Bibliographic record
Abstract
My contribution to this feature documentary (dir. Hanah Papacek Harper), investigates how film sound can articulate silence, disfluency, and ecological presence as affective rather than purely communicative phenomena. The research question was: how can the sonic dimension of a documentary foreground absence and the environment as dramaturgical forces? As a sound designer, I worked closely with director in the initial development phase of the film and then on the final sound design with designer/mixer Heather Andrews to create a palette that resists cliché and expands the soundtrack beyond dialogue. Drawing on Kerstin Stutterheim’s concept of sound dramaturgy, the methodology treated sound not as ornament but as a structuring principle of narrative affect. Informed by acoustic ecology and soundscape composition, we used iterative design to test how silence, fractured voices, and environmental recordings could generate meaning. Techniques included layering whispered and broken vocal textures, spatialisation to destabilise listening positions, and restrained use of low-frequency atmospheres to evoke ecological immersion and geological forces as well as connective emotion. The findings demonstrate that sound design can act as a dramaturgical agent, rebalancing audience empathy from the spoken word towards embodied and environmental listening. Linguistic loss is reframed as an active sound event, while the soundtrack functions as a communicative ecology where human and non-human voices intersect. This challenges the traditional hierarchy of image and dialogue, offering a practice-led model of collaborative sound dramaturgy in which affective and ecological listening hold narrative weight. Disseminated internationally through festival screenings and an online platform, the work’s significance lies in extending discourse on the soundtrack in documentary and evidencing the value of practice-based collaboration in interrogating communication, silence, and ecology.Selected 2025 Film Festival Selections (festival screenings ongoing):CPH:DOX, Copenhagen 20th March 2025Festival International du Film sur l'Art ,Montreal 22nd March 2025INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL OF SCIENCE DOCUMENTARY FILMS 28th April 2025Sheffield Doc Fest, UK 21-22nd June 2025Biografilm Festival, Bologna Italy,16th June 2025Ariano Film Festival, as part of AIFF Green, Campania, Italy July 2025LandxSea Film Festival, Montrose Scotland 12th September 2025(winner North Light Award)Ortigia Film Festival, Sicily, Italy 22nd Sep 2015
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.022 | 0.012 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.019 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".