Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1524736
16 FA L L 2 0 2 4 I C A S Q U A R T E R L Y everything on TV is, shall we say, a pure and honest expression of genuine artistry, there are some TV shows that would surely benefit from a mix approach that truly strives to guarantee maximum intelligibility at the cost of the rest of the soundtrack elements. Fraunhofer's Jan Rennies-Hochmuth points out that news programming commonly has a listening effort score of 0.5 on the ESCU scale, whereas movies are generally around 4 or 5, but can of course, be higher depending on content. One of the biggest factors in Listening Effort is the ratio of dialogue to other elements, be they music, sound effects, or just noise—noise in the track from a tricky set of conditions on the set or indeed noise in the playback space. For this reason, the meter was also tested with playback over speakers in a room that is not acoustically treated in order to more accurately replicate real-world viewing and listening situations, as opposed to directly off-the-source material. Although when incorporated into a mix, the algorithm in practice is more likely to feed directly off the source. The finding here is that the more "cinematic" the content (more competing elements in the mix as opposed to just speech, such as a news or sportscast), the more of a detrimental difference to effort the acoustic space is liable to make. We tested two mixes that I have been involved with. One that has very clean, well-projected dialogue with minimal variance in accents, but mixed with busy sound effects and orchestral score, and another, much simpler, dialogue-driven mix that had more noise and dialect variation. The busier, more cinematic show scored worse on the effort scale. I was surprised, as that mix is very clean and well-crafted around dialogue due to the skill of my mix partner and the priorities of the showrunner who places a high value on intelligibility. But that illustrates the approach of measuring at the phoneme level without the context of the viewers' tolerance for accents, etc. You can't predict how familiarity with accents might affect the viewers' effort, but competing elements in a soundtrack will be perceived similarly for all viewers. SUGGESTIONS FOR PRODUCTION So, this is all very interesting/depressing, but what can we in the post sound community do to mitigate any of this? The answer is … probably going to illicit a variety of responses, but the recommendations I'm going to make, in addition to being empirically demonstrable, are backed up, in practice, in whole or part by some heavy-hitter contemporaries (the AES Committee, along with some mixers I greatly respect such as the aforementioned Greg King, Karol Urban, and Mark Patterson, to name a few). Obviously, all that can be done to encourage choices in pre- production and production that set the rest of the process up for success will be of great benefit. We've all heard and bemoaned the phrase "fix it in post." Whatever we can do to coach our various clients away from this mentality will be of benefit. This is, of course, a bit of a minefield, but casting and directional choices that don't sacrifice clarity for some imagined or vague concept of added emotional resonance would be Fig 2. A prototype GUI of the Listening Effort algorithm showing the color breaks for low, medium, and high LE. Some text is blurred due to the lack of context in this early development stage.