How can you ensure your sound effects will be found? What’s the best way for people to discover your sound library? How will people find your nature recordings?
They’re all good questions. After all, there are tens of thousands of field recordings on the SoundCloud and HearThis sound sharing websites. Any game audio studio or post facility will have libraries of hundreds of thousands of sounds. There are millions of clips spread across Web shops worldwide.
You’ve spent countless hours recording and mastering your field recordings. You know they’re good. But that doesn’t matter if no one can find them. How can you ensure people find and choose your sounds?
Today’s article will explore one way to help your sound effects get noticed: by using sound effects keywords. This post will share what precisely this sound clip text tool is and how it can help you. Next week I’ll share one free and simple method to help you add keywords to your sound recordings.
Describing Abstract Sound FX
Recently those of us on the Pole Position Production team were working together finalizing a new sound effects library. The upcoming release is a collection of electromagnetic sounds.
Of course, EMF sound effects are full of strange noises: buzzes, hums, drones, and so on. They can be used in dozens of ways, such as robots, magic spells, spaceships, or building blocks for other sound design.
The trouble with organizing these sounds is that they are abstract. What one person would name a “coarse buzz”, another person may term a “gritty hum”. The folks at Pole were aware of this. They were determined that these unusual clips would be found easily and quickly – despite the abstract nature of the audio. That’s not a simple task when there isn’t consensus on whether a sound is a “fast crackle” or “active sputter”.
How do you get around this?
There are many ways, however the team focused on the best and simplest: by adding keywords.
How to Improve Sound Names with Keywords
What are Sound Effects Keywords?
Sound effect keywords are terms that help describe field recordings. Sometimes also called tags, they are the “supporting characters” to the headlining “A list” information in a sound file name.
Let’s look at an example sound file name:
Marsh frogs croaking at night.wav
While it’s easy to understand what you will hear when auditioning that sound, that doesn’t guarantee it will be found in sound searches. After all, someone may search for “swamp frogs” instead of “marsh frogs”. What then?
Well, “swamp” isn’t included in the file name, so typing “swamp frogs” into search software may not return results for our nighttime frog symphony. To help find sounds more easily, keywords are added to increase the chance that the sound will be discovered.
Some example keywords for that field recording could be:
toad, amphibian, groan, ribbit, fen, bog, swamp, night, midnight, creepy, scary, eerie
As you can see, the keywords are a list of terms that are related to a sound file name and the audio within it. So, when combined with the filename, the description of the sound is enhanced: filename + keywords. It’s not just “Marsh frogs croaking at night” any longer. It adds the keywords, so the data now becomes:
Marsh frogs croaking at night.wav
toad, amphibian, groan, ribbit, fen, bog, swamp, night, midnight, creepy, scary, eerie
Keywords ensure that someone who types “swamp frogs” will find the “Marsh frogs croaking at night.wav” sound file, since all the terms are available to be found.
These keywords are rarely visible in the sound file name itself. Instead, they are typically tucked away in hidden sound effects metadata that is attached to the audio file, and appear only when the clips are viewed in sound browsing software. They may also be listed in sound shop product databases.
Usually, people type these important terms into sound manager software or sound shop search fields, and related sound clips appear. It’s like using Google, but for sound searches.
In terms of sound effects, keywords are the most important tool to help you find field recordings. Why?
- They are direct: they are used to find an exact match. People type in “cow”, not “horse”, to find what they need.
- They are also short: people use 1-3 of them in a sequence to find results, like “horse passing fast”. It’s rare that most users type many more than that.
- They are understandable. Because keywords are usually only one or two words long, they are easy to read, to consume visually, and to understand.
Keywords and Other Types of Sound Names
Why use sound effects keywords?
Of course, there are many other ways to describe sounds: where the sound was recorded, the name of the sound artist, album title, and many others. These are all used for different reasons: archiving, sorting, flavour text, and more.
None of them beat the usefulness of keywords when you want to find sound clips fast.
