been done recently when I say recently over the last 10 years or so about what a child in the womb and here and he could hear that the noises and the rhythms that go on in the body and if the woman who did that every day to pound the cassava for the food heard that every day it must have an effect I once was in San Francisco airport and a home of Hippidum here at the time and a man with long hair and I suppose he had been on the pot one thing another he had a little baby in a look sack sort of thing and he recognized me and we started a conversation and he said was I recording something and I said yes I was and he said it's very important it's very important what the child hears it's very important when this little guy when we knew what he was expecting we paid Bach's the Carter and the Feud and D Minor to him every morning I said did you I said yeah we hold him up to my wife's stomach and I said did it have an effect oh sure he said I said what happens he said when he hears Bach's the Carter and the Feud and D Minor now he screams I know this is very important this style of music this is gamelan and it's a really beautiful sound and this is a recording again he must have made in the mid 1950s but it's a sound that just rings so true today and it's just really beautiful it's an orchestra, gamelan orchestra I would describe it as anyway but it's just a remarkable series of rhythms and tones good as all that is it Chris because you haven't got a proper balance I mean you hear that dong which is one particular gong which is responsible for the rhythm but that was too prominent I mean it wouldn't have been better with the multi-microphone setup I think you just make it more difficult I'm all for I do a lot of surround sound these days as you know because I'm interested in the sounds of places and spaces but you make it more complicated and you normally with things like that you don't get more than one chance do you? I mean I had no alternative because I just had more microphones you had precious privileged opportunities that's one of the things I like about what you did when you were starting out recording and what I do I like that sense of being able to not say right let's stop let's put set a multi-microphone setup and sure you could maybe do better and I'm sure now there are orchestral recordings made with lots of microphones that have more depth to them but what I like about that is the immediacy of it and the fact that you were there on location doing that it wasn't contrived later in the studio it's a live location or it was a live location recording and of course at Gamaland Orchestra it is the largest group orchestral ensemble outside of Western Symphony Orchestra it's a very interesting question there is only those two situations I mean no other musical ensemble that I can think of anywhere in the world a tribal one is as complicated as a Gamaland which has as many as 30 or 40 musicians all playing out of memory without a written score at all and they're metallophones like xylophones or the keys and the complexity of those instruments is just remarkable because when you play it the keys sound doing and echoes like that and then he has to damp it so he's playing a tune with one hand and playing one note behind with the other hand dampening it so the virtuosity of those musicians is quite extraordinary but also they have these clockwork rhythms very accurate as well it sounds like a clock almost like a metronome that is one particular it's called a cheng cheng gong is used and he sets the rhythm and keeps the rhythm going and are they different village to village? oh yes not only are they the Gamaland different from village to village playing their own tunes the master musician composes their traditional ones but he also composes ones especially for the village and they also have their own scales there are two different scales in Bali and when the village is a group decides they're going to commission a master bronze smith to make a Gamaland for them 30 instruments it's a very big financial ingestion and the brass founder produces keys and says this is the scale and are the intervals as you would like it and the master musician may say well that third note up I think it would be quite exciting if you made that just a little sharper and then the whole of the the Gamaland is tuned to those things and Benjamin Britton told me this himself that he was inspired by oriental Gamaland music and used it in his prince of the pagodas but when he was in Bali the Gamaland rehearses every village has its own Gamaland the Gamaland rehearses every evening and as he would drive through the darkness in Bali he would hear a Gamaland rehearsing and he would know with the sharpness of his composer's mind he would know that that particular harmony had to be that particular village so he knew where he was I've heard as well that there were a lot of the time they can be appreciated from a distance as well rather than being close up because the sound travels to the forest village to village I don't think because the village was quite far apart at least when I was there but the Gamaland plays during festivals and it plays continuously for hours hours and hours and you it's rather like many modern music now I feel that suddenly such one thing changes and when one particular thing changes with a slightly different harmony you've been listening too far with half an ear as you chew beetle and converse and you suddenly realise that now the rituals are going to move into a new phase of ritual and so you go back and listen to the thing and that's many ways Philistine talk for me but when I listen to a lot of music which is repetitive over and over and over again just that one change which tells you what's happening with the musical score the musical plot as it were So are these long performances as well then? 3 or 4 hours? 