1. Let Those Bugs Sing
The Essay celebrates the musicality and noise of our insect singers. 1. Let Those Bugs Sing. Writer and musician David Rothenberg wonders what the insect singers have taught us.
The Essay celebrates the musicality and noise of our insect singers. 1. Let Those Bugs Sing.
Long before the first birds took to the sky, katydids and crickets filled the air with their sonorous stridulations. The sound of summer and autumn is one of vibrating tymbals, chirps, trills, xits, tsips and kreeeeeaks! Katydids, Crickets, Cicadas. Now we can listen very carefully to a blade of grass and enter a near-secret world of vibrating treehoppers. Writer and musician David Rothenberg has long been fascinated our relationship with all this noise and explores how insects taught us to love rhythm.
'This is the music of the world, going back millions of years. We evolved in the midst of these sounds and that counts for something'
Producer Mark Burman
All Music by David Rothenberg and insect companions. Bug music 2013, Secret Songs of Ponds 2024
Insect recordings courtesy of Wil Hershberger, Charlie Woodrow and Rex Cocroft
A Storyscape production for 麻豆社 Radio 3
Last on
Broadcast
- Yesterday 21:45麻豆社 Radio 3
Featured in...
![]()
Attenborough at 100
Celebrating the life & work of Britain's amazing environmentalist and naturalist at 100.
Death in Trieste
A 1760s murder still informs ideas about aesthetics, a certain sort of sex, and death.
Watch: My Deaf World
Five compelling experiences of what it is like to be deaf in 21st-century Britain.
The Book that Changed Me
Five figures from the arts and science introduce books that changed their lives and work.
Podcast
-
![]()
The Essay
Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.
