Hamish Sewell runs Soundtrails, and has been closely associated with WLC from the very beginning, serving on the Advisory Board and SWS Grand Jury from 2020 to 2022. His piece Portland: The Town That Built Sydney is shortlisted for the SWS23 Awards.

Hi, my name is Hamish Sewell and I’m a director with the Soundtrails locative audio app. We’ve just launched the Soundtrails Academy, and I thought I’d write a little about how this came to be.

From ABC Radio Features to Mobile App Development

I have come to the world of locative audio/audio AR from radio documentary making and oral history. In 2011 my former company, The Story Project, ran here in Australia a series of community oral history projects based on the US StoryCorps model of audio recordings. Around this time we built a sound walk platform to showcase a range of the voices, sounds and stories that we’d captured in the small Australian regional town of Uralla. With the goodwill of the community and the rights to use the recordings, the first Soundtrail was launched. 

After five months of camping out at a friend’s place, and reworking the material, I was determined that these voices should be heard on site. Twenty people listening on the street meant more to me than any national broadcast. It still does. Twelve years after we started, with hundreds of GPS activated stories out there now, I believe in the power of listening on site more than ever. It’s about connecting places to people and meaning, building a sense of belonging through the stories we share which are in turn shaped by the places and communities around us. 

An Audio Walk Production House and Platform rolled into one

The Story Project set me off on a quest for a producer friendly no-code audio walk platform that had people and their stories at the heart. Luck led me to several developers living nearby in Queensland who took this on, and from out of which the Soundtrails initiative was born. An Audio Walk production house and platform rolled into one.

By 2021 Soundtrails had evolved to Sound Trails Pty Ltd and with Bettina Walter as a new co-director we embarked on a major platform redevelopment – making the Soundtrails Builder more user friendly and adding better administration functionality.

My background in producing radio features has helped inform the shape of the app and its development. As creatives and as teachers too the app serves us well. A big part of our focus has been to develop a simple and sustainable audio walk platform on which creatives and listeners can focus on the storied experience. 

The fact that Soundtrails can layer GPS audio fields together and deep dive us into the storied sound world around us, presents one the most exciting approaches to building audio walks today. As a way to contribute back to the audio community and to share the skills and excitement that led us here, we have developed the Soundtrails Academy.

Celebrating the Art and Craft of Audio Walk Creation

The Soundtrails Academy is a tool for teachers and their students who want to learn to create audio walks. Just as a novel or a podcast or a radio documentary has its own conventions, its paragraphs or plot lines, so too does building a compelling audio walk have its own rules. From planning the idea, engaging with communities to designing content and the route, to producing the audio, uploading and testing it on the streets, or even considering publishing a professional audio walk.

Much of what you can learn in the Academy is platform agnostic. Some of it is Soundtrails specific, especially when we get to practise on the platform and learn e.g. how to place the audio onto the map.

From the nuts and bolts of building an audio walk, to broader structural questions around things like authorship and ownership: these are just a few of the questions that organisations, teachers and students will find themselves along the way and which the Soundtrails Academy and the teaching modules address. 

So as you can probably read, the Soundtrails Academy means a lot to me as  a passionate advocate of the art and craft of building audio walks.

So, download the Soundtrails app and drive out to Myall Creek in north west NSW, arguably Australia’s most significant massacre site, and you’ll hear what we mean: from the newspapers of the day in 1838 that were skewed heavily against bringing the murderers to justice: sound footage from the yearly service, voices of the descendants of the perpetrators, voices of descendents of the victims, senior Kamilaroi elders who have now passed away. While returning such voices and stories back onto Country is meaningful for us, we also know there are many approaches to building a compelling audio walk and that the creative palette for audio walk producers has many colours.

In closing I wish you a great 2024 and when you have a moment I’d love it if you’d check out the Soundtrails Academy.