How do memories make us who we are? Music and poetry meet neuroscience to seek the answer, with voices and strings woven together to explore the richness and strangeness and beauty that builds from our earliest moments of life. Orkney Camerata String Quintet is joined by soprano Hannah Firth in a work by composer J. Harry Whalley, with speakers Flora Munro and Adam Zeman. The words are by Adam Zeman and Alexander McCall Smith, and the performance is conducted by Peter Nelson.
We hear from time to time of DNA sequencing of the genetic blueprints of living creatures – their genomes. The Darwin Tree of Life Project is taking the work to a whole new level of complete ecosystems and beyond – it's reading the genomes of all findable plants, animals, fungi, and single-celled organisms in Britain, Ireland and surrounding seas. Dr Thomas Mathers of the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge describes how the project works, what's been done so far and what's been learned.
The first transatlantic telegraph cable, via Ireland and Newfoundland, was laid in 1858 – and after a month broke down. It would be seven years before the next attempt, and in the meantime another option was suggested, part overland and part by sea – going via Shetland, Faroe, Iceland and Greenland. The telegraph company commissioned the ideal man for the work – the Orcadian Arctic explorer Dr John Rae. Dr Fleur Ward describes his account of the terrain and the various indigenous communities along the way.
We all talk, and we all hear much background sound through the day – but how often do we actually listen? All too seldom, says Julian Treasure. His five TED talks on the art of speaking and listening have been viewed more than 160 million times. Hearing is something that just happens to us, he says, but listening – that is the most fundamental skill of all, and yet scarcely ever taught.
Imagination, says Prof. Adam Zeman, is something that we all use constantly – “whenever we reminisce about the past or anticipate the future, whenever we plan or daydream, whenever we enter the worlds created by art or science.” He draws on research to show that the human brain is “above all else a creative, imaginative organ – and that we have evolved to share what we imagine.”
After the remarkable achievements of John Rae in the harsh Arctic terrain, his return to the world of Victorian Britain was hard. He had tackled the two great Arctic challenges of the time – the fate of the Franklin expedition and the final link for a Northwest Passage – but his information about the fate of Franklin had led to Lady Franklin destroying his reputation, helped by Charles Dickens. Then Iceberg, the ship he built with a plan to return to the Arctic, foundered in a storm and sank with the loss of all hands. His great-great-grandniece, Alice Jane Hamilton, has written a novel about this time in John Rae’s life, based on the actual events, reconstructing some of the family conversations, and this evening she tells the story of the chain of events that caused his life to fall apart, and how the pieces eventually came back together.
Two years ago the Ness of Brodgar excavations had closed, with the long haul of studying the finds continuing. Then a Ground Penetrating Radar survey of the site showed something totally unexpected – so much so that a small team went back in July to investigate, supported by the Time Team. Site director Nick Card has now had time to take stock of the findings and provide the latest update.
A multimedia one-man show developed by musician and composer Christopher Andrew Maier on the history of the wind-up gramophone and the life of its inventor, Eldridge Reeves Johnson. Labelled at school “too goddamned dumb” for college and put to work in a Philadelphia machine shop, he developed it into a company known worldwide as Victor Talking Machine. He turned the hand-cranked Berliner Gramophone into a spring-driven mass-market product and produced 78 rpm shellac records, with the little dog’s picture, listening to ‘His Master’s Voice’. The show has a seamless video musical backcloth and includes a working 1907 gramophone with vintage discs, from Caruso to the Charleston.
It was Samuel Morse who suggested a transatlantic submarine telegraph link. When the first cable was completed in 1858 flags flew in New York streets and church bells rang. But it soon failed and it was eight years before a new attempt succeeded – using the iron-hulled Great Eastern, the largest ship the world had seen, and a great improvement in cable design masterminded by the physicist William Thomson, later Lord Kelvin. Dr Alan Walker tells a tale of cables, ships and human determination.
It's not only the scale of the Ness of Brodgar that stands out – it’s the sheer quality of the building work. There are piers at intervals in the walls and evidence of flagstone roofs, and cleanly-faced, close-fitting stones that look as fresh as if they had been built today. The craft of building at the Ness, along with what's being learned from detailed study of individual tools, is described by Mark Edmonds, Emeritus Professor at the University of York and Visiting Professor at UHI’s Archaeology Institute.
