Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524736
C I N E M A A U D I O S O C I E T Y. O R G 13 b y J o n G r e a s l e y C A S Last year, as a result of my articles about the history and spotty implementation of loudness standards in broadcast, I was asked to join an AES committee on dialogue intelligibility and the increase in subtitle use for home theater. Greg King and myself had previously inter- viewed Jim Starzynski, Co-chairman, AES Technical Council, Broadcast and Online Delivery, about the CALM Act, and he was putting together a panel of experts (including me, for some reason…) to try and shed some light on the subject. Jim, for a little background, is one of the principal authors of ATSC A/85 (the paper that documents practices made mandatory by the CALM Act, that precisely describes how BS.1770 is supposed to be implemented in the US). He is an authority on broadcast audio, and I knew he'd shepherd this new group to an honest data-driven conclusion, so my answer to his invitation was an immediate yes. The committee includes Jim (in this role as Chairman, AES Working Group on Dialogue Intelligibility) and myself, along with David K. Bialik CBT; Hannes Muesch, Sean Richardson, and Scott Norcross from Dolby Labs; Scott Kramer, manager of Sound Technologies at Netflix; Robert Orban from Orban Labs Inc.; John Kean, AES BOD; Richard Friedel, retired Fox executive; Derek Barrentine from Comcast; Robert Bleidt from Fraunhofer USA; Rainer Huber, Hannah Baumgartner, and Jan Rennies-Hochmuth from Fraunhofer IDMT; Bob Katz of Digital Domain Mastering; Mark Johnson and Martin Walsh from Xperi; Matthieu Parmentier from France.tv; Steve Morris and Scott Levine from Skywalker Sound; Manuel Briand from Disney Entertainment, and ESPN Technology; and Scott Isabelle from Amazon. The goal of the committee is to create a paper that outlines the possible causes for increased subtitle use, and to make some "best practice" recommendations for the industry as a whole, along with for consumers setting up their TV sound systems. My role was to represent the post sound community, and so while this article will detail my takeaways and opinions about the myriad causes and issues we identified, I'll mainly concentrate my conclusion on the aspects we actually have control over in our workflow. I'll start by saying that, just because there's a lot of noise around dialogue intelligibility and subtitle use, it doesn't mean there's a legitimate, widespread problem. Indeed, not everyone that uses subtitles does so because they can't understand the dialogue, as odd a statement as that may seem at first. In my view, we are currently in a "loudest voice" period of human history, in which the squeaky wheel seems to desperately, even perversely, longs for the grease, and sometimes even demands it as a matter of entitlement regardless of how that might affect the rest of the machinery. But we owe it to ourselves to separate the signal from the noise, so … here goes. COURSE OF THE RESEARCH The course of our research and discussions revealed a few quantifiable truths: Subtitle use IS on the rise; streaming companies such as Netflix have data to support this, and they are by no means the only ones with statistics to back it up. The reasons for it are less concrete and somewhat open to interpretation. Listening environment is a factor—people are able to watch ever more content on the go. You can watch a movie on your phone, on a flight, bus or train, and this is inherently not an ideal playback situation from the standpoint of ease of listening, as good as noise canceling headphones are getting. Living spaces have changed since the 1970's when there was a lot more thick carpet and drapery in the average home, whereas home design today is comprised of more flat, hard surfaces and open, reverberant space, which can be considered a step backward from an acoustics point of view. There is a cultural and psychological aspect to subtitle use, which is largely generational and skews certain ways in different age groups. You might expect that older demographics use subtitles more often, and you'd be right—there's data to suggest that older, more naturally hearing-impaired viewers have a hard time understanding dialogue even when all the other factors are working in favor of intelligibility. But it also skews up for younger viewers, and the reasons for this are less obvious: Younger audiences don't have the life experience and familiarity with different dialects, lexicons, and accents that