Past Sounds

A familiar sound from the past is like a time machine – it can take you right back – just for a flash of a second to a moment in your past. But can we get the same powerful sense of time travel further back in time? Can we travel to other people’s pasts through sound? In this podcast series we meet the researchers uncovering the lost sounds of the past and discover that all sorts of long ago sound is recorded… If you know where to look. Each week Abigail Wincott interviews the people who do know where to look, researchers who piece together long ago sounds, from prehistoric South India through the Renaissance school room to life as a slave in the American South. All of these projects to reconstruct the sounds of the past can tell us something important about real people’s experiences, and they can also tell us about ourselves and our world today. Insights that we often miss when we look but don’t listen.