Sounds Interesting

Our connection with sound is deep and fanciful, scientific, social, psychological, cultural, even spiritual, sometimes mysterious, often surprising, but always fascinating. Join hosts Peter Boisseau and Gabriel Hutchcraft on a journey of curiosity inspired by personal experience and real-life events. Listen here or wherever you find your podcasts, and please subscribe, it's free!

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Sound design: Brian Garbet

Theme music: Playdate

Logo Graphic: Niki DeGoey heyniki.ca

Sounds from Beyond

Pete and Gabe share ghostly recordings from the reputedly haunted Merritt House in St. Catharines, ON., as they investigate electronic voice phenomena (EVPs). These sounds captured on electronic recordings are interpreted as spirit voices by ghost hunters and parapsychologists.

The house was built in 1860 for William Merritt and his family to replace a previous house that burned down.

Merritt House has served multiple purposes throughout its history, including as a convalescent home for soldiers, an inn, and a radio station, which it remains today.

A series of tunnels connecting the house to Twelve Mile Creek were rumored to be used for the Underground Railroad and during Prohibition.

The EVPs were captured between 2001 and 2004.

Special thanks to Haunted Hamilton and lead investigators Daniel Cumerlato, Stephanie Leichniak and psychics Michele Hewer and Kate Dejonge.

Mozart & Michele

In the amazing and emotional origin story of the podcast, Peter reveals the very personal reasons he is so curious about sound, and how his wife’s battle with epilepsy began a journey of loss and recovery that inspired the creation of Sounds Interesting.

Using a combination of personal narrative and interviews, Mozart & Michele tells a remarkable and moving story.

As a Black woman living with epilepsy, Michele is determined to overcome the barriers and prejudices she deals with every day on her own terms. As she navigates a dizzying array of medications as well as pressure to submit to risky brain surgery, she turns to music as a refuge from her epileptic seizures.

For more than 12 years, Peter witnesses her struggles and shares her joys as they create a soundtrack for their life.

In an incredible turn of events, the healing power of music becomes part of a series of life-and-death questions for Peter, who is relying solely on intuition as he searches for a musical formula to bring his wife back from a coma caused by a seizure.

Only the answers are even more astounding as years later, a still-grieving Peter has a chance meeting with the authors of a new study suggesting listening to Mozart can help reduce seizures. They become guests on a new podcast inspired by these real-life events, a show about sound and its curious powers.

The Curious Case of the Rendlesham Tape

Peter, Shyloe and Gabe hear startling revelations as they compare two UFO incidents, 40 years apart, both involving the U.S. Air Force, where audio recordings may be the most important part of the evidence.

The show opens with a sizzle reel of astounding audio recordings made nearly 40 years apart; one in the woods of Rendlesham Forest in the U.K. in 1980 and the others by fighter jet pilots encountering UFOs that were released by the Pentagon in 2021.

The events in Rendlesham Forest were captured by U.S. Air Force Col. Charles Halt, deputy base commander of RAF Bentwaters, near Woodbridge, Suffolk using a handheld recorder. The remarkable 18 minutes of audio allows listeners to hear in real-time Halt leading a group of military police and soldiers from the base as they search the woods of nearby Rendlesham Forest for signs of a crashed aircraft, only to encounter something that seems otherworldly instead.

Stunningly, the encounter, the tape recording and Halt’s subsequent report – the now famous Halt Memo – were largely ignored the U.S. military, who passed the incident off to their counterparts at the U.K. Ministry of Defence.

Sounds Interesting interviews Halt and plays his hair-raising original audio recordings as he details how he naively trusted his superiors, only to be betrayed. He confesses that the UFO encounter still haunts him.

We also hear from Nick Pope, a former civilian investigator with the ministry who examined the case and concluded the audiotape was a very important part of the evidence.

Pope also compares the Pentagon’s handling of the jetfighter cockpit recordings to the way they treated Halt and his taped evidence.

The Pentagon has been widely lauded for showing “transparency” for releasing the fighter jet recordings, and admitting they have no idea what the pilots encountered.

But Canadian researcher and ufologist Chris Rutkowski – who has donated more than 30,000 of his UFO investigation files to the University of Manitoba – shares a startling revelation in his interview about the Pentagon transparency theory.

The Curious Case of the Rendlesham Tape is a real whodunit played out in sound that will leave you asking: What do your ears believe?

Sounds from Outer Space (Part 2)

As Shyloe and Pete continue to explore our relationship with space sounds, they encounter the threat of hostile aliens as they probe questions about balancing the quest for exploration and discovery with our moral duty to future generations. This episode includes interviews with Canadian astronaut Jennifer Sidey-Gibbons, SETI researcher and York University professor Kathryn Denning and Bryan Gaensler, author of Extreme Cosmos and director of the Dunlap Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at the University of Toronto.