Finally! Why It’s Harder to Hear Dialogue These Days

[jesse_the_k]

The 20 Thousand Hertz podcast dives deep into Why is movie dialogue so hard to understand?, providing six possible reasons why more and more people are turning on subtitles/captions for movies, TV, and the streaming services we use to watch them. Reason six comes with a solution!

Dallas Taylor, 20k.org’s founder, points out video games have solved this problem: most permit users to individually adjust the loudness settings for

• music
• sound effects
• dialogue

Movie sound, on the other hand, is designed to be impressive in a great big theater. But of course most of us watch the screen sector’s output at home.

https://www.20k.org/episodes/subtitleson has both the 30-minute audio and a transcript

I’m a big fan of this podcast, which is often disability-adjacent. In its nine years, it's covered how artists shape sound to convey meaning, how manufacturers tune their devices to be friendly, and how Beethoven created great music when he couldn’t hear at all.

Not surprisingly, many fans work with sound. Taylor solicited listener-produced contributions; I enjoyed the sixteen he chose. The overall winner celebrates the sonic scrapbook a Canadian sound designer keeps of his blind son’s upbringing, and introduces generational delight to the stop announcements on the Montreal transit system.

Accessibility Issue: I couldn’t open the SquareSpace transcript window using my tab key (crucial for those of us who don’t use mice) so I hope this highlight link to the control opens the transcript—let know about trouble/solutions in the comments.

Comments

[thistleingrey]

The link opens the transcript for me with a mouse-click selection, but I couldn't get it selected using Tab, either (albeit in Firefox/Windows, which is probably less likely on average than Chrome to surface things nowadays because no one codes for Firefox support anymore, heh).

In the page source, the transcript "link" is an HTML h2 inside two divs, which means only JavaScript (Firefox thinks it's jQuery) is checking for a click event. I think that may be why a keyboard-run cursor doesn't find it.

ETA Also! Thank you for linking to this--podcasts and I don't get on, generally, but ones with transcripts on cool topics are definitely worth a few minutes.

[jesse_the_k]

Thanks for the specifics. I couldn't get Safari/Mac or Chrome/Mac to respond either. I emailed them about it.

[sasha_feather]

I enjoyed this, thank you! It was new to me to learn that the air in a theater is a "compressor" and affects how the sound moves. Neat.

Their arguments here are very convincing and I hope they "fall on listening ears" lol.

Ha ha ha

[jesse_the_k]

I was buffaloed by the comparison between video game and cinema sounds. Games happen in personal space--the sound usually through a headset, the controller in your hands. Old-style movies are fundamentally public, but that's not how we experience them anymore.

[komadori]

That podcast sounds really interesting. I am mostly blind so sound has become very important to me, and I want everything to be as accessible as possible for every person.

”As accessible as possible“

[jesse_the_k]

is my goal, as well.

Unfortunately, they don't tag their shows consistently. Search reveals five episodes mentioning audio description and designing audio games with blind consultants Steve Saylor and Connor Scott-Gardener and nine shows that include 'accessibility'.

(I just emailed them suggesting they tag better, fix the transcript issue, and yikes! their "submit a comment" page endlessly cycles through every color of the rainbow in 20 seconds)

[celli]

Ooh, I will definitely be checking this out! (By reading the transcript, so extra thanks!)

Transcripts are our friends

[jesse_the_k]

...because reading is faster than listening!

[lunabee34]

This is really interesting! I often have trouble hearing movie dialogue, so it's interesting to know why.

[jesse_the_k]

Yeah, it's not our imagination, nor just noise-induced hearing loss (although there's certainly some of the latter in my case).

[petra]

I appreciated the hell out of this via transcript. Thank you for linking it! I will now commence to pine for the TV Mix of movies.

I want the video game

[jesse_the_k]

options!

Our latest stream tool is a Roku Streambar, which has a "dialog boost" feature. But captioning/subtitles works damn well for most. (Except HULU and Peacock. Disney's captions are A++, but HULU's are terrible. Peacock's are autocraptioned by some cursèd Limited Language Monster.)

[replyhazy]

so, you're saying it's not just me?

[jesse_the_k]

Not just you, not just us, we're the aging boomer bulge ready to disrupt the sound mix industry1