Spatial audio field recordings — put on headphones and you are standing there
The main hall of a railway station. The tetrapods on the coast, with the waves working through them. A school athletics track. Real places, recorded by somebody who went and stood in them.
These are not synthesised loops or stock ambience. Somebody carried a rig to each of these places, stood there, and recorded what it sounded like — in spatial audio, so that on headphones the space opens up around you instead of sitting flat between your ears.
It turns out to be very good for working, studying, meditating, or winding down before bed. But that is the side effect. The point is the place.
What this actually is
A field-recording collection, not a sound-effects library. Every recording is made on location, in a real place you could go and stand in yourself. Each one runs about five to seven minutes, unedited enough that you can hear the place behave — a train announcement, someone's footsteps crossing the hall, the gap between two waves.
Today that is nineteen recordings, all made in Tainan, Taiwan, and published together. More are coming, and not only from Tainan. We would rather tell you the number than imply a catalogue that isn't there.
Where the recordings come from
All nineteen recordings in the collection today were made in Tainan, Taiwan, at three locations. Rather than sample a hundred places shallowly, we record one place until it is properly covered.
Tainan Railway Station — 6 recordings
The station is the most architecturally interesting of the three. Hard surfaces, a very high ceiling, announcements arriving from somewhere above and behind you, and a constant traffic of footsteps. Recorded at six positions:
- Tainan Railway Station Hall A5:38
- Tainan Railway Station Hall B5:32
- Tainan Railway Station Ticket Gate Exit7:02
- Tainan Railway Station Front Underground Passage5:02
- Tainan Railway Station Exit Plaza Intersection6:32
- Tainan Railway Station Exit5:08
The Tainan coast — 9 recordings
The largest group. It moves from the road, through a coastal grove, out onto open sand — and then to two distinct positions: beside the tetrapods, where the water collapses into concrete instead of onto sand, and beside the reef rocks.
- Tainan Coastline - Near Tetrapods A6:04
- Tainan Beach Tetrapods B6:39
- Tainan Coastal Reefs5:10
- Tainan Beach Distant Shore A7:01
- Tainan Beach Distant Shore B5:02
- Tainan Beach Close-up Sand5:06
- Tainan Beachside Grove to Shore5:03
- Tainan Coastal Road to Forest6:01
- Tainan Coastal Grove Parking Lot5:02
A Tainan school sports ground — 4 recordings
The quietest set, and the most specific. Open air with distant boundaries, which is a genuinely different acoustic problem from the station or the coast.
- Tainan School Sports Ground Track and Field Area7:14
- Tainan School Sports Ground Basketball and Volleyball Court Near-field A5:03
- Tainan School Sports Ground Basketball and Volleyball Courts Near-field B5:06
- Tainan School Sports Field Tennis Wall Practice Area6:24
How it plays
On headphones — any headphones. Every recording has a binaural stereo mix. Binaural is the format built for headphone listening: it carries the direction and distance information your ears use to place a sound in a room. No special hardware, no setup.
On iPhone, iPad and Android — Dolby Atmos. With a Premium or Max plan, Scenery serves a genuine Dolby Atmos stream and hands it to your operating system to decode and render. If you have a Dolby Atmos speaker system or soundbar, that is what it is rendering to.
In a browser. The same Atmos stream is sent to browsers that can decode it. Where a browser cannot, the binaural mix plays instead, automatically. We have not measured every browser, so we will not promise a specific one.
Dolby, Dolby Atmos, and the double-D symbol are registered trademarks of Dolby Laboratories Licensing Corporation.
Listen without an account
You do not have to sign up to hear whether this is for you.
Open the listen page and press play. It is the full recording, start to finish, not a thirty-second preview — and you can skip around inside it as much as you like.
Honestly, here is where that stops: the listen page is one recording, in binaural stereo. A free account adds the rest of the collection, still in binaural. Dolby Atmos is not part of the free plan — it starts with Premium.
Plans
Free
25 minutes of binaural listening a day, across the whole collection. Three playlists, three recordings in each. No Dolby Atmos.
Premium — USD 3.99/month
Unlimited binaural, 60 minutes of Dolby Atmos a day, background playback, offline binaural downloads, 50 playlists.
Max — USD 6.99/month
The same, with no daily limit on Dolby Atmos and no cap on playlists.
What Scenery is not
It is not a white-noise app, and it is not trying to be one.
The collection is a small one — every recording made in one city and published on the same day. There are no weekly releases yet, and no chart of what other people are listening to. Dolby Atmos starts at Premium — the free plan does not include any.
If what you want is an endless generative rain machine, there are good ones and this is not it. If you want to know what Tainan Railway Station sounds like at the scale of your own head, this is the only place that has it.