Costa Rica sound effects
29 October 2009

As Matt and Lilian find their feet in Costa Rica, the sounds that surround them couldn't be more authentic, as Archers senior producer Julie Beckett explains.



I came back from some summer leave to the surprising news that Matt and Lilian were going to spend some time in Costa Rica, and that the programme was going to visit them there. This posed several interesting questions for the production team. What is the weather like at this time of year? What sort of city is San José? How are we going to get authentic sounds for the area where Matt and Lilian were to be staying?

This last question fell to me to solve. We could of course have seen what was available in the sound effects archive, and indeed we did have a look. What was there was limited. Better by far, we thought, would be to have some recordings made by someone on the spot, who could get us just what we needed.

Doing this is not always easy. Archers broadcast assistant Susannah Wilson got on the case, phoning the Central American office at the World Service. They were very helpful, and Susannah found herself picking up the phone to call Carlos Amador in Costa Rica on the same day. His colleague Elda Brizuela was soon on the phone. She has excellent English, having lived in Bristol in recent years, during which time she had of course listened to The Archers!

I put together a list of the sounds we would ideally like to hear, and Carlos and Elda made their way around the city and the airport, recording for us. So the airport when Matt and Lilian arrive is the real San José airport, and the sounds around the city are all authentic too. They recorded flocks of urban birds (and listed them all for us - see below), the bar in a smart hotel, traffic, café chat, street atmosphere, and some lovely church bells for Sunday.

They also advised us on the reactions of tourists to creepy crawlies, the differences in the observance of the Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead) in Costa Rica in comparison to Mexico, and the level of rainfall that we might expect at the tail end of the rainy season in the central plain where San José stands. All of this by email - which gave the whole thing a most exciting immediacy.

Once they had finished and edited their recordings, Elda and Carlos started sending tracks to me at my desk at the Mailbox in Birmingham. It was all very well for me, since it was a sensible time to be at work. For Elda and Carlos, by the time we had finished, it was three o'clock in the morning.

I was listening to the tracks as they came in, one by one. My favourites are the church bell, the distant yapping dog in the street (wouldn't like to live next to him!), the rolling thunder, and the marvelously evocative birds.

Throughout the whole project, Elda and Carlos were cheerful and helpful, and by the end of it all I had moved from knowing very little about Costa Rica except that it was a magnet for wildlife tourism, to hearing the intimate sounds of city life only hours after it had been recorded.

So when you do hear the story unfolding, keep an ear out for the voices, and the traffic, and the birds of San José. That's while you're concentrating on a gripping and exciting story, of course.

Oh - and those birds. These are the species they recorded:

Quiscalus nicaraguensis (Zanate)
Turdus grayi (yiguirro, Costa Rican national bird)
Zonotrichia capensis (Comemaiz)
Pitangus sulphuratus (Bienteveo grande)
Saltator maximus (Saltador gorgianteado)
Zenaida asiatica (paloma aliblanca)

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