Country Lanes

In common with many rural parts of the UK, Cornwall's countryside look much more peaceful than it feels if you walk or cycle. A cyclist is almost twice as likely to be killed on a rural road than an urban street. This binaural audio documentary uses spatial sound to encourage an visceral understanding of what it feels like to cycle on rural roads and what's holding back change.

The radio/podcast sector has been investing in spatial audio for factual programmes but my work (2020, 2021, 2023, 2026) shows spatial audio’s potential is still not exploited fully. It can be seen as inconvenient and intimidating, not helped by the fact that research has almost entirely been done in the field of audio engineering, which is of course not concerned with editorial or narrative questions of journalism and documentary-making. Factual narrative audio is further held back by its under-developed craft vocabulary (McHugh, 2024; Hilmes, 2018; Abgrall, 2023), which makes it hard for programme-makers to justify experimentation with new technology and to share the results through teaching and training.
This audio documentary is one output of an E3-funded secondment at the Centre for Blended Realities (2025-26) that addresses this issue. It draws on my ethnographic studies of factual audio programme-makers’ concepts of space and story, begun in the Spatial Audio Journalism Project (2019-), continued in the Leverhulme-funded Craft of Audio Storytelling project (2024-25) and expanded during this secondment (2025-26). Through this work I have developed craft concepts relating to space and story, trialling these in workshops and experimenting with them through making a series of test features on mobility in rural areas. This output is one of these features: Country Lanes, a full-length audio documentary. I used ambisonics, binaural, mono and conventional stereo to develop a story as a series of spaces, in which the listener is immersed, to encourage an experiential understanding of the issues of contemporary life in rural and small-town spaces, as well as an informational understanding that comes through the spoken word. Much contemporary use of spatial sound avoids both any lack of clarity of speech sounds, and above all else, listener discomfort (Wincott, 2023). However in this documentary I attempt to immerse the listener in an uncomfortable subject-position of someone walking in heavy small-town traffic, and cycling among heavy and fast-moving rural traffic. The documentary also uses a range of other distinct aural spaces to progress the story, including that of a local café, a town hall meeting and the inside of a moving SUV, and a range of different transition types are used to move the listener from space to space, techniques likewise identified through ethnographic and textual analyses of the three phases of my research (2019-present) identified above.

References:
Abgrall, G. (2023) ‘Faire émerger les choix formels dans l’écriture des formats radiophoniques : une méthode pour analyser, transmettre et faire évoluer les pratiques d’un art combinatoire’ Radiomorphoses issue 9. https://doi.org/10.4000/radiomorphoses.3634
Hilmes, M. (2018) ‘Interpreting Radio: Culture in Sound and the Role of Media Studies’. New review of film and television studies 16(4), 420–5.
McHugh, S. (2024) The Invisible Art of Audio Storytelling. In Michelle Hilmes and Andrew J. Bottomly, The Oxford Handbook of Radio and Podcasting.
Wincott, A., Martin, J. and Richards, I. (2020) Spatial awareness: State of the art and future needs of spatial audio journalism. https://spatialaudiojournalism.home.blog/services/
Wincott, A., Martin, J. and Richards, I. (2021) ‘Telling stories in soundspace: placement, embodiment and authority in immersive audio journalism’. Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 19(2). https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00048_1
Wincott, A. (2023) ‘Un bon voyage sonore: Avoiding listener discomfort in immersive audio documentary’. Journal of Radio and Audio Media 31(2) https://doi.org/10.1080/19376529.2023.2225062
Wincott, A. (2026) ‘Why don’t more journalists and documentary makers use spatial audio? Barriers to sonic experimentation in contemporary radio and podcast production cultures,’ Radio Journal: International Studies in Broadcast & Audio Media 23(2) DOI https://doi.org/10.1386/rjao_00121_1