Understanding depth & space

You implicitly already understand how depth and space works—let’s make it visually explicit:

Depth is a perceptive function of space
It separates what we perceive as upfront from what we perceive as background:
1. Foreground: highest perceived level of detail
2. Background: lowest perceived level of detail

Further observations:

The lens upfront contains an unfiltered range of contrast and detail (clarity)
- You can identify the letters as letters, despite being ML gibberish
- Group them as part of the lens, not the camera body
  - Which has more information than the background, therefor must be closer
The background is composed of bandpassed and diffused range of information (blur)
- It’s an almost inseparable mush of ground, streets lights and reflections
- Yet, the bright street lights appear closer to the camera
  - And that there’s probably something behind them

To put this into the context of sound-design and mixing¶

A great sense of depth and space requires contrasting separation from the clarity upfront
- 💡 If the frontstage of your mix lacks clarity in itself, the more challenging it becomes to create depth
- 💡 Levels and filters are the most important tools for reducing information, to separate the front of a soundstage from the back
- 💡 Diffusion (eg reverbs) without filtering
- 💡 Depth does not equal width