Documentary sound effects
Documentary sound effects set the tone from the first scene. Whether you're editing a nature feature, true crime story, or personal profile, this collection brings atmosphere, pacing, and emotional depth.
Sound effects for every type of documentary
Finding the right sound depends on the story you're telling. Our collection is curated to support every documentary style:
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True crime: Build suspense with eerie drones, police sirens, the click of a camera, and subtle, tense room tones.
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Nature & wildlife: Bring the outdoors to life with authentic sounds like birdsong, flowing water, and wind through trees.
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Historical: Ground your narrative in a specific era with archival sounds like typewriter clicks, radio static, old film projectors, and classic car engines.
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Biographical & personal profiles: Add intimacy with everyday sounds like footsteps, coffee shop ambiences, and the rustle of clothing.
To get you started, explore our curated tracklists for some of the most popular themes below.
The interview toolkit
True crime essentials
Sounds of the city
Sounds of the wild
Sounds from the past
Seamless scene changes
Why use Epidemic Sound for your documentary?
We make finding the perfect audio simple, so you can focus on telling your story.
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Royalty-free licensing: Our license clears the entire catalog for your channels on all major platforms. Just connect your account to publish worry-free, safe from copyright claims.
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Unlimited downloads: Get access to our entire library of 200,000+ sound effects with one simple subscription.
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High-quality audio: Every sound is professionally recorded and mastered, ready to be dropped straight into your project.
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Curated for storytellers: Our catalog is organized and tagged to help you find the right sound for any scene, mood, or transition quickly.
Pair documentaries with music for storytelling
Complement your sound design with music curated for documentaries. From atmospheric underscores to emotive themes, explore tracks designed to support pacing, tone, and narrative.
Professional voiceovers made simple
A great documentary often relies on narration to guide the audience. Our AI voiceover tool lets you generate polished, natural-sounding voiceovers directly from your script, making it easy to add professional narration to your project without hiring a voice actor.
Related sound effects collections
Foley
Recreate the sounds of everyday actions like footsteps, object handling, and movement to make your scenes feel grounded.
Transitions
Smoothly guide viewers from one scene to the next with tonal shifts, swells, and subtle whooshes.
Nature
Bring outdoor environments to life with authentic sounds of birds, wind, water, and forests, perfect for documentaries, wildlife films and travel content.
Frequently asked questions
What types of sound effects are used in documentaries?
Documentaries use a range of sound effects to feel complete. Common examples include:
- Background ambiences like cafés, forests, or office spaces
- Foley sounds like footsteps, page turns, or doors closing
- Subtle whooshes and risers for transitions
- Specific sounds like clocks ticking, pens scribbling, or camera shutters
- Light drones or tones that set the mood
What is the difference between foley and ambience in a documentary?
Think of it this way for a documentary film:
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Ambience is the sound that establishes your location. It’s the background audio that makes a scene feel authentic, like the sound of a bustling market in a travel doc, the quiet hum of a university library, or the wind on a desolate mountain for a nature film. It’s the audio bed for your scene.
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Foley is the sound of specific actions that add intimacy and realism. It's the rustle of a subject's jacket as they shift in their interview chair, the sound of a historian turning a page in an old book, or the footsteps of your character walking down a city street.
In short: ambience tells you where you are, while foley tells you what is happening.
Why are sound effects important in a documentary?
Sound effects add realism, create atmosphere, and guide the audience's emotions. They fill aural space during quiet moments, make scenes feel more authentic, and can be used to build tension or signal a change in tone.
How should I mix sound effects with my interview audio and music?
For documentary filmmaking, the goal is usually clarity and authenticity. A good rule of thumb is to think in layers of importance:
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Interview dialogue & narration: This is your story and should almost always be the clearest, most prominent audio in the mix. Everything else serves to support it.
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Music underscore: Music guides the emotional tone of the scene. It should sit just below the dialogue, present enough to set the mood but never so loud that it distracts from the information being shared.
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Sound effects (the reality layer): Sound effects should be the quietest layer. Use room tone to create a clean, consistent floor under your dialogue edits. Use ambience and subtle foley to add texture and a sense of place, but keep them low in the mix so they are felt more than they are heard.
Where can I find royalty-free documentary sound effects?
You can find a curated collection of high-quality, royalty-free documentary sound effects at Epidemic Sound. An Epidemic Sound subscription gives you unlimited downloads, and once you connect your channels, your projects are cleared for use on all major platforms.