Ancient Romans used the word "Numina" to describe the divine spirit of a particular place.
This program was all music intimately connected to a particular place.
The tracks played were:
1. In A Beautiful Place Out In the Country by Boards of Canada
2. New Light At Thornborough by the Xenis Emputae Traveling Band
3. Journeys On The Winds Of Time by Alan Lamb.
4. Children by Tony Schwartz
5. Vihuela and Wolf Pack #1 by Jim Nollman
6. Warminster 4 by The Mt. Vernon Arts Lab
7. Camp 2 - World Music On The Radio by Geir Jenssen
8. Earth's Magnetic Field by Charles Dodge
Some notes on the pieces: the Alan Lamb piece was a recording of the wind vibrating miles of telegraph wires in Western Australia. A very good article on Alan Lamb's work can be found here.
Norweigian Geir Jenssen is better known in the music world by the name Biosphere. In addition to being a composer of ambient electronic music, Jenssen is an accomplished mountain climber. The piece we heard was recorded at the top of one of the highest mountains in the word, Cho Oyu in Tibet. You can learn more about his work here.
It has been said that "Earth's Magnetic Field" by Charles Dodge was actually composed by the planet itself. Dodge created it by mapping data from the Earth's magnetic field data to a four octave span, or 45 notes. The piece was realized using Digital Audio Converters that Bell Laboratories was developing in the late 1950's. You can read more about it here.
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