Using Music and Sound Design in Documentary Podcasts
Sound design and music aren't decoration layered on top of a finished story. Done well, they're part of how the story gets told in the first place, sometimes doing work that narration and interviews can't do on their own. A few real, different approaches show how wide that range actually is.
Score to Your Subject, Not to a Genre
Floodlines, The Atlantic's series about Hurricane Katrina, used an original score composed by Christian Scott aTunde Adjuah, a jazz trumpeter, alongside sound design by David Herman. Critics singled out that combination specifically for elevating what could have been a straightforward documentary into something far more vivid and evocative. The choice wasn't incidental. New Orleans is a city whose musical identity is inseparable from its actual history, and scoring the show with a real piece of music that’s totally unlike anything else that’s out there (you know, rather than a generic dramatic stock track) tied the sound of the show directly to the culture the story was actually about. That's the lesson worth taking further than this one example: the choice of composer and instrumentation can itself be a storytelling decision, not just a mood-setting one.
Let Sound Design Do the Work of Revelation
Containers, an audio documentary about global shipping, built one of its most memorable moments entirely around a piece of archival sound design. In an episode about a group of longshoremen displaced by automation, the producers tracked down a former dockworker who had secretly kept nearly forty years of his own analog recordings, tape nobody else had ever heard, made for a documentary film soundtrack about the waterfront decades earlier. The episode doesn't just describe finding the tapes. It plays the actual moment of putting one into a tape player for the first time in decades and hearing voices emerge out of the noise. That's sound design functioning as the reveal itself, not an accompaniment to it. The lesson generalizes: when you have a genuinely rare piece of archival audio, sometimes the strongest choice is to let the audience discover it exactly the way you did, rather than describing what they're about to hear before you've let them hear it.
A Single Piece of Existing Music Can Carry an Entire Show
Not every project needs an original score. Wind of Change is built around a single existing song, the Scorpions' 1990 power ballad, investigated across eight episodes for a rumored CIA connection. The show returns to that same song again and again, but its emotional register shifts along with the investigation, playful in one context, genuinely unsettling in another, as the same piece of music gets recontextualized by what the audience now knows. That's a different craft than commissioning original music: it's finding one existing piece of audio central enough to the story that it can function as a recurring motif, and trusting the structure of the show to change how the audience hears it each time.
What to Avoid
Generic stock music is the fastest way to make a genuinely distinctive story sound like every other true-crime trailer on a podcast app. If the score could be swapped into an entirely unrelated show without anyone noticing, it isn't doing real work for this one. The same caution applies to over-scoring: music playing under every single moment, regardless of whether the scene needs it, tends to flatten emotional peaks rather than building them, because there's nowhere left to go when everything already has a swell behind it. Silence and space are their own compositional choices, worth a full discussion on their own, but the short version here is that knowing when not to add music is as much a part of this craft as knowing when to add it.
The Line Sound Design Shouldn't Cross
Music and sound design can shape how an audience feels about a moment, and that's legitimate, powerful craft. What it shouldn't do is manufacture an emotional reaction the material itself doesn't earn, ominous music under an interview to imply guilt the reporting hasn't actually established, or a triumphant swell to make an ambiguous outcome feel more resolved than it really is. The same honesty principle that applies to narration and archival reconstruction applies here: sound can and should elevate a true story, but it shouldn't be doing the job of convincing an audience of something the facts don't support on their own.
Seaplane Armada treats sound as a genuine storytelling tool, not a finishing layer added at the end. If you're trying to figure out what your project's sound should actually be doing, get in touch at theadmiral@seaplanearmada.com
