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BBC Radio 3 is a radio channel that started transmitting on the 30th September 1967. It replaced Third Programme.

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Between the Ears

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Factual: Arts, Culture & the Media

Innovative and thought-provoking features on a wide variety of subjects

Innovative and thought-provoking features that make adventurous use of sound and explore a wide variety of subjects. Made by leading radio producers.

Between the Ears: Disequilibrium

Drama: Psychological

Disequilibrium

01/12/2012

BBC Radio 3 - Between the Ears, Disequilibrium

Sound designer Nick Ryan explores the disorientating effects of a balance disorder.

A personal portrait by sound designer Nick Ryan of the disorientating effects of a balance disorder and how they make him confront experiences from his past.

January 2010. Nick Ryan, award-winning sound designer, composer and binaural maven, wakes dizzy, nauseous, destabilized. Despite medication and his GP's assurances, the feeling persists. Nick is working on something intricately difficult and entirely new. He's building a game-world entirely from sound through which players must navigate using only their hearing.

'Disequilibrium' is a meditation on the nature of sound and hearing. It traces Nick's experience of his balance disorder as it morphs his world into a space nearly as alien as the one he's creating. And it explores the process of making a world out of sound and how this work is affected by, and affects, his condition.

With contributions from Cath Le Couteur, Gillian Ryan, Jeremy Corcoran, Paul Bennun, Rahul Kanegaonkar, Rachel Ritchie. The GP is played by Neil Bennun. 

The music featured in the programme includes 'Brain Waves' by Mira Calix and 'As Above so below' by Nick Ryan

With special thanks to the staff of the Balance Clinic, Guys Hospital, and Mira Calix.

Disequilibrium was made by Lisa Gee and Nick Ryan and produced by Jeremy Mortimer

Nick Ryan is a composer and sound designer. He holds top industry awards in technical and creative fields for his unique approach to sound and music for film, radio and TV drama and documentary, interactive media, animation and orchestral composition. In 2004 he received a BAFTA for 'The Dark House', a groundbreaking interactive radio drama that he devised and scored, broadcast live on BBC Radio 4 in September 2003.

Lisa Gee wrote Stage Mum (Arrow 2009, Hutchinson 2008), Friends: Why Men and Women are From the Same Planet (Bloomsbury 2004) and edited Bricks Without Mortar: the selected poems of Hartley Coleridge (Picador 2000). She writes, edits and creates video content about books, music and other cultural stuff for a variety of print and online outlets. She has trained as a sound engineer.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

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