Sound artist for ‘Hidden in the Landscape’ - a binaural guided audio walk around Cromwell Bottom nature reserve
Overview
‘Hidden in the Landscape’ is a 50 minute wheel-chair accessible binaural audio walk (for headphone listening) exploring the history and ecology of one of Calderdale’s most important wildlife sites, Cromwell Bottom. It is a production by Northern Broadsides Theatre, Halifax, commissioned as part of Calderdale Year of Culture, 2025.
I was the sound artist and designer for the project, covering all elements of its creation, and its delivery via the Go Button app.
We ran the walk as a guided event in March 2025:
Walking through the old hay meadow where (once common but now disappeared) corncrakes can be heard, a Six Spot Burnet Moth tells her story, and the invasive New Zealand Pygmy weed slurps through the water.
Stopping to hear what’s going on at the pond: Frogs and water beetles are busy, a family is pond-dipping, but maybe also the mystical Iron Woman is lurking not too far away….
We have now reconfigured ‘Hidden in the Landscape’ so individuals visiting Cromwell Bottom can experience it on their own, using their mobile phones:
Creating the walk
Poems and story scenes written by the community, and natural history narrative from a local expert, formed the vocal elements of the walk. Having recorded these I sound-designed each poem, scene or narrative clip, weaving voices with field recordings, found sounds and music I composed especially for the walk.
Listeners are taken back in time to the Victorian era to hear textile mills in full operation, navvys building canals, recreational boaters on the River Calder, and Sarah, a ghost-child (who drowned in the weir), speaking with a fairground fortune teller. A landfill site, which has undergone reclamation in recent years to a grassy meadow, comes back into full operation with workers, diggers and rubbish. At the site’s lagoon one encounters the harsh sounds of machinery extracting thousands of tonnes of fly-ash dumped from a local power station, then the present day ambience, busy with birdlife (e.g. coots, moorhens, geese, willow warblers) that has returned since the lagoon’s restoration. A long ‘list poem’ set to music makes for a relaxing walk along a willow bordered path, with listeners introduced to the species of birds, insects, mammals and amphibians it is possible to encounter on the site.
To create a sense of really being in those different spaces and scenes I worked with binaural sound, making many of the recordings using my DIY binaural head. Where this was not possible I employed a binaural plug-in within my digital audio workstation to create the sense of things happening all around you, within a 3D space.
Collecting binaural sound for Hidden in the Landscape
I also used a range of other microphones, capturing more intimate sounds that cannot be heard by the human ear, but that allow for the creation of interesting sound-worlds.
Hydrophone recordings
Contact mic recordings on bridge infrastructure
Editing the walk within my audio workstation involved working with over 170 tracks of audio. Iterations of the walk were tested several times on site, before uploading a final set of files to the Go Button app, for transmission to audience members via silent disco headphones.
A snapshot of the project being built with a Logic Pro
The walk, imported as a series of audio files into Go Button, for triggered playback.
Audience feedback
This is what listeners said about the experience:
