So when I pass by my neighbor’s door, and I hear the noise someone bleeding in the movie makes(no music, no suspension sound effects, plain pain moaning), I initially know it’s a movie.
How? What exactly makes the sound of a person moaning from pain different from an actual person moaning, that doesn’t make 1000’s of false alarm 911 phone calls everyday all around the globe?
In: Technology
I think it probably has to do with audio processing and the dynamics in sound being different to things not recorded. Speakers have a range of frequency and information probably get lost or manipulated making it sound not “real”
Typically at least in music sounds get compressed bringing the peaks and dips closer.
Sorry i don’t have a definitive answer
Many possible factors.
First and foremost, 99% of all sounds that you could hear from a TV are compressed to save storage space or broadcast bandwidth (depending if it’s a disc, streaming, or cable/satellite/over-the-air TV signal). This limits the range of frequencies available, so you are picking up subconsciously that the sound of the screaming is artificial because certain high and low frequencies are just missing entirely. An extreme example of this is how people sound different over the phone.
Next, all modern TVs have two or more speakers, so there’s a subtle difference in the timing of when you hear the sound. We are very attuned to this, because it’s how we can tell what direction sound is coming from, but hearing two identical sounds from the same direction is an immediate tell that it’s artificial. The effect is even stronger the more speakers are added. I mention this, because if your neighbor WAS being slaughtered, you would only hear one main sound, not two.
And finally, the sounds of someone being slaughtered on TV are often highly exaggerated and not really accurate to real life, because they need to enhance the spectacle. As an example, look to Sir Christopher Lee’s famous quote about the Lord of the Rings, where he told the director that the sound of someone being stabbed in the back was not at all like what had been scripted.
Human ears are incredibly good at locating sounds in three dimensions, subconsciously, including tone and time shifts from echoing off of surfaces, and combining that into a mental image. While it’s not unique to humans, it’s still a fairly unusual ability in the grand scheme of creatures with ears.
There are a few clues your brain uses to determine that it’s not real, and given a high enough quality setup you can actually reproduce these for yourself, it’s pretty fun. In no particular order, some of the bigger ones are:
* Most speakers have a more limited range of sound than actual human voices, so you hear missing tones
* The locations from a pair of stereo speakers tell you that it’s two sources, not one, and therefore not real
* Human voices don’t radiate like a speaker, so the echoes are wrong
* Some recording media lack dynamic range and frequencies compared to a human screaming – especially older media
Now if you correct for all of those – big high quality speakers, a good recording, and position yourself so that the multiple speaker sources sound like a single location, and suddenly it sounds real. And that’s how a good home theater works.
By the way, there are some false 911 calls from this still. 🙂
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