24/09/2026
Nick Gellatly
Week 1 reflection
Week 1 challenged my assumption that immersion depends on sophisticated technology. Our discussion began with storytelling: a narrative gives people a way to navigate experience, but can also limit what they notice (Solnit, 2013). I therefore need to ask whose account an immersive work privileges and which voices remain unheard. This question seems particularly relevant when interpreting a museum collection as we will be doing shortly in our project working with the Sedgwick Museum.
I initially thought about immersion through sight and sound, yet the ‘French Fancies’ example I gave – I only like the yellow cake because I associate its colour with lemon, whether or not it actually tastes of lemon – implies that smell and taste play a part too. Immersion is therefore partly constructed by the audience. My experience of listening to Ian Rankin’s John Rebus audiobooks – about an Edinburgh police officer – gives another example: when the narrator changed, my sense of inhabiting that fictional world weakened. Voice is not merely a means of delivering information; its continuity helps sustain emotional engagement.
Bandersnatch – which I have not seen but the Netflix programme was mentioned in class – raised a different issue: interactivity offers choices, but those choices are designed in advance. An audience member may feel agency while following paths selected by someone else. Solnit’s account of stories as structures is useful here: the storyteller builds the space in which the participant moves. I want to make those structures inviting without disguising their constraints.
Our practical task gave me a way to test these ideas. I developed a seven-stop ECHOES audio walk along Mill Road in response to My Beautiful Laundrette. I recorded short pieces at locations connected thematically to care, migration, class and belonging, then edited them in Audacity with restrained sound effects. ECHOES attaches sounds to locations so that movement can trigger playback (ECHOES, n.d.). The street supplies sights, traffic, weather and other unplanned sounds; the recordings provide an interpretive layer. This taught me that a story can be immersive without replacing its surroundings. It also exposed practical questions: Will GPS trigger at the right point? Can someone listen safely and finish a clip before reaching the next stop? I have built the route but still need to test it on foot. You will find more details, including the link and QR code below.
The Sedgwick Museum brief now asks me to move from a location-based exercise to a researched interpretation of an object, theme or hidden narrative. A Mile in My Shoes suggests that a simple combination of walking, objects and first-person audio can invite empathy (Empathy Museum, n.d.). However, I must not assume that one person’s voice can speak for everyone connected with an object. I would like to explore an audio experience that offers more than one perspective and can travel to museums.
My next steps are to select and research a Sedgwick object, speak with museum partners, and prototype a listening experience for the Week 8 pitch. I also need to consider access: headphones, transcripts, visitors unable to walk the route, and enough capacity for busy periods. These decisions may matter more than choosing between Snapchat, binaural sound or another platform. By the November Tech Play event, I hope to test whether interaction deepens the story rather than simply displaying the technology.
References
ECHOES (n.d.) ECHOES – geolocated audio tours and experiences. Available at: https://echoes.xyz/ (Accessed: 25 September 2026).
Empathy Museum (n.d.) A Mile in My Shoes. Available at: https://www.empathymuseum.com/a-mile-in-my-shoes/ (Accessed: 25 September 2026).
Solnit, R. (2013) The Faraway Nearby. London: Granta Books.
Planning for my Sedgwick Museum Project
Since visiting the Sedgwick Museum over the summer break, I have given this project some thought and have developed the following idea for discussion and consideration:
Proposed Project Title: Complemental: A Listening Layer for Darwin the Geologist
Complemental is a browser-based, binaural audio experience designed for the Sedgwick Museum’s Darwin the Geologist gallery. Scanning gallery QR codes on personal smartphones launches a dual-channel “listening layer” in front of display cases. One ear plays Charles Darwin’s clinical, published monographs; the other plays his candid, astonished private correspondence written during his study of barnacles and “complemental males”. Without adding explanatory voiceover, the installation contrasts these texts, allowing listeners to directly experience the contrasting opinions Darwin expressed publicly and privately. I hadn’t realised we would be working with ECHOES in week one but it is possible that this tool may be useful in bringing this idea to life.
I think this project is deliverable because it is:
- Anchored in Darwin’s 1846–1854 barnacle monographs (palaeontology), directly matching the Sedgwick’s Earth Sciences remit.
- And expands the museum’s existing Bridging Binaries LGBTQ+ tour into a permanent, self-guided experience for individual visitors seeking a private encounter.
- Focuses on shifts between private notes and public publications, avoiding speculative biography or claims of intentional “queer coding”.
- Web-hosted binaural audio tracks and printed transcripts accessed via QR cards, requiring no app downloads. Possibly using ECHOES
- Verifiable text pairings drawn from Darwin Online and the Darwin Correspondence Project, informed by Ross Brooks’ historical research in his recently published book, Darwin and the Queer Origins of Life.
