Immersive Audio Catalogue
Immersive Binaural Audio
Programmes under 15 minutes
Pod Plays
- Drama Shorts
- Listening Time: 4 to 6 minutes
Are you trying binaural audio for the first time? In that case, these five mini-plays offer an excellent introduction to the potential of immersive 360 degree sound.
Each story is set in specific and familiar locations: the bedroom, the bathroom, the pub and the living room – but the journeys they take you on are bizarre, funny, touching, scary and literally out of this ordinary world.
So put on your headphones, laugh, cry and let your imagination go boom!
Kidnapped
- Drama
- Listening Time: 14 mins
Put your headphones on, close your eyes, and allow the 3D binaural audio to immerse you in a kidnapping!
This binaural documentary-drama experience focuses on two true but very different abduction stories; one without long-lasting consequences, the other devastatingly fatal.
Kidnapped places the listener in the victim's place, giving you the experience of being abducted through the power of binaural surround sound - and questions if we are blind to the possible risks in our everyday lives.
This audio experience featured as part of BBC Radio 4's New Storytellers series, featuring the five winners of the Charles Parker Prize for the Best Student Radio Feature. Kidnapped was produced by Harry Stokoe, a student at the University of Salford at the time.
Programmes under 30 minutes
Slow Radio
- Music and Documentary
- Listening Time: 15 to 30 minutes
Slow Radio from BBC Radio 3 is an antidote to today's frantic world. Each episode of fifteen minutes to half an hour long and features binaural sounds of the natural world.
So put your headphones on, let go and immerse yourself: it's time to go slow and try two episodes of Slow Radio our catalogue:
From Dada to the Stars
An intimate, breath-close binaural portrait of the intoxicating Indian city of Mumbai.
Armistice Sonic Memorials
Featuring sounds of battlefields across the world today – from the Somme to the USA, and Afghanistan to Vietnam.
If you enjoy listening to these Slow Radio episodes, there are over 80 more slow sound experiences to discover via BBC Sounds, Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
DEADHOUSE
- Horror/Drama
- Listening Time: 20 to 30 minutes
If you like original horror, you'll love this terrifying trilogy of immersive audio horror stories from BBC Radio 4 and immersive event specialists Darkfield.
Each of the three episodes: BETHLEHEM, SALEM and XANADU take a different look at the separation of mind and body - using binaural sound to place you in the centre of disorientating environments that feel unnervingly real.
To experience these episodes to full effect, put on your headphones, lay down in a dark room, close your eyes and be transported into strange, frightening and otherworldly scenes. Listen as your familiar environments slip away, to be replaced by other, mindbending scenarios designed to challenge your fears around mortality, morality and the unknown.
Not for the fainthearted!
WARNING: Contains strong language, violence and upsetting scenes.
Forest 404
- Original Drama
- Listening Time: 24 minutes
Listen to the first episode of Forest 404, an immersive sci-fi thriller starring Pearl Mackie, Tanya Moodie and Pippa Haywood – with original music by Bonobo.
Set in the 24th century, after a data crash called The Cataclysm, this first episode introduces us to Pan, a young woman with a boring job sorting and deleting old sound files that survived the crash. Amongst them she uncovers a set of sound recordings of rainforests from the early 21st – places which no longer exist. The sounds haunt Pan and she feels compelled to hunt down the truth about how the forests of the old world died.
This drama series will provoke you to imagine the world we know today as a thing of the ancient past - using the sound of the Sumatran Rainforest, the songs of whales and a chorus of frogs - to create an immersive soundscape of natural world environments, mixed in binaural audio for an atmospheric 3D headphone experience.
Sound of Wales
- Documentary
- Listening Time: 28 minutes
Discover the nation of Wales through sound in this unique St David's Day listening experience.
Listen on your headphones to calls of seals on a Pembrokeshire beach; a miner's memories of the lost sounds of the colliery; a climber describing the reflection of sound off rock; and the streets of Cardiff on Six Nations match day.
Presenter Hugh Huddy travels the length and breadth of Wales, discovering the nation through sound. Using innovative 3D spatial audio recording technology, he shares some of the sonic treasures of Wales's landscapes - natural, industrial and urban.
Iceland's Dark Lullabies
- Documentary
- Listening Time: 28 minutes
At the darkest time of the year in Iceland scary creatures come out to play.
