Save Me, White Text!
Posted on | October 7, 2008 at 7:25 am | 10 Comments
I’ve probably mentioned it before, but as I get older I find it increasingly hard to hear certain things, like dialog. This is especially evident when I’m in a large space with a lot of people and I’m trying to concentrate on what one person near me is saying. If I’m at a restaurant with N for example, I sometimes have a hard time hearing what she’s saying from the other side of the table, even if the restaurant isn’t that noisy or crowded. I’ll have to keep asking her to repeat herself, which understandably annoys her. I’m not sure if the problem is with my ears or with my brain, but I’m sure it has something to do with age. Although I rated pretty good in my last hearing test, from what I recall.
This also extends to watching TV. The center channel is already set louder than the other ones, but I’ll still have to turn up the system volume as a whole sometimes to hear the dialog. But then the music and effects channels are too loud. This is even more of a problem of course when people are speaking fast or with an accent. I’ve been availing myself of the closed captioning option on the DVR and the subtitle track on DVDs more and more lately. When we were at the B&B last weekend, N and I watched a DVD there that neither of us could really hear very well, even though we had the volume cranked to the absolute max. But the TV was pretty small and not close enough to the viewing area. We turned the subtitles on for the last half of the movie and that helped a lot. We were finally able to figure out what was going on.
One of the TV shows I regularly watch is The Shield – it’s the only cop show I watch, though it’s far from a traditional one. The dialog is very fast and is filled with slang and odd names. I’ve found that it’s much easier for me to figure out what’s going on when I watch with the CC on. As a bonus, I get to see how some of the character names are spelled, which is sometimes surprising. Sometimes even the spelling of the slang is odd, and doesn’t necessarily help in determining what it means. I wasn’t actually sure I was going to watch the show for this final season, as I was not invested in it from the beginning and only started watching a few seasons ago. Plus I always had trouble figuring out exactly what was going on. The plot is usually filled with double and triple crosses. But now the CC has enhanced my viewing experience so much that I’m really getting drawn into it and I’m anxious to see how the series ends.
British shows are another good use of CC. I remember watching the original Office that way, and it helped a lot. Those British accents are hard to penetrate sometimes. The Doctor Who revival is another one where I occasionally have to turn on the CC to figure out what’s going on. But that show has a major problem with sound design, if you ask me. The music is way too overbearing most of the time, drowning out the dialog. The music is good and appropriate and movie-symphonic, but it’s just too damn loud.
One of the shows I’ve been watching lately on BBC America is Primeval, which is an SF show about a group of scientist adventurers having to deal with prehistoric (and “posthistroic”) creatures invading London due to portals to other times opening up in random parts of the city. The lead character has a Scottish (?) accent, which makes it even harder to figure out what he’s saying. I watched the first episode or two without CC and then was somewhat surprised to find that when I switched over, I had gotten the names of one of the main characters totally wrong. I’m not sure what I thought her name was, but I sure didn’t hear it as “Claudia”. I was initially unsure about this show from the first episode, but it started getting interesting pretty fast. There have been two series (i.e. seasons) of it so far in the UK (the third is currently in production) and BBC America is showing both of them one right after the other. Of course, since this is British TV, the seasons are short (6 episodes in the first, 7 in the second). At first, I thought it was going to be a “monster of the week” show, but then the overall character and story arcs started up and made it lot more interesting than that. It really hooked me when the show underwent a drastic status quo change with a plot twist at the end of the first season/beginning of the second. Usually when that sort of thing happens in an SF show, they fix things and revert back to the old setup pretty quickly, but it’s looking at this point, a few episodes into the second series, like it’s a permanent change. Pretty ballsy. Reminds me of the middle of the third season of Babylon 5, when things went totally off the wire. I think you tend to find that kind of thing more in British TV shows, where the seasons are shorter and more focused and they’re not afraid to take chances with more dramatic show-altering storylines. Each season is like a separate mini-series. And I know I was recently complaining about time travel tropes, but at least in this show time travel is built into the concept, so there’s no getting around it.
Okay, I got a little off track there from my original topic. (What was the question again, Ms Moderator?) Oh yeah… Hearing bad, closed captioning good, subtitles good. Is it all downhill from here? And I was sorta wondering if other people have this issue as well. Do you avail yourself of the CC and subtitle options, even though you don’t consider yourself hearing impaired?
Latre.
