Hacker News Reader

Comment by Pasorrijer | Hacker News Reader

A response to your edit, I was on a zoom call with current musical editors / producers and that is 100% part of the problem. Many of today's actors /actresses almost mumble their lines and make it absolute hell for the audio people to pick them up, whereas theatre trained individuals were loud and enunciate the crap out of everything.

View on HN

They are trying to be authentic. That is what actors are taught these days, to portray "realistic" characters that move and sound as realworld people. The net result is mumbling and tiny little movements that in turn mandate tight closeups and asmr-like microphone placement. Try that on a stage or in any live performance and you will be called wooden. Compare actors like Samuel L Jackson, Percival Ulysses, Jane Lynch or Rowand Atkinson. They dont need closeups and microphones secreted in hairlines. But they also rarely get leading drama roles, more often appearing as side characters who run on stage to tell the team the dramatic news.

One big problem is that US actors have a history of recording adverts, so they are not classically trained, unlike a lot of British actors who have backgrounds on the stage and so have learned to speak clearly.

I hate having to watch movies and TV with the subtitles on — the mumbling may be realistic, but I'm paying for escapism.

You probably hate clips like this. Male characters are dramatic, with big movements and loud voices to portray fear and disorder. The three female characters, including a very tough marine, are quiet and docile to engender escapist feelings of worry and protection. So which volume setting do you use? The camera is forced into an awkward zoom to reconcile the two.

https://youtu.be/VrVZHxH2O1I

"They mostly come at night. Mostly."

I'd say the editors did a good job in this case, considering both "they mostly come at night, mostly." and "game over man, game over!" have both become iconic often-quoted lines.

Good memes rarely come from good writing.

"If I took off the mask, would you die?"

"It would be extremely painful"

"You're a big guy!"

"For you."

hmm, you're probably right.

That is the incredible acting, not the lines IMHO. Imagine Bane played by an average actor - what a corny, laughable display it might have been.

I like it better this way. Theatre like playing in movie come across as fake to me - as bad acting.

When the whole thing is clearly exaggerate comedy, then it don't bother me. But, if I am supposed to immerse myself in the story, it does not work.

Real people aren’t quiet around intense emotions and loud noises. This often comes off really silly, when actual people would be yelling they come off as mumbling to themselves.

Instead, actors are often chatting in front of green screens without any of the appropriate ambient sounds or emotional context.

Real people are often quiet around those. That is as normal reaction as loud yelling.

It’s so subconscious for people to speak lauder in a noisy environment that you might not realize it, but it’s so necessary we have started to program devices to do the same thing: https://www.theverge.com/2021/8/31/22651304/amazon-alexa-ada...

I am not saying intense emotions universally result in yelling, but people very rarely whisper when say calling 9/11. Even just kids playing tag get lauder.

People normally get mute in stressful situation. They normally have troubles to express things, they talk in weak voice, whisper or not at all. They have one word answers to complex questions. And anything in between. Some dissociate and act normal or follow normal script by routine.

They don't whisper to the phone, they will put more conscious effort to talk into 911 call ... or the shaken mute person won't be the one making call.

You seriously never had to ask people to talk louder in noise environment? The "people yell" assumption is artifact of movies, not reality.

Asking someone to speak lauder in a noisy environment is normally because they aren’t raising their voice enough rather than them failing to raise their voice at all. It’s not easy to judge how laud you need to be but the basic feedback of failing to hear your own voice if you don’t speak up prompts raising your own voice.

As to going mute, some people do completely shut down in an stressful situation, but that’s associated with for more than their voice. I have no issue with an actor in a war movie endlessly stacking ammo from point A to B. But if their having a coherent conversation, activity and productively responding to stimulation, that’s very different.

I'm not a native speaker, but, I think it's rather the opposite. It's very inauthentic.

English is a rather unusual language that the meaning is mostly carried only by consonants, while vowels are almost meaningless.

What actors seem to be doing is that they focus too much on their accent, and the vowels that define it, and mostly ignore the consonants. Which means you can only hear the accents, but not what is being said.

> English is a rather unusual language that the meaning is mostly carried only by consonants, while vowels are almost meaningless.

Sorry but this sounds like nonsense. Vowel distinctions absolutely matter in English. Think of how many words would be indistinguishable otherwise: bout, bought, bet, bat, bit, beet, boot, boat, bite, but, and bait are all distinguished from each other only by a vowel.

(And, yes, these all sound quite different to me, an American, though non-native speakers often have trouble making or recognizing some of the distinctions. Some native speakers further distinguish “bot” from “bought”, but I don’t.)

It may sound like nonsense, but in comparison to many other languages, English is super flexible with how vowels are pronounced and toned (entoned?). If you've ever tried to learn a tonal language, or one with more specific vowels like Khmer (which has 33 consonants and 22 vowels) you'd realize how relaxed English can be.

Generally this is in English's favor, I pronounce button differently than my NZ friends, but they still understand me.

American English has something like 15 distinct vowels. That’s not that much less than your citation of Khmer, and way more than many languages. Any claim that American English has a uniquely poor vowel inventory is just wrong.

Perhaps I didn't specify that perfectly. I wasn't saying English is poor in vowels, I'm saying that it is flexible in how you use them. Khmer has 22 specific vowel letters, each letter that indicates exactly how the sound is made, even the differences that of how the previous letter will effect the sound.

English has 5, and no real consensus on how they are used, let alone the tone of voice that you need to use to indicate a specific word.

