Audio Journalism: An Epistemology of Bodily Engagements with Sounds

This article highlights the critical role played by the body in audio journalistic epistemology. It focuses on the journalist's "audio body" and its deployment in the creation of documentary podcasts. Highly tuned to both the audible and the inaudible, this is a body at once central to the journalist's investigatory toolkit, at once responsible for the creation of powerful audio journalism that brings listeners into an intimate space with the subject at hand. Foregrounding the role of the body in the processes of audio journalism also highlights the importance of affect and time in journalistic sound-based montages. By way of illustration, three immersive sound pieces that document news production in a variety of media outlets are discussed. So too are the ways that the documentarist and author of this article was required to mobilize and subsequently reflect upon her own "audio body."