Jogged Today: Yes (@ 43°F)
Songs That Came Up On The iPod While Jogging:
- “Transmission” (Fretblanket)
- “Lost and Found” (Echo & the Bunnymen)
- “Down on Terminal Street” (Be Bop Deluxe)
- “Can’t Help Falling in Love” (Lick the Tins)
- “We Got To Leave” (Caesars)
- “The Flag” (Barenaked Ladies)
- “In The Tower” (Yes)
Pet Peeve of the Day: The “DTVanswers.com” crawls at the bottom of the TV screen on our local NBC channel. I swear, last night’s Heroes had the thing up for 5 minutes at least, with the same two phrases repeated over and over again. That’s not the kind of captioning I like!
Videogame(s) Played Yesterday: Wipeout HD (PS3)
Comments
10 Responses to “Save Me, White Text!”
October 7th, 2008 @ 9:23 am
I found myself wishing that the Shane McGowan documentary If I Should Fall From Grace had subtitles. Nothing like trying to figure out what a toothless besotted Irishman is saying!
October 7th, 2008 @ 9:34 am
Nothing like trying to figure out what a toothless besotted Irishman is saying!
Thanks – you just described my childhood.
October 7th, 2008 @ 10:31 am
Joe & I always watch British shows with the captioning on. I usually have no trouble with the classic BBC-type accents, but anything regional and I feel like I’m missing things here & there if I don’t have the captions.
October 7th, 2008 @ 11:11 am
My old RCA DVD player had a feature that I loved. If you hit the “backup a few seconds” button (don’t know the technical name) it would put on subtitles for several seconds. It was like a “what the f**k did they say?” button. I used that a lot.
October 7th, 2008 @ 1:22 pm
I am so glad to know that someone else needed the subtitles to understand the British version of “The Office”. I thought maybe it was just us getting older (and I guess this does not rule that out since we are the same age).
October 7th, 2008 @ 3:16 pm
The ability to hear high-pitch tones begins declining around age 20, thus the high-pitch ring tone that only teens can hear. Most people don’t notice it until they have trouble hearing women when they speak.
October 7th, 2008 @ 4:10 pm
My son needs subtitles. So does my father-in-law sometimes.
But I’m still OK with the TV.
October 7th, 2008 @ 4:13 pm
Lisa: Are those the high-pitch tones that say “You know everything, adults know nothing, and you’re immortal”?
Flasshe: I’m going to assume that as a tech geek, you’ve adjusted the various channels as far as they’ll go to foreground the dialogue? I run into this problem sometimes with my laughably archaic “stereo” TV setup – drives me nuts when all the effects are louder than the dialogue. I don’t know that it’s an age thing (although it might be), but I’ve always had a certain difficulty isolating conversation if there’s too much background noise. I hate trying to have a conversation in an over-noisy place, for instance. Drives me nuts: people at concerts, trying to have conversations while the band’s playing full-blast. I think one reason I never really enjoyed talking on phones is that unless the environment is quiet, I have a hard time hearing it. Yet my hearing also tests just fine… I think it’s some sort of perceptual ability, somehow isolating the relevant frequencies and cadences that indicate speech from all the background noise.
October 7th, 2008 @ 4:55 pm
Beginning in my 30s, I’ve had more and more trouble understanding voices in large places, I suspect in the same ways you’re experiencing. I have to concentrate intensely on the person with whom I’m conversing to understand them. And I’m concentrating to such an extent that if the server drops by and says something, it goes past me. I have to refocus on the serve and ask them to repeat themselves themselves… so yeah, hearing loss or loss of concentration or whatever’s going on in our heads isn’t fun for anyone.
Btw, this entry totally makes me want to get into Primeval. And Rog, I totally concur on the too-loud music on the new Dr. Who – as you say, nothing wrong with the music itself, but why have it blare out those carefully-written lines of dialogue?
I had no trouble understanding the British Office, but maybe I just have a decent ear for a lot of British accents. However, I do remember walking up the Royal Mile in Edinburgh, turning a corner, and going into a record store where I could barely recognize the language being spoken by the store’s denizens as English. Gone were the the lowland Scots accents of the clerks in the more touristy stores. It was probably the only time I had a “wow, this is a foreign country” moment during my two trips to the UK.
October 7th, 2008 @ 5:32 pm
I’m going to assume that as a tech geek, you’ve adjusted the various channels as far as they’ll go to foreground the dialogue?
Yeah, I’ve found that it doesn’t help that much, which makes me think it’s a perception problem. Or maybe I just don’t like the how “artificial” things sound with the center channel too high.