What is the sound of the natural world? For several generations of us, the answer is David Attenborough’s voice, its whispering lilt sing-songing upwards for cuteness and swooping down again for the drama of the hunt – or in more recent years, taking on a grain of anguish as it urges us to conserve what wildlife we have left. The best pictures that the cameras of the time can muster, backed by the sound of Attenborough: this is nature as we have known it for decades.
So there can be only one narrator for Sky Nature’s new series Secret World of Sound, a natural history show in which the audio is more important than the pictures. In between Attenborough’s words, we are invited to listen more closely than we have before, and with the benefit of better sound equipment than has previously existed, to the roars, buzzes, clicks and paw-steps that sharp-eared animals use to find their way and to stay alive. This intriguing idea is, more often than not, successfully executed in an opening episode that concentrates on foraging and hunting – although the task of packaging up some of the world’s most obscure noises and delivering them to us sometimes proves impossible.
