James Dobbs produced a sound walk, SENDwalk, around Peel Park, in Manchester, with the help of local children. The walk was debuted at the Spirit of Little Hulton festival.

This work is one of the shortlisted pieces for the Sound Walk September Awards 2025. 
Below, James discusses his work.

SENDwalk began with a deceptively simple question: “How can I make music collaboratively with SEND children?” SEND, if you’re wondering, stands for Special Educational Needs and Disabilities.

Now, back to the question at hand…

I wanted an approach that was tactile, intuitive, and reactive. Given my past experience, my first thought was to make a sound walk. By their very nature, they are reactive, while moving through space, the environment, is both tactile and intuitive. But, I also wanted to take the idea a step further, and I figured that to let the children make the music that would form the walk, would be exactly that.

For this to work, I realised that my approach would have to be, above all else, tactile. Intricate technologies would likelybe lost on an SEND class.
I decided to work with stickers. I used these musical stickers to construct various intriguing games that would result in melodies to be put into the sound walk. Like a variation on Os and Xs where the children are sticking down musical notes. I called it Crotchets and Quavers.

This was not the only approach I followed. Below, you can see another line of thinking I followed; a Rubik’s Cube that spits out melodies (with a toy piano companion), but also, separately, a stave sheet onto which the children placed their stickers.

All of this music that the kids would make, on paper, I would be actually creating using MIDI on my laptop.
This made the experience reactive. Furthermore, this didn’t require any specialist knowledge on their part.
I opted for a fairly neutral, vanilla piano sound for the MIDI exports, and this was to keep things cohesive, simple, and easily understood.

The most novel part of this process occurred when I asked the children where they would like to place their music. This question was met with a bit of collective bemused look, until I explained the context of sound walks, and the Echoes app.
They loved placing their music around their local park and this excitement only grew when we tested the resulting walk. Then, to provide some direction when interacting with the music “curiosities”, I gave out a ‘Quest list’ in the SEND sessions prior to the festival.

In the end, hearing their melodies suddenly come out of a phone led to laughter, surprise (sometimes shock, even), and eureka type moments.

After the initial sessions I did some fine tuning and added some musical glue, to make sure that the walk was ready for the Spirit of Little Hulton festival, where everything I did served as colour between the lines of what the SEND children made.

In order to make the walk more easily understood and accessible I needed something tactile and intuitive that would encourage people to scan a QR code. I settled on hanging QR codes from a door frame and combining them with wind chimes, and this was quite effective in making the participants feel like you were travelling between realms; the doorframe being a portal and the wind chimes being a kind of musical lure.

Here’s a video which encapsulates the whole journey nicely.

The winner and honourable mention of the SWS Awards 2025 will be announced around the start of 2026.