Sophie Scott presented 2017 Royal Institution Christmas Lectures

Sophie Scott gave this years's  Royal Institution Christmas lectures on doing standup comedy and why rats laugh. 

Founded in 1825, the Royal Institution’s (Ri) CHRISTMAS LECTURES engage children and young adults in scientific research with live demonstrations and involving experiments led by the experts. The Lectures were first broadcast in 1936, making them both the world’s oldest science series and a popular annual British Christmas tradition. The Ri’s CHRISTMAS LECTURES are broadcast on BBC Four and produced by Windfall Films.

In her lectures, Sophie Scott is joined in the theatre by a chorus of chirping crickets, hissing cockroaches and groaning deer to reveal the very different ways that animals have adapted their bodies to send audible messages that are vital to their species. She also explores how and why the human voice evolved to become the most versatile sound producer in the natural world. In a dramatic experiment Professor Scott reveals how our vocal cords can open and close more than a thousand times a second and how we can use our throats for breathing, eating and communicating. Sophie Scott demonstrates what sound actually is and how it travels, not just through air, but water and solid materials. Unpacking the power behind sound, she uses it to shatter glass and reveal how the human body can resonate in a way that amplifies our voices to send our messages further. She also explores how different species use very different frequencies to communicate and why humans can only hear a fraction of these animal messages. Professor Scott investigates why our voices all sound very different, to the degree that we all have unique vocal prints. She also looks at how computers are learning to recognise these. She further shows how we have developed the biological functions that enable us to create such incredible noises - from the arias of an opera singer to the complex sounds of a beatboxer.

You can watch the Christmas Lectures online until 25th January 2018 on BBC iPlayer.