Holiday round-up

Noises in the news

Here’s are a few things that have appeared in relation to A Book of Noises, plus some other stuff that may be of interest.

On 17 December I joined Michel Faber and Georgina Godwin for ‘Meet the Writers’ on Monocle radio. We talked about almost everything from tinnitus and music therapy to Björk and the shingle beaches of Orford Ness. The podcast is here. I hope you enjoy listening to it as much as I did taking part.

By coincidence, Michel Faber’s Listen and A Book of Noises were the subject of a double review by Mythili G. Rao in The Washington Post on 13 December. Rao describes aspects of A Book of Noises accurately. Apparently I have “great faith in the power of sound to transform.”

Earlier the month I joined Mike Carruthers on Something You Should Know (from about minute 27 minutes in here), and spoke with Wayne Kelly for his remarkable Joined-Up Writing podcast. In ‘The Writing Writes You’ we spoke about the trials, tribulations and general craziness of writing.

Elsewhere, the “48 exquisite short essays on sound” made A Book of Noises one of New Scientist's best non-fiction and popular science books of 2023. There were favourable reviews, too, in Strong Words Magazine and The Mail on Sunday.

And in other news, the Kickstarter for An Audiobook of Noises draws close to its funding goal! The funding drive has been greatly helped in recent days by an incredibly generous offer to match fund new pledges by Cat Bohannan. She’s written a lovely and beautiful note about why she decided to do this. Do read it! Please note: there is still a little way to go. New pledges are most welcome. (If we exceed the funding target, additional funds will be spent on music rights and getting the audiobook out to a wider listenership.)

Away from the book but relevant to its themes I’ve been particularly taken by two things in recent days. One is The Music: An Album in Words by Matthew Herbert (Unbound, 2018). Thanks to Xander Cansell, proprietor of Caper, a brilliant new independent bookshop in East Oxford, for the recommendation. How did I miss it before?! The other is the 15 December edition of Late Junction (BBC Radio 3 and BBC Sounds) with their pick of sounds of 2023. Among many extraordinary tracks is ‘Ntebogang: We Must Give Thanks’ from the album Taa! Our Language May Be Dying, But Our Voices Remain. [1]

Another is ‘Ryuhyo’, the sound of drift ice recorded in Utoro, Shiretoko in March 2022 by Yoichi Kamimura, which won the Best Disappearing Sound category of the Sound of the Year awards. “Every winter, a mixture of seawater and freshwater freezes in the Russian Sea and becomes drift ice, which gradually drifts to Shiretoko,” writes Kamimura. “In this recording, the sound of the ice floes can be heard rumbling wildly. This is due to the fact that the decrease in the amount of drift ice has created many gaps in the Sea of Okhotsk, which used to be completely covered with drift ice, and the drift ice now moves violently. The sound of ice floes that sounds very strong is actually the appearance of ice floes that have become very weak.” [2]

And finally (!) I will be speaking at TEDx in Bari on 21 January. This talk, relating to The Book of Barely Imagined Beings, was first scheduled for early 2020 but the pandemic put a stop to that. I’m delighted we are going ahead four years later. It looks likely that I will also speak with researchers and students about A Book of Noises at the university in Bari on 22 January.

Footnotes

[1] The Taa language features in a chapter in A Book of Noises on Onomatopoeia.

[2] Sounds of melting ice feature in the Climate Change chapter of A Book of Noises.