Keywords allow instant access to audio in a way that other data does not. They’re far more effective than broad information such as categories, for example. Catch-all info like that produce relatively less meaningful results when finding specific sound effects. After all, no-one searches Google using “kitchen appliances”. Instead, they search for “best juicer”. A search for “car tires” isn’t very helpful if you’re looking for “Corolla winter tires Detroit”. What’s the result of building sound effect names with other nebulous info?
A sound library search using categorical info like “farm animals” forces filtering. With filtering, emphasis placed on broad information requires a sound fan to scroll through general results to narrow down clips to find the exact sound they need. It demands more decision making and provides less precision. As a result, secondary sound text types – microphone and recorder data, SKU numbers, categories, and so on – are helpful add-ons that enhance a sound after good keywords are already written. However, they are not the best choice before, when conceiving how a sound should be named or found. Why?
Well, they misplace emphasis and the results they produce are too broad. When the goal is to help people to find a specific sound, you don't want your sound information to revolve around global information instead of specific info. This makes sound fans struggle to find the right sound. It’s better to focus on the precise sound effect keywords of common, recognizable nouns and verbs people use to search first, and accent them with other types of info after. Broad info may be the delicious icing, however keywords are the cake.
Use these ways of describing sounds, sure. Recordist team, designer name, equipment data, and more are all useful. Just create them last, after you’ve sculpted meaningful keywords. Why?
There are two reasons. Keywords help find sounds fast, of course. There’s another benefit, too. Composing powerful keywords cultivates a mindset of crafting focused, helpful sound descriptions that reflect the intent behind each recording. Contrast that to thinking of the work you create in vague, broad, and less actionable terms. This is why keywords are so powerful: they bypass huge amounts of information and find specific things quickly, while showcasing the fascinating details you reveal in your field recordings, too.
Understanding Sound Effects Keywords
So now that we know the power of keywords, how can you use them? Let’s learn about what types of keywords there are. Then we’ll learn how to compose a good sound effects keyword chain.
Types of Sound Effect Keywords
What role do sound clip keywords play?
The most common are:
- Synonyms: the same subject with a different name (e.g., aubergine and eggplant).
- Related terms: words that do not match, but are inferred due to context (e.g., potato chips and crisps).
- Near matches: terms in the same family, with a slightly different meaning (e.g., wind and breeze).
- Sound-alikes: onomatopoeic sounds that describe the character of the sound (e.g., boing, doing, sproing).
- Emotions: emotional adjectives and adverbs that convey mood and feeling (e.g., happy, nervous, aggressive). (With credit to Randy Thom.)
Choosing Keywords Wisely
As you can imagine, keywords can cover a lot of ground. Why not just add any synonym you can find? This practice is called keyword stuffing, and it’s important to avoid it.
What is keyword stuffing? Well, back in the first days of the Internet, webmasters would do anything to invite Google searches to their pages. They would populate pages with every keyword they could think of. Most often these were hidden behind-the-scenes in the code. Sometimes they were obscured on the pages themselves, hidden with text that matched the background website colour. Google swiftly changed their search algorithm to drop these site’s ranking. Why? The explanation is a helpful way to think about naming sounds.
Sites with keyword stuffing were misleading. You may be directed to the site by an inaccurate keyword and not find what you need. After all, the web designer just threw every word in the thesaurus onto the page in a desperate attempt to get traffic. With so many keywords, it was hard to understand what the page was about.
This highlights the four most important things about blending text with audio:
- Accuracy: the text must describe what the sound is. You don’t want to use the keyword “dinghy” for a rowboat sound. They’re not precisely the same. A thesaurus may mistakenly conflate the two, however.
- Comprehensiveness: the words must describe the sound fully. If a car is driving, passing by, and stopping, all terms should be used, not just the first. That helps readers understand the audio completely.
- Understandable: the text must be able to be understood, and to be read easily. So, this has to do with how legible the text is by using simple language and avoiding industry terms, abbreviations, weird characters, and so on. It also has to be conceptualized effortlessly. That means using common, platform-agnostic, direct terms instead of a jumbled “word salad”.
- Unique: the best sound text is unique. Why? Well, two sounds named the same force a sound searcher to listen. If “truck horn 1” and “truck horn 2” sounds are recordings of short horn honks, that’s usually not a problem. They can be heard quickly in a few seconds. However, imagine a list of 20 sounds named simply “car idle”. How are they different? It’s annoying to audition each of the 20 to find the perfect clip. With unique text, it’s easy to spot the one sound you need: “car idle high RPMs and off”.
