Maria Pramaggiore is Head of Media Studies at the National University of Ireland at Maynooth. She has published four books, two on Irish cinema, and one a co-authored textbook, Film: A Critical Introduction (2011; with Tom Wallis), now in its third edition.Bella Honess Roe is a lecturer at the University of Surrey, UK, where she is the programme director for Film Studies. Her scholarship and teaching focuses on animation, documentary and popular culture more broadly. She is the author of Animated Documentary (2013). Her work on animation, documentary, genre and British cinema appears in publications such as The Journal of British Cinema and Television and Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal.

A book that performs a double and much needed breakthrough. It manages to transfer much of the cutting research in fiction cinema to the field of documentary film. But it also succeeds in making room for a type of reading that gives priority to the materiality of the voice ... [there is] great diversity of the topics under scrutiny ... systematic articulation of specific analyses and broader theoretical schemes and patterns ... [and] careful close-reading of the chosen movies, which are not only judiciously described (quite an achievement in the case of a work in print that is not accompanied by oral documents) but also patiently examined so that the limits of traditional ways of analyzing voice and sound become clear.

• I. Voices, Bodies and Power1.Playing God: Film stars as documentary narratorsAnnabelle Honess Roe2.Auditing the Call Centre Voice: Accented Speech and Listening in Sonali Gulati's Nalini by Day, Nancy by Night (2005)Pooja Rangan3.The Fundamental Lie: Lip Sync, Dubbing, Ventriloquism and the Othering of Voice in Documentary MediaPatrik SjöbergII. Voices Beyond Language4.Hearing Voices in Singer-Songwriter Music DocumentariesMaria Pramaggiore5.'The Voice' and Sound in Indian Documentary Film: Listen to Surabhi Sharma's Bidesia in Bambai (2013)Deborah Matzner6.Hum, Buzz, Gurgle: Ecological Soundscapes in Poetic EcodocsShilyh Warren7.Literally Documenting her Voice: Valie Export's Vocal-Visual Experiments with Screen MediaHelen HughesIII. Gender, Sexuality and Species8.The Voice of MockumentarySarah Kessler9.Fabulous Thinking, Chimeric Voice: Kathy High's Lily Does Derrida: A Dog's Video (2010)Brenda Hollweg10.Animating Voices, Onscreen and Off, in Kathleen Shannon's Working Mothers (1974-5)Jean WaltonIV. Documentary Modes and Techniques11.The Voice in Documentary Sound Design: A Digital RevolutionChris Cagle12.Kazuhiro Soda's Migrant VoicesLuke Robinson13.Vocal Hierarchy in DocumentaryJames NicholsonV. Time, Testimony and History14.Crime Documentary's Confessing Voice. Kristen Fuhs15.Sounds of Disillusionment and Discord: When Pasolini and Sontag Visited IsraelOhad Landesman16.Beyond Words: Speech, Ethical Time and the Politics of the Local in Nicholas Philibert's Retour en Normandie (2007)Rhiannon Harries