- Objective is for a presentation at the Sedgwick on 12 November 2026.
Blog post on an immersive story from the MIT docubase website, include links, videos and your response to the work, what do you like, how does the work make you feel? Is it immersive?
Can a rock tell a story?
The task was to look at MIT Docubase to find examples of Immersive Storytelling. I decided to use the search function on the site to look for examples relevant to the project idea I have outlined above for the time we will spend at the Sedgwick Museum. With that in mind I searched the following terms: geology, the Sedgwick museum and queerness. The example I found most interesting was called The Butterfly Effect.
MIT Docubase links:
The Butterfly Effect: giving a meteorite a story | Search Results | MIT – Docubase https://docubase.mit.edu/?s=The+Butterfly+Effect%3A+giving+a+meteorite+a+story
The Butterfly Effect website:
The Butterfly Effect https://thebutterflyeffect.space/
The Butterfly Effect invites visitors to encounter a meteorite through light, sound, smell and video. Rather than treating the object as something to look at through glass, the installation translates scientific information into a sensory journey from space to Earth. I can’t honestly say I found the experience uplifting, it all seems rather dark to me – perhaps that’s what should be expected of something originated in deepest space – and I would hope to create an immersive experience that is a little more uplifting.
I was drawn to its use of smell – ‘goaty’ and locker room smells are mentioned which does not add a sense of joy to the experience for me but happily some more pleasant aromas are described later in the piece. In our first class, I realised that even the colour of a French Fancy can shape what I expect to taste. This project makes me wonder how much of an encounter with an object comes from the object itself, and how much comes from the story and sensations created around it. For me, it is the story surrounding a fact or an item which becomes most engaging and, in last year’s live brief at the Fitzwilliam Museum it was the story of Mai and his journey across the globe which most strongly drew me into the project.
For the Sedgwick brief, I would like to explore that question on a smaller scale. Could one object support a short audio story alongside its scientific explanation? I would want visitors to know which sounds represent evidence, which are imagined, and whose perspective they are hearing. The Butterfly Effect has encouraged me to begin with a particular object and ask what experience might help someone look at it again.
ECHOES – A walk you can hear
One of the tasks in Week One of the Immersive Storytelling Module was to create a walking tour with narration using ECHOES Creator (https://creator.echoes.xyz/walks ). I’ll be honest, I should probably have remained on Campus but instead I decided to have a walk up Mill Road, why? Well for the Motion Graphics Module I had decided to focus in the 1985 film ‘My Beautiful Laundrette’ and I had found out that one of the few laundrettes still around was in that street – so I decided on a quest to find it. This is the result.
I completed the Mill Road walk and recordings during the session at the university but completed the task at home. It’s clear from what I have said above that I did not properly understand the brief until I actually began doing the background work of putting the walk together. My feeling is that in a perfect example of serendipity, ECHOES may the the perfect media for delivering the project I have outlined for the Sedgwick Museum but I am reluctant to nail that colour too firmly to the mast as I never cease to be amazed by what I am discovering along the path of this course.
For a project with My Beautiful Laundrette, in mind In many ways, Mill Road is an interesting subject as it also asks many of the same questions as the film itself, such as class, migration, care and belonging new resonance. I did a project in May – with Pride Month in mind – where I pulled together a series of places of interest to people attending Cambridge Pride. I think ECHOES would be the perfect vehicle for this walk and – if and when time allows – I may remake it with ECHOES:
Image: Screenshots of ‘Queering Cambridge’ walk
With the ‘Week One’ project back to the front of my mind, I plotted seven stops, beginning outside ARU on East Road and ending at Monarch Coin Laundry. Between them lie Ditchburn Place, once a workhouse; Mill Road Cemetery; the Old Library; the Bath House; and the railway bridge into Romsey. The laundrette gave the route its destination, but each stop had its own story.
I recorded a short piece at each location. Back at my computer, I used Audacity to cut pauses and mistakes, balance my voice and add small sound effects. I learned quickly that less was more: a train, footsteps or water could suggest a place without drowning out the words. I exported each finished clip as a WAV file.
Then came ECHOES. I created an “Echo” for each stop, placed its trigger area on the map and uploaded the corresponding recording. I checked the playback settings so a story could finish after a listener moved on, without looping endlessly. Seeing seven circles appear along Mill Road was the moment the recordings became a walk.
The next step is to test it on foot. GPS and pavements may have their own opinions about my map. For now, I’m pleased to have turned research, field recording and editing into an invitation: walk, listen, and notice what this street has to say. It is not a perfect walk but, I think, a good example of what ECHOES could deliver.
It is great to have Year Two underway!
https://explore.echoes.xyz/collections/wOp4ayz9W5pf7fyj
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