Welcome to Sound Fields

Sound Fields is a publication and community event series founded in 2023 that is dedicated to the art of audio documentary in theory and practice. We are a collective of audio documentarians 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. 

A big part of the impetus for this project is our shared understanding that audio documentarians are – and have been for the past century or so – creating important, creative work; but as a field, we haven’t had the same level of recognition, the same institutional supports or the same spaces for shared critique and inquiry as our peers in parallel fields like documentary film. We wanted to create a space that takes audio documentary seriously as an art form and creative practice.  

Our first online issue invited audio documentarians on four continents to answer the question “What is an audio documentary?” 

Our second issue, slated for spring 2025, will be our first print issue. The Archives Issue is an attempt to reckon with the future of our field by engaging with the past.

You can read our Transom Manifesto published in December 2024 here.

And you can reserve your copy of our first ever limited-run print issue by pre-ordering here.

Animated gif features a warped grid laced with a scattering of identical daisies drawn with thin white lines. The grid shifts and wiggles below the floweres, each of them dancing.
A black and white risograph printed image features a photocollage made from scraps of printed paper and magazine cuttings of cloud imagry.
A black and white risograph printed image features a wavy texture similar to the surface of water. On top of that, a finely packed grid is printed.
Animated gif of white water droplets falling through a black background. Once the droplets hit the bottom of the image, they radiate outward as concentric circles.
Black and white scan of an embossed collagraph print. Supple paper has been etched through with crisp white lines that look as if they come from woven fabric. Trails of raised dots meander through the inky surface.