Storyteller Andri Snær Magnason used to be terrified by his grandmother's Christmas tales of Gryla the 900 year old child eating hag and her 13 troll sons - the Yule Lads - who would come down from the mountains looking for naughty children in the warmth of their homes. These dark lullabies partly hark back to a pre-Christian Christmas when people worshipped the Norse gods.
As Iceland opens up to global influences after centuries of isolation Andri travels from farmstead to lava field and reflects on these traditions: whether the elves still crash your house to throw a Christmas party or the cows still talk on New Year's Eve; and what happens when you have to spend Christmas alone, locked inside Ikea?
NHS Symphony
- Arts Documentary
- Listening Time: 30 minutes
The patterns and flows of life in the NHS are captured in immersive stereo. Listen as this episode takes you into the maternity unit at Birmingham's Heartlands Hospital, where the heart rate of an unborn child gives cause for concern. Across town at Queen Elizabeth Hospital, patients with critical heart conditions are being closely monitored hour by hour. At the same time, downstairs in A&E, staff begin their shift not knowing what awaits them.
The NHS Symphony is recorded in binaural stereo which simulates how the human ear hears sounds. The Bach Choir are joined by members of the Barts Choir, the Lewisham & Greenwich NHS Choir and the Royal Free Music Society Choir.
Give Me Space Below My Feet
- Spoken Word
- Listening Time: 30 minutes
Is it possible to take 93-year-old mountaineer Gwen Moffat climbing again? Can Helen Mort recreate the sensation through an original poem and binaural sound? In a new poetry commission, Helen Mort picks up the gauntlet with an original poem and recorded in binaural sound to once again give Gwen the sense of teetering on the edge of a rock face, wind whistling past as her fingers reach for the contours to pull her higher…
Programmes over 45 minutes
The Shepherd
- Drama Adaptation
- Listening Time: 45 minutes
Put on your headphones and be whisked back in time to Christmas Eve, 1957, where a young RAF pilot is alone in the cockpit of his Vampire on his way home from Germany. Flying over the North Sea, the radio goes dead....
Written as a Christmas present, Frederick Forsyth's gripping and much-loved ghost story is a moving reflection on loneliness, fear, gratitude and sacrifice.
The soundscape features specially recorded a cappella pieces, improvised sounds and mouth/body percussion by the Saint Martin Singers. It also includes symbolic sound effects using Christmas decorations and Vampire aircraft recordings made at the RAF Museum, London.
Christabel
- Drama Adaptation
- Listening Time: 1 hour 19 minutes
Author Kate Clanchy gives Coleridge's unfinished poem Christabel a contemporary twist in this atmospheric and spellbinding binaural drama featuring poetry, music and voice.
It's lockdown in the Lake District, and siblings Sam and Bella decide to make a podcast of a text being studied for exams, Samuel Taylor Coleridge's unfinished poem Christabel.
Sam, a young performance poet, like Coleridge at the same age, is interested in drugs and what they make you see. Bella - forthright, precious, anxious – like Christabel, has a dog, rather a small one, and the ghost of a mother.
Listen carefully as Sam and Bella take their podcast outside, into woods and a graveyard and encounter another mysterious, romantic element – the lake and the landscape around it.
The Invisible
- Original Drama
- Listening Time: 1 hour 30 minutes
Put on your headphones and settle in for an immersive 3D drama set in a speculative future London.
The Invisible is a drama that imagines a future where everything is digital. El Irving disappeared 17 years ago. When his sister Tor sees him on screen at a protest outside Westminster Abbey, she embarks on a journey that will lead her to the invisible.
The drama addresses the possibility of losing your identity and your legal status because suddenly your citizenship becomes invalid, and how easy is it to fall through the cracks.
Linda Marshall Griffiths is an award-winning radio and stage writer who has written many original dramas.
Richard II
- Drama Adaptation
- Listening Time: 2 hours 14 minutes
Richard II was the first king to insist on being called 'Majesty' and believed in the divine right of kings. In Shakespeare's lyrical play, Richard's folly and the delusion of autocracy bring about his own downfall.
When he banishes Bolingbroke and then confiscates his land and wealth despite warnings, he triggers a chain of events that led to his overthrow and the accession of Bolingbroke as King Henry IV.