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I haven't contributed any sounds. So, it's okay to consider that.

Usually, when trying to find a recording I am wanting to find the recording of an event, as if I were an invisible person happening to record sounds that occurred at some random moment.

For example, this is not what I would look for:

A person sets up a microphone next to a blob of oatmeal, starts recording, then hits the oatmeal with a beaver.

This is what I would look for:

A microphone is left alone next to a beaver dam, at 3AM on a clear night, a meteor lands next to the microphone and it's impact is recorded.

Is there already or is there an interest in categorizing sounds to separate "naturalish" sounds form "artificialish" sounds?

Other examples of things I would not look for, not that there is anything wrong with them:

My impression of how bees sound when they are angry.
A sound I made with an oscillator that is sufficient for use a sound effect in a movie.
A recording of Hyenas snickering which has been sent through a phase shifter.

The dichotomy artificial/natural seems quite, well, unnatural to me. There is no clear difference, neither in life or art, between incidental and accidental, at least in my opinion. The subject has been dealt with extensively in photography, for example here's an interesting view on this: http://erickimphotography.com/blog/2014/05/23/debunking-the-myth-of-the-decisive-moment/

I believe the main difference between a gun shot recorded during a bank robbery or in a studio is that the 'live' sample will (for many different reasons) sound much worst

D

My interest does not relate to purity of some sort as a goal, I think. We get to use heuristics, being meat things, supposedly, instead of machines that we craft doing the choosing. So, it is a vague notion, like democracy. You can't pin it down without making it, not democracy.

So, maybe, in terms of negatives:

Sounds that I recorded without intending for them to be something specific, within some scale of tolerance, relative to a fabricated context.

So, here is a recording that I have, that I did not make with the intention of producing a "spooid" sound.

(small text: where "spooid" is a quality I arbitrarily decide is between arbitrarily chosen extremes somewhere between the sound I made when I intentionally recorded myself intending to vocalize "boob" and another sound I made when I intentionally recorded myself intending to make a sound "squid")

Or, in commonish speak, here's a sound that I don't think would sound to another person as if it were contrived.

And, ultimately, it is irrelevant whether it was actually intentional or not.

cheyrn wrote:
Or, in commonish speak, here's a sound that I don't think would sound to another person as if it were contrived.

Each listener will form their own opinion as to whether a sound feels natural or contrived, and that will depend on personal perception(bias) and the context in which it is being considered. Some sounds are obviously contrived, synthesized cartoon SFX, some are obviously natural, field recorded thunder with no post editing, but most fall in between by virtue of the creator 'tuning' the sound to their own preference with post processing. To make cataloguing even more fraught, each creator will have their own idea of how the sound should be described and tagged. For instance the often used tag 'dramatic' is applied both to the well-caught surprise moment and the beefed up reverbed compressed and equalised big-screen sound effect.

Wibby

Of course. In that way, no categories can ever make sense. But, that is impractical. How about everyone's more is more than their less, so we could all try to do more and it might be more, more or less.

Sorry for replying to myself. Actually, "field recording" is pretty much what I was asking about. But, I'm not sure what a tag would be for something in doors.

Tags are only useful by common acceptance and expectation. I don't think there's a commonly used category for indoor 'field-recordings'. The tags 'processed' or 'unprocessed' or 'raw' are sometimes used, but not often enough for them to be universally helpful. The best way to learn the most appropriate tags to use is to do some random searches of sounds for yourself and see which tags are most commonly applied. For example kettle boiling sounds are mostly tagged 'kettle', 'kettle whistle' kitchen' and 'boiling-water'. Using the tags 'unintended-recording', 'set-up-recording' or 'Hotpoint' might help 1 in 10,000 looking for a very specific kettle but will very often restrict the search results to zero in a simple search. Even if a Hotpoint kettle was used in a recording, if it wasn't tagged or described as Hotpoint it could be excluded on a search for 'kettle kitchen Hotpoint'.(depending on if and what Advanced Search options are set)

Do your own experiments using different options on the advanced search page and see what you get. Remember, although a few users here are very proficient at using Advanced Search, 99% of users don't and keep their searches basic.

The Tag cloud on the right hand side of a search page is worth looking at.

I'm not an 'advanced' user of freesound so I hope if I got anything wrong in this reply a more knowledgeable member will post and correct me.

Wibby

cheryn has some good/interesting points, but there are some inconsistencies.
I have read this thread but cannot determine/decide if we are talking about sound or phylosophy - which means I am very compelled to write an (excessively long) reply...

