Freesound Forums

Hi,
I'm wondering what's a good scope for tagging ranges of distances?
I presume it changes on the subject, recording a car "close" wouldn't be the same close for a snail.

When it comes to household objects, does the following sound good? :
"touching"
"very-close-up" (0-3cm)
"close-up" (3-7cm)
"fist-distance" (palm span distance)
"near" (7cm-15cm)
"Octave" (Or Finger-span?) (17cm ish)
"in-proximity" (15-50cm)
"distant" anything over 50cm.
"meter-distance" (100cm trying to standardise recordings of that distance)
"Room-tone-like" (anything further than half way though a room)
Or any suggestions?

Sorry for making up new imperial measurements units lol, probably not a good idea but I frequently use a "fist" (8cm) as it's close enough to mostly pickup the subject, but also far to control the proximity effect, and still sound natural by picking up the other all other sound emissions from the subject (from the chassis, moving parts, air intakes/outakes).
A finger span or keyboard octave is a easy way for me to have a somewhat repeatable and memorable distance without a ruler.

Very small and household objects are probably the most important, but what about other subjects ? Like architecture, people and animals, crowds, land vehicles etc... ?

I should elaborate why tag distances.

I imagine, if distances were tagged and standardised, people would search for the sonic quality of each distance.
For example a very close-up recording will probably have proximity effect (if it isn't a omni mic), and pick up a very specific sound of the subject which might not be representative of what we hear day to day. Think a keyboard, recording a switch from 1cm will probably make a great single switch sound, but not a good "typing on keyboard" sound. One part due to the keys close to the mic will be a lot louder than the ones on the opposite side, another part the chassis of the keyboard might contribute to the sound for the overall thonk.
A "close-proximity" recording, would be more representative of what we hear for a keyboard.
Similarly, it might sound very "personal" while someone might want a "office" or house-mate sound of someone typing. So one might search "distant" or "room-tone-like" where the keyboard now will show some thinness in it's timbre and be muffled by the room's reverb. (A clean dry recording, and the user adding reverb in post is the most flexible type of recording).

So I'd like to somewhat have easily searchable distances tags. I wonder what would be a good start because I can't imagine "Room-Tone-Like" to actually be used xD
What would people use/search for ?

There is no way I would ever associate "distant" with half a meter to one meter. "Distant" would have to be at least 3 meters for some kinds of sounds or recordings, or more like 30m or 3km for others.

It might be simpler to use fibonacci-like sequence or something more rounded numbers that approximates it, since such subjective and language/culture and sound-specific terms don't cause any problems:

0cm
1cm
2cm
3cm
5cm
8cm
[then use more rounded to 5's]
15cm
25cm
40cm
65cm
[then more granular rounding]
100cm
150cm
200cm
300cm
500cm
800cm
1.5m
2.5m
4m
6.5m
10m
15m
25m
40m
65m
etc.

But.... blech. I don't like it.

A question this brings is how precise do we want to be?
Ideally, as precise as one can be while tagging, and have a search system that can recognise X-cm tags and filter searches within a range and include anything tagged within a range.

So one could search "balloon pop, 60-90cm" and anyone who tagged "78cm" will be in it.

I think the only sensible thing here would be

1) categorize by actual distance, it's far to messy and subjective to get into that "near" for an aircraft-carrier is different than "near" for a snail - let downloader/user decide what s/he would consider near.

2) A log scale, e.g, 0-10cm, 10cm-1m, 1m-10m, 10m-100m and 100m -> infinity

Hi,
I fully agree having actual distance would be the best option. Relative / interpreted distances can still be used in conjunction.
Problem is currently one cannot search in a distance range (90cm-1m30). But they can for a specific tag like "1m" or "meter-distance" or "close".

I also think this shouldn't be a enforced thing but indeed a user decided / interpreted thing. I want a guideline and examples to help tag more than a rule.

With your aircraft vs snail, or my car vs snail examples, I think this illustrates that if one wants a close recording, I don't think we care about specific distance; just relatively close be it a 3cm away snail, 2m away truck, or 30m away crane or a aircraft carrier 100m away. "close, near, in-proximity, far" would all have their uses in conjunction to specific distances in terms of search/tagging/describing.

Because recording a snail at 1m, you'l get partially the snail, but also all the bugs all around. Record a truck at 1m you'l get the truck (engine exhaust chassis vibrating the entire thing), record an aircraft carrier at 1m you won't get an aircraft carrier but a mechanism (engine, motor, pipe, gears) of it.

Perhaps a way to measure distance relatively would be to think in terms of angular size.
Measure the angle from end to end of the subject, relative to mic position.
Touching would have to be 180°, very-close-up could be >140°, close-up >90°, Close/near >45°, distant <25° etc...

The problem I'm trying to solve here is, I don't think there's currently an easy way to filter sounds in terms of distance (which is a crucial aspect for quality and or timbre / "colour". To the point where it's no longer nuances of a same subject, but very different recordings.).
Exaggerating but it's almost like if we only had the ability to search for "vehicle" and not "truck" or "car" types of nuances.

To solve this ideally, when uploading a sound one could enter a "mic distance" data, tick "this is exact" or keep it approximate. Then a user searching for sounds would have in advanced search options a slider with minimum/maximum distance search.

This currently not being an option, we may enter distance data in description and tags. But on the search side this is impractical as we cannot search for a range only specific tags.
Hence entering a specific distance for proper record keeping and a distance range for search ease is IMO desirable.

However this is only useful if there's somewhat a common ground on how we define and tag things for some standardisation. If different people use "mid-range, midrange, medium-distance, mediumdistance, in-proximity" for the same distance. They each lose search practicality and ease of search as opposed to agreeing to use "mid-range" for X to Y angular size.

So questions are :
-How detailed / narrow do we want a scale to be?
-What words / tags should we use?
-Is there any data on most common search words? And already used tags? (Searching description/tags : Close 30k, Near 10k, distant 6k, far 5k, room-tone 25k, proximity 16k, meter distance 393)

I cannot envision a system that works perfectly, there will be spills and mistakes and grey areas and interpretation and most people unaware of it. But surly having a system and reference to somewhat narrow things down can only help.

(I argue the same with music, it's very abstract and always will be but having a set of examples of what is ok and not ok would help, no music will be the same but having reference material will be flags in the grey line and beacons in the fog which is IMO better than nothing. But that's another discussion...)

I agree that the angular size of the target would probalby be more useful than plain distance, but it's probably too complicated for many users - who's going to whip out their calculator to calculate the angle subtended by that cornu aspersum snail ?. I suspect users won't search for all "close" or "distant" recordings, but rather for close/distant recordings of particular things, so the user can figure out that if they're searching for a "snail", 1m is already fairly distant, while if they're searching for an aircraft carrier, 1m is very close.

If distance was divided into ranges, like I suggested (0-1cm, 1-10cm, 10-100cm etc), you would make the tag just the upper end, or maybe some scale like "Distance1" = 0-1cm, "Distance2"=1-10cm, so people could search for specific distance tags, e.g., "10cm" or "Distance2" to get 1-10cm.d

Alternatively, if people just enter an actual distance (rather than range), say in cm, one would have to add the capability of selecting a range of distances to the the search, similar to the "duration" on current "advanced search".