In tonal languages a rising vowel note is different than a falling, rising and then falling, falling then rising, flat or tumbling tone. The closest English has is the rising tone one makes when asking a question, but that doesn't change the meaning of the words entirely, just the context.

“Letters” are irrelevant. We are talking about the spoken language, not the writing system. American English has 15 or 16 vowels, and (not counting tone) the distinctions between them are just as meaningful as in Khmer or any other language. “Bit” and “beet”, or “but” and “boot” are different words, after all. Where are you seeing “flexibility” in the use of vowels?

Again, we are not talking about “letters” or the writing system here. Yes, there are many distinct vowels that are written the same, and conversely many different ways of writing the same vowel, but that’s irrelevant to the discussion of spoken language.

And, yes, I know what a tonal language is, and you’re right that English isn’t one. It’s hardly unique or special in that. Most languages aren’t tonal.

There are tons of examples, take "no" for example, you can pronounce it 'nooh', 'nah', 'nuh', 'neh', and yet it will be transcribed as "no". That one could be dismissed as negating is a pretty primitive concept.

My previous example of how to pronounce 'button' varies depending upon where you're from...but is still recognized by the most English speakers. Some folks pronounce it but-ton, others but'n.

Water can be pronounce in a variety of ways. Actually the list is endless...I'm surprised you're arguing the opposite. Compared to Spanish, or any number of languages where the vowels are very specific (disregarding the Castilian ascent), English is very forgiving. Bringing up Khmer's letters was to show that the vowel sounds have been formalized in that language, where English allows for much more variance.

Listen to any non-native English speaker, they can be all over the place and still understood.

> Some folks pronounce it but-ton, others but'n.

This is a distinction in consonants! Different realizations of the /t/ phoneme. The whole claim that started this thread was that English expresses information almost exclusively in consonants, not vowels. Your example directly contradicts that very claim.

Anyway, English is _far_ from the only language where different dialects have a different set of vowels. Quebec French for example has completely different ones from French French.

I get that, but it matters very little in a typical sentence. I bet you could understand almost everything with all vowels replaced with schwas.

> I bet you could understand almost everything with all vowels replaced with schwas.

No. Have you tried understanding someone who can only pronounce consonants but also whose dialect is foreign? It's unintelligible. Vowels absolutely serve a purpose. You're just used to hearing your own words spoken back to you in the same way you've always expected them.

Different accents use different vowels, but they remain comprehensible. It's specifically those accents that also change consonants that are taken as hard to understand, such as Scouse.

You can replace unstressed vowels with schwas and usually end up with something understandable. Stressed vowels cannot be schwaed. This is also specific to american English and doesn't work for other dialects, or even all american accents.

> Many of today's actors /actresses almost mumble their lines and make it absolute hell for the audio people to pick them up, whereas theatre trained individuals were loud and enunciate the crap out of everything.

There's zero correlation between how loud someone says their lines and how loud they are in the resulting mix when ADR is used.

There is a limit to how far you can push this for lines recorded live because of environmental noise, but in that case there's more control than ever before because of software like iZotope RX (which is close to magic).

This. These are largely mixing decisions, although it would be kinda weird to have a whispering actor boosted to sound as loud as a train in a scene.

The technical term for this is “Dialogue LRA” measured in LU: https://s3.amazonaws.com/izotopedownloads/docs/insight200/en... - this link also mentions some of the standards around this and now to use their software to adhere to those standards.

LUFS is also relevant here as a measure of loudness: https://blog.landr.com/lufs-loudness-metering/

https://auphonic.com/blog/2020/10/08/dialog-loudness-normali...

and

https://www.pro-tools-expert.com/home-page/2018/11/10/is-dol...

Give some insight into how this works.

Are lines ever recorded live? I imagined that they almost always re-record them in a sound booth later, it just seems like it would be so hard to get good sound on-set in most circumstances.

Yes, on-set audio is often used if possible. Re-recording is a bunch of extra work (you need to pay your potentially quite expensive actors for), needs matching, might not be as "in-the-moment" as the original, ... But re-recording is of course done where needed.

Many of today's actors /actresses almost mumble their lines and make it absolute hell for the audio people to pick them up, whereas theatre trained individuals were loud and enunciate the crap out of everything.

Sorry, but I work with a lot of Hollywood production companies and have been on plenty of sets, and this is a load of crap.

Today's actors and actresses speak their lines just fine. The problem is the trend toward louder audio f/x and music, which can drown out voices if not mixed correctly. See, e.g., Tenet for a horrific example of audio mixing, and the characters can barely be heard even when yelling; compare to The Batman where Pattinson rarely speaks above a whisper but is audible and understandable in every scene.

I always wondered what people have against Tenet's audio. I originally saw it with headphones and using vlc and it was fine. Then I saw it on a TV and it was awful. I wonder if it was tested in normal environments.

I remember that back in the day, actors re-voiced what they said on the set, but from a studio with proper recording gear, and sound engineers mixed these voices into the general soundscape.

Are modern movies shot in reporting style instead, with all the visuals and sounds recorded once and simultaneously? That would surprise me.

In some recent musical-to-film adaptations they recorded the voices ON THE SET during filming, often with no backing track or metronome, and then forced the music director, post-filming, to conduct the orchestra along with whatever the hell the actor was filmed doing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ikqU6G6Xgs

It seems pretty short-sighted to blame it on actors. They are a low-level cog in the machine that are trained to exactly what they are told. It's the job of the director to get the performance out of them that will look good on screen. Can't the sound teams talk to them?

Seems much more likely that, as other posters have said, movies are edited to play on the big screen at high volume.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com