The route will run from Oldham town centre to Northern Roots and will be available from September.
Fifteen people from Turning Point's Rochdale and Oldham Active Recovery service worked with poet Phil Davenport to create seven spoken poetry pieces for the trail.
Called If You Could Speak to the World, the project combines their recordings with brass compositions written by sound designer and composer Sophie Cooper and played by Milnrow Band.
The group met outdoors during spring and early summer and used the Northern Roots landscape as inspiration for their work.
Participants, aged from their 20s to their 70s, also helped map the route, choose stopping points and record sounds from the area.
The trail includes locations such as a boating lake, beehives, a mill and a bridge. The shortest route is two miles and takes in all seven locations, while longer routes run up to six miles.
Maps will be available from Northern Roots' new Welcome Building and online from September 2026.
John Bailey, from Wardle, is one of the people whose work features on the soundtrack. The former bar and restaurant manager has been in recovery for just over a year.
He said: "A big part of my recovery has been saying yes to things. And as an English literature graduate who grew up going on lots of walks, this opportunity really stood out for me."
Mr Bailey is currently training as a peer mentor with ROAR ahead of postgraduate study in counselling and psychotherapy.
Describing one of the poetry exercises used during the project, he said: "Phil had us write down answers to three questions: who we were grateful to and what message we would send them, what we look back on with sadness and what we thought the area we were walking through was like 150 years ago.
"We then 'curated' our own words to make a 'found poem' out of them. They were surprisingly profound and beautiful and, in this way, everyone in the group created a piece they could feel proud of."
Mr Davenport said: "This is a sound walk like no other. We aren’t delivering a nature trail or a local history, but something much more unusual. We will be guided by the voices of local people in recovery: people who are intensely aware of the dark art of damage and the honesty needed to pull away from it.
"Their poems are the narrative for the walk, which takes us out of a busy, chaotic town centre, to the edge of where people are and then out beyond, into the woods and the wilds."
The artwork was commissioned by visual arts organisation Portraits of Recovery for Recoverist Month and funded through Transport for Greater Manchester's Wheels and Walks programme.
Recoverist Month takes place in September and uses exhibitions, performances and other creative events to explore substance use and recovery through the arts.
Dominic Pillai, curator of social engagement at Portraits of Recovery, said: "Phil did a fantastic job demonstrating that poetry takes many forms and can be accessible to everyone."
He added: "Group members embraced the project with honesty, courage and imagination, drawing strength from experiences that are too often overlooked and misunderstood."
A series of guided walks will take place in September and October 2026 to launch the permanent audio trail.