5 hours? Are we coming to the end? No we're nowhere near the end I've got a question I want to ask you in public before we come to the end so I'll hold it in my end reserve Go on Chris, we'll talk about it Okay Right Well for a change then We're supposed to There we are We should because A long player trust is about time and deep time in particular and there are two things this is sort of the final section if you like but there are two trips that we've had where I've thought significantly about time and how it's affected me and the most recent one was this when we went to Argentina about two years ago to go and look at this giant dinosaur this sauropod which had been discovered I think it is the largest isn't it that's been discovered This is in Chubot province of Patagonia so southern Argentina so the this is the femur of this dinosaur the leg bone which is longer than David which he laid next to posed next to for that photograph and it was astonishing enough the whole experience and I'd urge you to go and watch the film Attenborough and the Giant Dinosaur I think it's still online but then we went to this place far less spectacular but we were taken still in Argentina in the foothills of the Andes and we had a mammoth car that we flew for a few hours and then we were driven for six or seven hours I remember to this place and I'd urge the location of it by the scientist because what is in front of you in this picture is a nest of a dinosaur I don't know if it's the same sauropod or another one this is a nest site of a dinosaur these eggs were laid 100 million years ago maybe more and will you explain what happens to the landscape because I found this astonishing it was eroded out you can see some segments there on the right hand side they are little plates of dinosaur shell and I have to admit I'm a sort of kleptomaniac I love collecting things and but we are with a very very responsible paleontological professor who asked someone else from the ministry and I couldn't restrain myself I suddenly marvellous piece, like a piece of a soup plate and I peeked out and I was like look at that and I suddenly realised that there are people on either side of me looking at me and the camera was actually turning and I said yes and I'm putting it back where I found it and it's still there I think I almost recognise it up there on the right from a time point of view what I found really profound was that that landscape was like that 100 million years ago and obviously it changed significantly but then being eroded back as I understood it to this original state and these eggshells were still there the fossilised even somewhere on the inside had imprints of baby dinosaur skin on them it was just a piece of time to look at that, I found it very I found it hard to comprehend just being there in what looked like effectively a building site, this huge area as you can see treeless, very low lying vegetation very few birds but the shells of animals that were there 100 million years ago I need to move on we need to move on we need to progress to this last place very different from this frozen planet had the privilege of working with you on 2010, 2011 and we went to Antarctica and eventually to the south pole but as I do before I've had many trips with David I did a bit of research obviously into the place and this is a place rich in history Mount Erebus which is on Ross Island so just off the coast of continental Antarctica this is the Ross Sea which when we arrived in late December I think it was it was still frozen so that's the surface of the sea frozen to about 3 or 4 meters in depth and what you can see over there is the land Mount Erebus the volcano and we were staying at the American base the McMurdo United States Science Foundation base just down the coast was Terra Nova Captain Scott's hut from which he embarked on his trip to the south pole a little further down the coast was Shackleton's hut Nimrod where Shackleton would have arrived to had he made his trans Antarctic journey successfully and so we were in a place where when Scott went down he took with him a photographer Herbert Ponting who made a film I think it's for Gormont pictures called The Great White Silence and so I imagined that that would be the case that in fact not so much silence because that doesn't really exist even in a vacuum but a very quiet place and indeed that's the case when the wind doesn't blow when it's not blowing 180 mile an hour winds it's very quiet there are a few birds there there's in the daily penguin colony which we filmed David at and there were a few Antarctic skewers the bizarre thing is there are no insects there so when there are no birds there is virtually no sound apart from the wind drawing over the ice and we went to this place on Ross Island which is Terra Nova this is the hut that Scott and his party walked out from in October I think 1910 and never came back to so we had the real privilege of being invited in by the New Zealand Science Foundation who maintained the hut David had been there 17 years previously I remember and I was at this point I was there to record David's pieces and other sounds I've been recording the sounds of glaciers and ice but I'd yet to get underwater because the Austral summer hadn't really started to melt the ocean but we went into this hut which had this remarkable atmosphere and presence but I also thought a very special acoustic it was really quiet but very dry and Antarctic is the driest continent there's no humidity there there's one reason why things have been preserved so well but we sat down in this hut and you just