On 12th and 19th of May I held the first two workshops. The aim is to share the insights from research with makers of spatial audio journalism and make a difference to the audio production community.

Participants completed a questionnaire before and after and I’ll follow up with them in a few months to see if they’ve adopted spatial audio in their work and if not, what barriers remain.

These attendees were an amazing group of people – creative and innovative, all experienced in different fields of work and it made me aware how large and diverse the audio production sector is. Some already knew about spatial audio but not necessarily how to put it to work on interviews or reporting.

In workshop 1 we tried out two techniques for a simple binaural uplift to pretty standard production in factual audio – speech with some atmospheric location sound and interviewing one or more people.

They then discussed how they could use binaural in their own work, and planned a test recording to share with the group by the next workshop.

In workshop two everyone fed back on this and then broke into groups to share knowledge and ideas from their own work. Then generated a series of binaural project ideas.

Finally, we provided some suggestions to get ideas commissioned or funded and a selection will be pitched to BBC radio in June.

The main thing I learned

…was the first two workshops were a bit rushed at two hours each. I thought busy producers would find it easier to commit to something short. But it’s still basically most of a morning spoken for, so next time, they’ll be three hours so give the activities more time to breathe and more time to hear from the participants, who had a lot of interesting insights and advice for each other.

What next?

A network. The first cohort were keen to keep in touch with each other and form a longer term network for collaboration and support, so I’m looking at the best way to do that – either a new network or maybe joining a bigger established network.

More training. I’m now organising the second pair of pilot workshops for July. And thereafter I want to find a sustainable way to roll out this training and expand on it.