“Often, Steven sat in the middle of the children, looking out on the blue of the rippling, writhing ocean and the peninsula of palm trees that stretched into it a few miles down. He felt the beat of his own heart in his chest and it seemed to play into the rhythm of the water in front of him. That heartbeat, and the faint electrical current that fuzzed steadily beneath his eyes, making him slightly queasy; that was the soundtrack of Mexico for him.”

This passage is taken from ‘Latido One’, the first in a set of three stories by writer and artist Louise Stern, written specially for Radio 4. For me, it encapsulates what the series is about. Latido (Spanish for heartbeat) goes out on consecutive Fridays at 3.45 pm – and available on iPlayer thereafter – starting on Friday, 12 July.*

I first worked with Louise last year when she contributed ‘The Electric Box’ – a brooding piece in which tensions surface at a Fourth of July family barbecue – for our series Where Were You … She’d been on the air before, a few stories from her first collection Chattering went out in 2010, but this was her first bespoke work for radio. It was only afterwards that we felt this wasn’t entirely mainstream. Why? Louise is a fine writer, period: but she happens to be deaf from birth.

We wanted to do more, and met up several times last summer and autumn. At this stage, we hadn’t so much established a concept or a writer’s brief as come up with areas of exploration. Namely, the internalised ‘soundtrack’ of the profoundly deaf, and Louise’s personal passion for Mexico.

Your beating heart

This was the easy bit, of course. Louise then wintered in Mexico and got on with the hard bit of conceiving and writing the thing. The result is Latido. All three stories are set in a Mexican village and each one features a deaf central character. The heartbeat leitmotif reprises in all three tales. And none of it gets in the way of some very good storytelling. In ‘Latido One’, a deaf foreigner gets on the wrong side of the one man in the village who will not accept him. ‘Two’ takes us onto the ocean with a deaf member of a fishing crew. ‘Three’ starts out as a ‘quiet’ observational, atmospheric piece, only to turn into a story of sexual betrayal and revenge.

As a writer, Louise has a natural sensuality, an ability to zoom in on her subjects like a child in the garden with a magnifying glass and, above all, a sense of ‘otherness’ that we were keen to replicate in the recording studio. Louise Brealey (known to some of you as ‘Molly’ in Sherlock) reads all three stories and gives us this, I think. Sadly, Louise (Stern) won’t hear the stories, but she did come to the recording with her long-time interpreter Oliver Pouliot and gave us many useful steers during the day.

Sound and silence go hand in hand, of course, and we had one or two ideas for post-production. There are moments of soundscape throughout the series – in ‘One’ Louise has effectively written one in the opening pages – and the noises come from a variety of sources. There’s music by Chavela Vargas and J.J. Cale; effects from sound-man Jon Calver’s library and some wild-track recorded in ‘Louise’s village’ in Mexico by Sophie Pierozzi. And then there’s ‘the heartbeat’ – occurring at varying speeds under moments of particular excitement or stress in the characters – that Jon has ‘felt’ like a jazz virtuoso.

Cum On Feel The Noize

Ultimately, all radio programmes have to work on a variety of devices, and I hope you enjoy Latido whether you listen on DAB, mobile, TV, vintage portable Roberts on long wave or a 1940s wireless where the Home Service is west of Hilversum on the dial. But, if you happen to be able to listen through big speakers, crank it up loud and put your hand against one. Mostly, you’ll feel the lovely vibrations of Louise Brealey’s voice, but keep it there for long enough and, at certain times, you’ll feel the latido, the heartbeat, too.

* A transcript of each programme will be published on the Radio 4 website directly after broadcast.