I think the key aspect to discuss is first of all what we undertand to be intentional versus incidental.
So, when we say 'intentional' do we mean to include 'intention and control' or just 'intention'?
If we want to include control then, in extremis, anything except a very well planned and executed recording would become incidental.
Example:
If I setup to record a thunderstorm, I have no control of when each particular thunder will happen, or how loud it will be. OR even if there will be any thunder at all. I have no control over it, but I certainly have the intention to record thunder.
If I want to record the sound of cows mooing, I can setup my recording aparatus in a field with cows. Again, I have no control over what sounds they will make, if any. But, statistically, if I wait around long enough I will get some 'moos'. Attempting the same recording in a subway station is unlikely to succeed, even if I wait years. So, by choosing the right location and time, I have at least some degree of control.

So the question: does this classify as 'intentional' or 'incidental'?

The interesting part, if we think about it, is that if we want to say that having the 'intention' is what defines the recording as 'intentional', it certainly is no guarantee of result. Example: I setup to record a thunderstorm, but there was no thunder, only rain.

An even more interesting outcome of this type of logic is that an 'incidental' recording cannot be created intentionally, since the mere 'intention' of creating an 'incidental' recording, immediately transforms it into an 'intentional' recording - Fun, heh?

So, if we can't create them on purpose, the only option is to find them in recordings where someone else has capture these sounds by accident.
Perfect example: someone sets up to record a school theater performance. During a quiet moment in the play, someone in the audience has a coughing fit.
The practical problem now is how to find such recordings, since most likely the person uploading the recording would not refer to this in the description, and almost certainly would not refer to it on the tags.
And if the uploader referred to it on the tags, it still leaves the searcher no other option but to manually go through each file, check descriptions and listen to many files to actually determine if some sounds withint the recording are 'spurious', i.e., unintentional, i.e., 'incidental'.

One could take the approach of looking for certain sounds that are, by their nature, likely to appear as spurious sounds (dogs barking, birds, coughs,...) - but we would be limited to searching specifically for certain types of sounds and dependant on the uploaders making

Another option would be to search through sounds tagged as 'field-recording', as many of them are likely to contain unplanned elements. But this kind of search would be work-intensive and based on the searcher having to attentively listen through many hours of recordings.

Another interesting distinction which may seem a lot more useful than it is, is the distinction between 'natural' and 'artificial' as guidance for 'incidental' or 'intentional' classification.
Taking a very simple and clearly artificial example: synth sounds. Certainly 'intentional', right?
Well, what if I create a modular synth patch whle blindfolded? I have no idea what I am plugging where, so what will it sound like? (will it blow up?).
Less radical eamples include hitting the 'randomize' button found in many software synths. Or any computer program or synth setup that includes a control item that generates a random or chaotic control signal...

This seems to suggest that searches involving the tags 'random' and 'chaotic' (or 'chaos') may produce some interesting results for the purpose of finding 'incidental' sounds.

Other tags that could be suggested as useful for someone looking for incidental sounds: 'ad-hoc', 'impromptu', 'unplanned', 'unintended', 'accidental', 'incidental'...

As for the point of "what to call an indoors recording? Can I call it a field-recording?"
I guess YES, since even many places 'out in the field' are actually INDOORS: museums, train stations, shopping malls, subway stations, supermarkets, workshops, factories are all examples of indoors locations that can certainly have the tag 'field-recording' applied to them.
So I would have no problem tagging a recording as both 'field-recording' and 'indoors'.
Someone intentionally recording water sloshing in their kitchen or bathroom, would probably be better tagged as 'foley' - this is a term used to refer to sound FX created typically by day-to-day or mundane objects (keys, kitchen utensils, doors slamming, rubbing pieces of cloth, etc). These sounds can then be used as-is, combined with other recorded or synthetic sounds and sometimes include processing (pitch up/down, distortion, reverb,...).

Haaha.., a very long but very interesting read AlienXXX

Back to the pragmatic, I think too many or questionable tags & filenames clutter up the search process. I've come to feel bad I named one of my sounds windroar_blackbird_blahblah.. I cant help wondering how many people needing a blackbird wasted time listening to 8+ minutes of wind any never even spotted the 500 milliseconds of bird squawk halfway through. Even I'm not sure I can spot it today.

Still, I think the philosophical angle is good food for the creative spirit, and in large part that's what it's about.

Perhaps there should be a Dare based on creating something to catch a mood from a very specific but obscure search term, if it's not already been done.