QuestionHello again, Mr. Smith, and thank you for your recent help. I had asked you a question about analyzing sound of television shows on DVD for inserted, masked comments. You claimed that the ear is more tolerant of audio alterations. By this, did you mean that an "inserted" or even "subliminal" type comment would be picked up by the ear
and registered on some level but would be difficult to detect consciously if we looked for them? That is, they would blend in better and therefore be more hidden? Let me clarify, also, that I have detected much of this already with the naked ear upon repeated viewing; it is just difficult always to discern what is being said.
Another question--how does voice over work for television? Sometimes, during "chaos" type scenes, when everyone is talking at once (a party or dinner scene, for example), things seem to be said in the actors' voices, sometimes synchronized with their lip movements and sometimes not necessarily. I had read that voice overs are sometimes done by other actors with similar sounding voices. How can one tell the difference between an "inserted" type comment independent of the actors and of voice overs and the latter?
Thanks so much for your help once again. Any help would be appreciated.
AnswerHi Lisa-
When I said that the ear is more tolerant of audio alterations, I was basically taking an educated guess based on experience. For example, if you have a photo that has been altered, most people can tell - whether it has some weird lighting, or there is clear pixelation around people's faces, or whatever. If you have sound that has been altered, most people cannot tell. With today's editing software, it is possible to make cuts and alterations to audio without leaving much evidence behind. Additionally, since people cannot hear sounds outside of the range of their hearing, or out of the range of their speaker system's frequency response, it is possible to have sounds above or below the range of human hearing. With other media, such as photos, there exists no similar "hiding space".
Have you ever heard the phrase "hidden in plain sight"? This happens to audio a lot, and people don't hear it because they have untrained ears (outside of professional musicians and audio engineers). I'm not saying that there is a big conspiracy of hidden audio, or anything like that, just that it is *possible* to do this without detection, unless you know *exactly* what to do to unmask the hidden audio.
It is also difficult for many to discern deliberately modified audio from that which is a result of poor-quality editing or poor-quality media. Just look at how awful the video quality of YouTube is and you'll know what I mean... the poor quality video encoding and pixellated "artifacts" in the picture could very easily cover up any deliberate editing by appearing as normal variations.
Some television shows record the audio for a scene in a studio and then over-dub it in post-production editing. This happens for various reasons, including noise in on-location shoots and bad acoustics (too echoey or whatever). They then have to synch up the audio to the video. If it's done on a low budget, or done hastilly, you might not always get a perfectly-lined-up audio track. Sometimes the overdub is not the actor, as you mentioned, although this is rare. Usually this is done when something catastrophic happened to the audio master tapes and they need to recreate the audio and there's no time to bring the actors back in (or the actors are dead or want more money or whatever). There's really no way to tell unless you really carefully watch the movement of the lips.
Hope this helps!