Using the Grandma Test When Describing Sounds
Prefer something less stuffy?
Try a simpler approach: ensure your sound effect text can pass the grandma test. What is that?
Imagine showing your sound name to your grandmother. Would she understand what it is? If not, your sound text is too complicated. Think about how you can simplify it.
Nobel Prize winner William Faulkner one criticized fellow author Ernest Hemingway for his simple prose. Hemingway replied:
Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.
The point? Simplicity and understandability are best for consuming information.
The grandma test is vital to bear in mind in the world of Web searches, SEO, general readability, and being mindful of economizing people’s time. It ensures that anyone, no matter their level of experience, will understand the aim of your field recordings. And if your recordings are understood, they will be auditioned. And if they are auditioned, there is a chance they will be used. When it’s just as easy to navigate to the next clip with a click of a mouse, complicated, inaccurate, and niche sound text will be skipped with glazed-over eyes. Nobody has the time to decipher anagrams, cliquey trade short forms, or refer to Google spreadsheets of terms.
Of course, some grandmas may be sound effect keyword wizards. The phrase itself isn’t important. Think of it more in terms of people who are not as familiar with field recording as you are yourself. How can you help these people? They make up the majority of the population on the planet, after all. The idea is to shift the focus from what you prefer to what others need to find, use, and enjoy your sounds.
How to Write Good Sound Effect Keywords
How do you write good sound effects metadata? What are the best keywords for your field recordings?
Of course, that depends on the sound you capture. How someone describes a car and a horse are completely separate. Overall, though, you want to combine all the guidelines mentioned above:
Use synonyms, related terms, near matches, and sound-alikes that are accurate, comprehensive, understandable, and unique. Bonus points: they pass the grandma test and when you’re done, you’ve avoided keyword stuffing at the same time.
Let’s look at our example:
Marsh frogs croaking at night.wav
And here are our example keywords:
toad, amphibian, groan, ribbit, fen, bog, swamp, night, midnight, creepy, scary, eerie
That hits the synonyms and near matches for frogs, marshes, and time-of-day, as well as the sound-alike croaking sound the frogs make. The emotional keywords convey mood that the words alone may not. The accuracy is high, we’ve comprehensively covered each major noun and verb, and each word is short and understandable. We have 12 terms in there so we’re not at risk of keyword stuffing.
And I think grandma would understand it too.
A Sonic Buffet
Some may think such detail and focus is silly. It’s just describing a sound. Isn’t it too much effort for so little payoff?
Perhaps for people who haven’t yet experienced sound’s power to inspire. Sound itself is incredibly rich. Every second and frequency is flowing with changing sonic accents. It evolves; no two moments are the same.
Focused keywords are a way of unlocking this appreciation of sound. Not just in empirical terms, either. Your motivation for field recording is part of it too; the goals you have for capturing sound, the technical choices you make, and your unique perspective of the audio you gather.
How can you describe it all? Certainly not by starting your sonic foundation with a single, broad term. Instead, think about your work – and the sound itself – in small bite-sized conceptual terms. That articulates the field of sound listeners will hear. It helps you express why you’ve created the buffet of sound you’ve harvested. That helps you become a better artist. And it helps others digest your creations, too.
Read More
- An Introduction to Sound FX Metadata 1 – The Basics
- 15 Tips for Naming Sound Effects
- An Introduction to Sound FX Library Categorization – The Basics
- How to Build A Sound FX Library Category Tree
Membership Articles
Want to learn more about naming and organizing sound effects?
The following are articles can help. They’re from the Creative Field Recording membership, a list of carefully curated articles that help you record, edit, and share inspiring sound with others:
- An Introduction to Sound FX Metadata 2 – Beneath the Surface
- How to Choose Sound Effect Metadata Fields
- 5 Reasons Why A Sound Effect’s Name is Vital
- 13 Lucky Tips & Tricks for Sound FX Library Categorization
- How to Apply Categories to Sound Effect Libraries
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