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This is something I pay attention when both listening and especially when making.
I think it is connected also to sound source being ”concrete”.
A lot of electronic music, that is not amplified, and recorded in space, simply does not have the same sense of space. It is just the electronic signal inside the format. No sense of space or volume, until you adjust it from the volume button & pair of speakers.
Some other types of sounds, have a sense of size, space, loudness, build within the sound. Therefore, my decades long passion for seemingly ”old” metal junk crushing, is often tied to its sense of loudness and noisiness. Same for feedback. Even if these may be illusions and volume of recording was not -that- loud. Even the utmost distortion doesn’t appear to me a LOUD. It is just signal inside gadget, perhaps overdrive of cassette, until it is blasted out from speakers.
To record situation what sound loud, is not always easy. Often loudness erases a lot of nuance and detail that actually make noise interesting. Yet when succeeding to capture both, that is among my favorite ways of noise. Physicality, happening in specific space, that you can sense. Not just abstraction of white-noise-generator hissing.
Another thing, I like, is the combination of kind of surreal mix of space that can not exist. Not just room recording, but blatantly ”unnatural” mix of noise. Where stuff like mentioned above, that has very physical, concrete and clear in form, meets unrelated space or ”spaceless” sound.
In mixing methods, I would qualify this ”imaginary” / ”surreal” space very relevant. Where listener is the element. Such as, your brain functioning as mixer. I guess there must have been topic about it somewhere. Quite common practise, where left and right channel feeds sounds that your brain sort of mixes together. Sometimes method used is based on having two seemingly same sounds, yet different, and in headphone listening they merge as one. I was using method long before being aware it was used in more ”psychological experiment”.
I have friends who have passionate dislike for things like reverb effect. Artificial sense of space. I don’t often associate delay or reverb effects to even simulate real space. Seems more of blatant effect, that barely creates the illusion. When they break the sense of ”real space” - such as dry electronics or quiet acoustics are combined with artificial space used in vocals or other sounds, I am not annoyed at all. I tend to like also the ”unreal”, or even ”surreal” feel too. Where space exists in various levels and not just band perforing in strictly limited real location.
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