Sound Fields is a new publication and event series dedicated to the art of audio documentary in theory and practice. We are a group of audio documentary-makers interested in building community, defying convention and homogeneity, and in asserting for ourselves the ethical concerns, creative inheritances and common goals that fuel our wildest dreams for the future of our field. 

We commit acts of journalism. We create art. We tell stories. We make audio. 

When our founding editorial board came together, in the spring of 2023, to figure out what our first issue might be, we kept circling around a question: What does it even mean when we say “audio documentary?” As a group, we share some common creative orientations. We make audio work that is grounded in reality, facts or – in broad terms – claims about what’s true. We tend to make work that is carefully produced, often combining several sound, voice, music elements in the editing and mixing process. Our work airs on radio and on podcasts, but also in audio installations and public spaces, or on quiet corners of our own websites. 

Many of us make work that uses narrative or storytelling techniques and structures to convey meaning, emotion and information, but we are also wary of the limitations and potential exploitation of these tools. And we are all excited about work that challenges existing power structures and tears through boundaries of form and convention. 

As folks who ask questions for a living, or for living, it makes sense our first issue would take the form of a central question we can’t answer. 

What is an audio documentary? 

We are pleased to present attempts to confront that question from contributors from four continents, all providing answers from divergent perspectives. Drawing inspiration from sound art, community radio, journalism, acoustic ecology, film theory, poetry, disability studies and queer history, this issue’s contributors invite us to think expansively about what audio documentary could be—and about who we could be, as audio makers in this moment.

And on that note, we hand over our inaugural “Letter from an Editor” to documentary artist and founding editorial board member Sayre Quevedo, who opens this issue with some questions of his own.