Issue 0

Hi friends and colleagues,

Welcome to Sounds Gut. An occasional newsletter from me about what I'm working on, what I'm listening to, and the experiments I'm running at the intersection of sound, technology, AI and culture. You are included in this newsletter because i’d like to stay in touch and thought you might find it interesting and, hopefully, useful to hear about what i’m up to and my recent discoveries. The newsletter will land in your inbox quarterly (issue 1 to come in June) and if it's not for you there's an unsubscribe link at the bottom, no hard feelings at all.

Here’s a brief update and what to expect in general with future editions:

BBC Radio 3 ‘Between the Ears' episode this Sunday

On Sunday 24 May at 8pm CET, I have an episode for BBC Radio 3's Between the Ears airing. Tides of Sound is about St Giga, the Japanese satellite radio station that broadcast from 1991 with no news, no ads, no DJs. Just an unbroken flow of music, field recordings, commissioned poetry, and tide announcements, with programming built not around a schedule but around the tides. It's both a documentary about the station and an attempt to recreate the experience of actually listening to it.

You can listen live internationally at bbc.co.uk/radio3. If you are in the UK you can listen to the on demand version here from after the broadcast this Sunday. Unfortunately BBC Sounds no longer streams on demand outside the UK. If you're international and want a private link to hear it afterwards, just reply to this email and I'll sort you out.

What I'm doing

I'm now working freelance. My work spans production and executive production, creative strategy, project management, and business development. It increasingly sits at the edge of AI and creativity, building websites, creative presentations, and interactive prototypes for clients. I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months learning a variety of AI tools, how to create with them, building out my own ideas, where and when they are useful versus being a distraction and thinking about ways to incorporate them into daily work flow for individuals and corporate structures. I’ve invested a lot of time into the likes of Claude Code/CoWork/Design, Eleven Labs, Runway, Open Claw, Clay and generally using Claude to run scripts and do work in the background for me. I’m open to sharing this research and experience as part of my freelance offerings. More on my profile at benfawkes.com which I built with Claude in under 3 hours.

I'm also working with the team at Mira to help grow their business. Mira is a smart knowledge-capture platform. Experts record themselves doing a process on their phone, and AI automatically turns it into structured, multilingual, interactive guides that anyone in an organisation can access and ask questions of. It's particularly powerful for companies whose critical know-how lives in the heads of a variety of people in all capacities. So far it has been used successfully in the manufacturing industry but it is potentially relevant in all manner of areas from agriculture, pharmaceutical to real estate and insurance. If that sounds relevant to your world, let me know.

Experiments in progress

The first proper issue of Sounds Gut (coming end of June) will go into these in more detail, but here's what's currently on the workbench:

More on all of this soon.

What i’m listening to…

NTS Guide to Music from Japan’s CD Era Electronic Underground

Many 6 hour St Giga broadcasts that can be found on Youtube - this link is just one of them

Seismo from upsammy and Valentina Magaletti

Baltimore from Nina Simone

Diamond Jubilee from Cindy Lee - an album I will put on and often ended up letting run for the full 2 hours

Thanks for taking the time to read this. Always happy to hear from anyone if so inclined. And of course please unsubscribe if this is not for you.