The King's Book: Kirkstall Abbey
Script and spatial audio for a location-based tour of a Cistercian ruin
Lead partner: Immersive Networks
Programme: XR Stories (University of York), OpenXR 2
Venue: Kirkstall Abbey, Leeds
Our part: Script; spatial audio design, with audio engineer Matt Brown
In a sentence
A mobile audio experience that lets visitors walk the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey and overhear its past – travellers arguing on the road, monks talking low in the cloister, the kitchen and the garden and the church going about their day. We wrote the words and designed how they sit in the space.
The project
Kirkstall Abbey is one of the best-preserved Cistercian monasteries in Britain, a few miles from the centre of Leeds and free to walk around. The King's Book set out to give visitors a way to hear it as well as see it: a Kirkstall Abbey app – part audio tour, part AR – combining location-based exploration, augmented reality and spatialised audio, so that stories reveal themselves as you move through the site rather than being read off a panel.
The project was led by Immersive Networks, with research and development funding from XR Stories' OpenXR 2 call – one of four projects selected – and an inclusive design process aimed at audiences the heritage sector has traditionally served least well.
What we did
Reflex Arc's role was the content: we wrote the script, and worked with audio engineer Matt Brown – who we commission for our sound work – to design the spatial audio: how each scene and each ambient layer is placed around the abbey, and how it should behave as the listener approaches, passes and moves on. The app itself was built by Immersive Networks' development partners.
Writing for a place, not a page
A script for a site like this is not a narration. Visitors choose their own route, stop where they like and leave when they're cold, so nothing can depend on what came before. Every scene had to stand alone, make sense overheard from any direction, and be short enough to catch in passing – while still adding up, for anyone who wanders the whole site, to a picture of the abbey and the argument that ended it.
The brief called for conversation rather than lecture: travellers with a horse and cart debating the issues of the day; monks in hushed exchanges you only catch if you go looking; the ordinary sounds of cooking, gardening and prayer coming from the places where those things actually happened.
Spatial audio in the open air
Placing sound around a roofless ruin, outdoors, is a different problem from placing it in a headset. Point sources need to be anchored to real spots – a doorway, a hearth, the far end of the nave – and to fade in and out over distances that feel natural on foot, while ambient beds fill the spaces between so the site never falls silent. The design has to survive imprecise positioning, headphones of every quality and visitors who walk at very different speeds.
This builds on the spatial-audio work in our Blind Cricket and Sky Live projects, where sound is the primary interface rather than an accompaniment.
Something similar in mind?
If you have a site and a story, we can take on the whole thing – script, spatial audio, and a native app built to work outdoors, on the day, on visitors' own phones – or just the parts you need. Tell us a little about it and we'll come back to you.