told us this story and I don't think it's ever been transmitted I think it was something for the New Zealanders but I found this really powerful piece of sound in a place where there was at the time virtually no other sound and I'll just spin through a couple of images of inside the hut as I played this piece which thankfully you let me play I first came to this site 17 years ago and I was one of the first here Indeed I had the key to the lock and I opened it and I remember very vividly opening the door and coming into this place and there was a smell of tar and rope and a kind of musty smell and I looked around and saw these extraordinarily intimate things clothing horses saddles bunks and I suddenly became aware of something around me that became quite oppressive it wasn't particularly aggressive but certainly if I was ever to think about feeling ghosts or personalities it would be here and it became so oppressive that eventually I actually had to leave and go for walk outside and by the time I came back the rest of the team was here and so we were putting up lights and bringing in the cameras and I walked in and that atmosphere had gone and it wasn't like any other place of course because it's an extraordinary place but that oppressive feeling had disappeared but even so if ever there was a place that held the personality of the people who had lived in it a century ago this surely must be it anyway I thought it was very poignant that recollection of yours in that space because there was a remarkable sense and spirit almost a place within that and I'm sure the acoustics were part of it because it was so dry you could hear any sound it was a remarkable place and so well preserved because of the lack of humidity so what happens when the sea ice melts is that it allows animals to come into this place this great white silence and transform it as we've seen on Blue Planet too particularly if these animals orca which were on a couple of weeks ago who are I don't anthropomorphise usually about animals but if I've got a favourite animal it's the orca highly intelligent animals that have free reign over 70% of the planet you know quite often think we're we think we're the smartest that we evolved in the oceans like orca orca then decided to go back into the oceans and they now live in these sophisticated family groups highly intelligent, communicate with echolocation and acoustic communication we stay up here doing the dry bits paying 20% VAT these animals have free reign over the rest of the planet I mean who's the smartest and when I the great thing for me was to stand on the sea ice several kilometres out to sea taken the courtesy of the United States Science Foundation my hydrofoams into the sea the sea here was the helicopter pilot was telling me was 800 metres deep and we were on 3 metres of sea ice a long way from the island but putting my hydrofoams into that crack in the sea ice and tuning into what was happening underneath was this fantastic contrast for me between the so-called great white silence that was happening in the sea water where sound travels almost five times faster and then in terms of time we went here to the North Pole within a few months maybe four months and we were taken there from the Russian camp Barneo and I think what is the most dangerous trip we've ever undertaken in an ex-Russian military Soviet helicopter an MI-8 from 89 degrees north to 90 degrees north the last 16 nautical miles in something that resembled a second hand washing machine shop with rotor blades I remember when we landed they had because they can't use radar because it goes straight through the ice and of course unlike Antarctica this is the ocean it's the north polar ice cap which is the frozen ocean revolving around the middle and David went there to do a piece again a powerful piece about it's imagined that within 50 to 100 years for the first time in history there'll be open water at this place at the north pole so we had to we were taken there in this Russian helicopter and I remember the Winchman had an old tyre from the helicopter on a piece of rope that did no other means of measuring the altitude when we were up there and they threw this tyre out and he watched it till it bounced and it was smoking as well he shouted instructions to the pilot and we then got dropped at the north pole at which point the producer said the usual things and he said oh right David, Chris and Alistair we need to get some shots of the she said we need to get some shots of the empty north pole so you'll just have to go and hide somewhere so we to walk off and hide behind one of these spin drift frozen waves while they filmed us and I remember the conversation at that point because I had a GPS that had said at one point 90 degrees north but of course we were moving all the time with the polar current and we started to sort of twist it and move away and I I well remember this conversation because we were just like I said at the start we were just standing there waiting to be told you know what to do but by the rest of the camera crew and you know I said something like look over there it's to Los Angeles and we know people in Los Angeles and then I can do this and look down to where Maggie is where she is now down somewhere in Europe and I can do this and look over to Asia and Australia where we've got friends you know all in different time zones the place where we were standing every time zone on the planet converged so what what time was it it's the place where there's no time I mean it was again a powerful moment for me there's one sunrise isn't the one sunset a year and in terms of time and the aspect of this conversation deep time going to a place where of course I think we adopted