Perceiving Depth and Distance in Recorded Music

The depth of phonographic recordings is most often defined in terms of the perceived distance to sound sources. We tend to speak about the location of sounds as if sounds ’belong’ to their sources. However, depth is not necessarily connected to physical distance in auditory experience. Sounds may seem nowhere or omnipresent still creating a sense of depth.
This paper aims to explore the concept of ’depth’ in relation to spatial staging of sounds in phonographic recordings. How is depth perceived? What does sound engineers mean by depth? And how is depth created in the recording studio? In most popular music recordings we will find a complex combination of staging effects (Lacasse 2000) that often yields contradictory cues to the horizontal location of sound sources in phonographic space.
Among scholars working with audio perception there are some disagreement as to which parameters of sound are the most essential to listeners’ estimation of the distance to sound sources. A decrease in intensity is often seen as the most obvious cue to an increase in distance. Thus, for many sound engineers the front-to-back placement of sounds is simply connected to the use of dynamic faders, while others consider ratio of direct to reverberant sound and change in spectral balance to be essential parameters. In discussing these issues I will consider work by John W. Philbeck and Donald H. Mershon (2002), who has shown that familiarity with the ’probable’ output power of a source has a significant influence on the listener’s perception of distance; Håkan Ekman and Jens Berg’s (2005) study on the concept of depth; and Ulrik Schmidt’s (2011) work on the experience of ambient sounds.