Now Hear This
Sometimes I get home from work and tell Mrs Zed what happened at the office that day. Sometimes she doesn't believe me. She goes silent, her jaw drops and her mouth just sort of hangs open like an oven door. Well, like our oven door. I must get that seen to.
"Today we had our fortnightly meeting of all the ±«Óãtv Scotland department heads and a guest speaker arrived and told us to munch on shortbread fingers while pressing the palms of our hands tightly against our ears."
This is a true story. It happened just last week when Richard Bates - who works with the RNID and other organisations - came to talk to us about the problems some listeners and viewers have in hearing our programmes. 8.3 millions listeners and viewers in the U.K., to be precise. It's all to do with sound frequencies. As a general rule, children and teenagers can hear a wider range of frequencies than people in their late forties, fifties and older. That's when we lose the ability to hear the higher frequencies. One consequence of that is we can't make out speech if there is too much background music, or a competing soundtrack of effects.
We programme makers tend to mix the audio in sophisticated studios with top-of-the-range sound systems. Listeners and viewers, on the other hand, might only have a tiny mono speaker or a duff TV set. Others might be listening in cars or watching the telly in noisy rooms. You can see how the problems begin to mount up.
Then again, music under dialogue is often used to create a mood or emotional impact. Get that wrong, however, and listeners will be left in a bad mood with anger being the only emotion provoked. If you can't imagine how bad it might sound then try watching telly while crunching on shortbread and pressing your hands against your ears. Yes, that was the point of that little exercise. Not so silly after all.
Anyway, since last week, I've been making a list of some of the possible problem areas on ±«Óãtv Radio Scotland. Music under headline sequences in news programmes, presenters speaking over the travel sting, and the opening menu of a live programme with audience applause running underneath.
Oh, and we've found another problem too. Apparently there's a high pitched tone that sometimes appears on our DAB transmissions. We oldies who run things around here had no idea it was happening. A couple of teenagers e-mailed us about it.
Now doesn't that take the biscuit.
Comments
or to comment.