Hidden in the Landscape - a binaural guided audio walk around Cromwell Bottom nature reserve
‘Hidden in the Landscape’ is a 2025 production by Northern Broadsides Theatre, Halifax, commissioned as part of Culturedale (Calderdale Year of Culture). It’s a wheel-chair accessible binaural audio walk around one of Calderdale’s most important wildlife sites, co-created with the public, who attended poetry and story-writing workshops inspired by the site’s history and ecology. As the sound designer I worked with spoken-word material from these workshops, collaging this with field recordings, found sounds, narrative and bespoke music to build an immersive binaural experience. I set this up for transmission to Silent Disco headphones via the Go Button phone app. The walk was delivered in March as a guided audio trail and we are currently adapting it so that public visiting the reserve can experience it independently, using their own mobile phones.
The walk was one element of Northern Broadsides ‘Iron People’ - a project inspired by the environmental message in Ted Hughes’ The Iron Man and The Iron Woman stories. ‘Iron People’ and has been nominated in the "Excellence in Sustainability" category at this year’s UK Theatre Awards.
Walking through the old hay meadow
Stopping to hear what’s going on at the pond
Scroll through the comments below from walk participants:
Photos from the production phase including on-site recording with a binaural head, a hydrophone in a stream, and contact mics on a metal bridge.
Audio files were designed with long fades and loaded into the Go Button app to provide a way of managing different walking / wheeling speeds whilst still providing a seamless listening experience.