Hackney Hear has won the Prix Europa Radio Production of the Year Awards.   With entries 600 entries from 38 countries, Hackney Hear was selected in the innovation category as being a first in audio and technology.   Hackney Hear founder, Fran Panetta, travelled to Berlin this week to present the project to a panel [...]

Hackney Hear has been nominated for the Prix Europa Radio Production of the Year Awards.   Marked out in the innovation category, Hackney Hear was selected from over 600 submissions from 38 countries, as being a first in audio and technology, triggering sounds via an individual’s GPS location.   We’re extremely excited to have been [...]

We’ve had so many fantastic responses since we launched Hackney Hear in February, and I wanted to take a moment to share two of our favourites with you.   Just this week, the award-winning Canadian producer Chris Brookes sent us this:   When audio features began in the last century, listeners had to cluster around [...]

We are the winner of the Race for Apps Gold Award in the ‘Finding your way’ category, it was announced at the Digital Shoreditch Festival today.         The Race for Apps project, a collaboration between Hackney Council, Digital Shoreditch and the Technology Strategy Board’s IC tomorrow team, celebrates ground-breaking apps which successfully [...]

  I’m reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 at the moment. In it there are two worlds: 1984 and 1Q84. Like Philip Pulman’s famous trilogy and countless other multiverse novels, the central thesis of the book is about reality of the world we live in and why we should believe it really is what it says it is. [...]

That’s an order, from Mr Iain Sinclair.

This innovative app will be available for download for the iPhone. Triggering sound via GPS-location, Hackney Hear provides an innovative way to explore and rediscover London’s east end by combining immersive sounds and storytelling.   Stories include: – Writer Iain Sinclair unravels the layers of history in his beloved local park – Performance poet Shane [...]

We’ve a competition for a pair of two tickets at the Barbican to see one of our favourite supporters of the Hackney Podcast at the Barbican this week.   Iain Sinclair is taking part in an extravaganza of readings, music and video projections. Along with Iain will be Alan Moore, Tom Picard, Shirley Collins accompanied [...]

Hackney Hear is excited to have been nominated for the Radio Academy’s inaugural Technical Innovation Awards.  As you all know thanks to the Arts Council we’ve been building a prototype app over the summer around the London Fields area and we’ll be launching it to iTunes soon so you can all have a go.   We’ll be presenting [...]

Rather than take our word for it, we thought it would be useful to get the opinions of our trial people on tape.   We asked three questions, of which this was the first: ‘now you’ve taken Hackney Hear out for a spin, how would you describe it the app?’   This is what they [...]

1. Audio is awesome   Some favourite moments shared with us include a recording of a table tennis match that triggers as you pass, a chilling account of the gangs that ‘own’ London Fields and a short story told from the point of view of a park bench. What links all of the responses is [...]

We did it! The app has had it’s first outing and – despite the rain – people loved it.   Thanks to every one of our volunteers who dropped by Lock 7 to give it a go and offer feedback. One pair got so caught up in Shane Solanki’s song that they found themselves dancing [...]

Well, your old iPhones anyway. It transpires that Apple only allow a limited amount of installs of our app, prior to release. So if we want to test the app with different people, we have to find a way to lend them iPhones with the app preloaded on without breaking the bank. That’s where you [...]

1. It’s scary This is mostly because us audio producers are used to nice, linear feature-making; where the passage of time allows you to reveal information to a listener at a pace that we control. But now it’s the listener calling the shots – and every step is one we probably would rather they didn’t. [...]