either I don't know if it was Norwegian time or Russian time we adopted but that was it for the period you can just choose your time and one sunrise and one sunset and from that from the silence of the North Pole or the quietness we then moved to a place where there was some open water and I did the same thing and you put my hydrophones below the surface and recorded why I still regard again you know in anthropomorphic terms is the most beautiful animal music that I've ever heard and these are bearded seals singing under the Arctic sea ice but because they have little holes where they come to breathe through but because there's no wave action on the surface it sounds like they're in a room which the irons to some aspects that under the surface of the ocean but with no wave action on the top and these are the songs that they've been singing for thousands, tens of thousands of years in that place maybe it's been a pleasure talking to you thank you for listening before we go I'll say we've got to go now I'm going to put you on the spot Chris of course has a particular interest and he thinks that all the rest of his team are insensitive really to sound I mean we listen to it but you don't understand it in the way that he understands it and on one evening as we were sitting there drinking beer and so on he actually said to me you don't listen to the sound you don't think about it if you thought more about them you would actually understand more now for example he said I can tell the difference between a recording of waves on the shore in the Atlantic and waves on the shore in the Pacific entirely by listening to the recordings I guess you're going to sit there and say that's true Of course I am, yeah in fact I remember I made a CD for you God God well it has a the Pacific Surf has this silky sort of velvety growling sound whereas the Atlantic is much harder and sharper I mean I'm sure lots of people know anyway I made somewhere in this huge archive of recordings there's a CD I made for him of the sounds of the Pacific and the Atlantic That's his story and it's lasted us over many many a beer over many a lifetime Well let's continue the debate over a drink this evening Thank you very much Chris and David an extraordinary journey through stories, memories, tales sounds, images of a world that we can only really appreciate because of such ventures and such activities as David and Chris have undertaken over many decades a wonderful, beautifully shaped journey through the natural world that we all depend on which we must defend of course with all the energies we have I'm going to close things formally very shortly delighted that while we've been in the room here of course Manchester pool and Wakefield public libraries have been joining us via the streaming live that's been going on in the room and the streaming film will be available to everyone from Wednesday morning so do please make note of that and come back to the British Library website from Wednesday if you'd like to share this wonderful event with friends, family and beyond but before we come to a formal close I'm delighted to welcome the composer of Longplayer, Jim Finer to make a short presentation Thank you We couldn't top that wonderful presentation Well gentlemen thank you very much on behalf of myself and everyone for being inspiring, beautiful and shall I start again? Thank you I was just saying on behalf of myself, the Longplayer Trust and everyone thank you very very much for the most inspiring beautiful, wonderful talk it's a shame it couldn't go on longer we could have listened for ages custom aerily we thank our conversationalists by giving an inscribed singing bowl wow fantastic there's one for you one for you, Sir David thank you and with those you'll need a beta they all have their own very specific beta wow that's different you should run it around the outside or you can just clang them like a bell if you want to use your mouth to modulate you hold it so the sound the sound of them comes out to the the sound comes out to the side of them wow I think I'll do that lesson anyway thank you very much amazing thank you so much Jim sorry to put you on the spot there but I think it was very very hard to add anything to that wonderful presentation we could all have listened of course for at least a thousand years sadly we have considerably less time than that please do track down the Longplayer Story if you like at longplayer.org listen online, you can listen on an app you can go to Trinity by Wharf in London Docklands and listen to it live you can listen to previous conversations read about previous events and so on at longplayer.org cards in your seats will enable you if you would like to continue supporting Longplayer actively as you must also do of course with the British Library would save our sounds particularly but with the whole British Library project please do sign up join become a member of the library and preserve the extraordinary repository of world knowledge here for future generations as this whole evening of course has been about many many thanks to everyone here for making it possible of course the Longplayer Trust and everyone at the British Library please continue to follow Chris Watson's work at his own eponymous website you know where to find David's films it's been an extraordinary evening of course a celebration of the natural world as we find ourselves in it and a call of course a great plea to defend it in whatever way we can so please do join me in giving you all warmest thanks for their wonderful life and work for the worlds of wonder they have brought us on screen via the microphone and of course most of all in person tonight Chris Watson and David Attenborough thank you very much