For example, how do our ears easily discern that someone talking in a room is actually there vs the dialogue coming from a television is not physically there?
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One – commercial audio is heavily compressed – in that soft and loud are similar volumes. Why? So the final product (TV audio, music also) can be heard clearly on shitty speakers or in noisy environments. Or at low volumes (think a parent watching TV while their baby/family is asleep).
Think ASMR, Billie Eilish whispering her songs into the mic, your TV character speaking softly to themselves. It’s all soft, but the volume is blown up. I’d argue this compression sounds natural to us as we’ve been listening to this processing all our lives.
Addendum: there is a lot of other processing going on, and it’s all to make everything sound consistent and smooth and an artificial “natural”.
Two – reverb, or as the layman calls it, echoes. The exaggerated version is obvious – when you are in a cave, you hear your voice reverberating/echoing throughout the cave. Even in a small room, your ear is hearing a mixed signal of someone speaking with their voice reflecting off the ceiling, floor, and four walls surrounding.
TV audio doesn’t reproduce audio with the same intimacy of someone facing you. All that processing we spoke about earlier isn’t tuned for that.
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