Where do imaginary animals go?

[iluvcapra]

For example: dragons, demons, banshees, aliens, things like that? This is an issue for sound effects libraries.

[dpwe]

That's a lovely problem!

One of the principals for deciding what to include is whether an "average listener" can recognize it. At the very least, there needs to be some kind of common understanding of what the sound is. I would argue that "Dragon sound" is not a very well-recognized class. Although .. I guess there's a flamethrower-cum-roar sound that could be pretty evocative.

I have a much clearer idea of what a banshee sounds like, and I guess there are a large number of synthetic "radiophonic workshop" sounds that would be nice to include.

I could imagine an "Imaginary animals" top-level subcategory to "Animal sounds". Then, I'm not sure if it would be right to put Banshee there, or whether there ought to be an "Imaginary humans" (and then maybe "Imaginary things") too.

[iluvcapra]

I would argue that "Dragon sound" is not a very well-recognized class. Although .. I guess there's a flamethrower-cum-roar sound that could be pretty evocative.

I have a much clearer idea of what a banshee sounds like

I think if you're using "average listener" criteria in that case you're going to run into cultural issues when you talk about fictional entities, and these are themselves even going to fluctuate over time. I have a lot of sounds in my library that are labeled "zombie" but would have just as well been labeled "ogre" sounds 30 years ago (and sounds created either way are perfectly valid when used in a zombie attack scene).

And of course many zombie and ogre sounds are human, in the sense they were originally performed by a human and then post-processed, but this isn't universally true. Many monster sounds are hybrids of human and animal recordings. And then some are purely synthetic, like the monster from Carpenter's The Thing, which I wouldn't know HOW to categorize.

I note that Wordnet considers "deceased person" to be a direct hypernym to "zombie" but "imaginary creature" to be a direct hypernym to "monster."

[iluvcapra]

Just curious but have you consulted with anybody from the entertainment industry on this? In sound design we're having arguments about this stuff all the time :)

[genema]

hah, thnx a lot