Geoff’s recent research as both a filmmaker and musicologist has focused on the aesthetics and experience of sound and music in the documentary. Early film was dominated by ‘actualities’, short silent films that delighted viewers with their simple representation of everyday things and events. They are the first examples of what was to become the documentary, a medium that has evolved as part of both commercial and avant-garde schools of filmmaking. Whilst the study of the use and importance of sound and music in fiction film has grown considerably in recent decades but within documentary studies discussion of the sonic is still relatively rare and perhaps reflects the cognitive, information driven focus of its contemporary conventional use. The more creative treatment of sound and use of music can be viewed with suspicion as a potentially emotive and insidious commentary, at odds with a supposedly factual, objective genre. These issues, relating both to practice research and musicology were explored in the international conference Sound and Music in Documentary Film and the 2018 collection of essays Soundings: Documentary Film and the Listening Experience, edited by Geoff Cox and John Corner.