Subtitles On: Why is movie dialogue so hard to understand?

listening to 20,000 Hertz.

What you're hearing is a clip from Terminator 2.

Back in the early 90s, it won the Oscar for Best Sound.

In the scene, Sarah Connor is escaping from a hospital.

Then, she runs into the Terminator played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, and she is terrified.

But I want you to focus on the soundtrack.

On her screams, you can hear some added reverb.

There's also some foley as Sarah scuffles with the hospital staff.

There's some dialogue.

And there's some punchy sound effects once Arnie starts throwing people through windows.

By today's standards, this sound mix is actually pretty tame.

Nothing feels overpowering, and the music is kept fairly low.

I don't find myself thinking about the sound at all.

I'm just completely lost in the story.

But lately, it seems like anytime I watch a movie or a TV show at home, I have to constantly ride the volume on my remote control, and it's really annoying.

A sound effect like an explosion will be way too loud.

So I turn it down.

Then someone says something and I can't understand it, so I turn it back up.

What happens if we don't?

I'm not sure, but I don't want to find out.

Then the music ramps back up

and it's so loud that I'm worried my neighbors are going to call the cops.

So I turn it back down again.

This goes on and on.

And I'm not the only one who's noticed this.

Our listeners have too.

It's not only movies, but it's also some television shows as well.

You have to crank the volume to understand the dialogue and then when the music comes in, it's deafening.

And you can't really hear what the characters are saying because the music is just so loud.

Okay, I cannot tell you how frustrating it is to raise the volume on your laptop or your television and still not be able to hear the dialogue.

Most of the times I just prefer to watch them at home where I have the possibility to turn the captions on.

And it's quite bad because it disconnects you from the film.

Today, more and more people are relying on subtitles to understand movies.

That's 20,000 Hertz producer Ashley Hamer.

In a 2022 survey, half of the respondents said they mostly watch movies with the subtitles on.

And this isn't just older people who might have hearing issues.

Young people in high school and college are actually the most likely to watch with subtitles.

Now, even if your hearing is perfect, subtitles can be really useful.

Maybe there are kids running around the house while a movie is playing.

Or maybe you're watching something late at night and you just don't want to wake people up.

But in a perfect world, unless you're hard of hearing, you shouldn't need subtitles.

When you're busy reading, it's harder to appreciate all the visual details on screen.

And when you read the punchline of a joke before the actor delivers it, that ruins the joke.

Overall, it just makes the experience less immersive.

Surely Hollywood knows about this problem.

So why does it keep happening?

One theory is that it starts at the source, the actors themselves.

Theory number one, the actor's delivery.

I think Tom Hardy is probably the prime example.

That's journalist Ben Pearson.

He wrote a great article in Slash Film about this very topic.

A through line for a lot of his performances is that it's just simply difficult to understand what he's saying.

Sometimes he's wearing a mask.

Peace is cost to your strength.

Victory has defeated you.

Sometimes he's mumbling a lot.

Now, you might think a director would just ask an actor to redo a mumbly take, but that doesn't always happen.

Some directors will correct an actor repeatedly and tell them to do something differently.

That's Tom Curley, who's an Oscar-winning production sound mixer.

And some directors, either out of fear or out of respect, will allow the actor to interpret the role entirely on their own.

Theory number two, an over-reliance on technology.

So technology is actually kind of a double-edged sword because you would think that, you know, now there are all these different effects that can be used to potentially clean up audio.

But when things were actually shot on film and edited with tape, it was a much more laborious process.

This meant that filmmakers had to be much more strict about getting the dialogue just right when filming, because fixing it after the fact was much harder than it is today.

But with the rise of digital audio, that means you can go in and tweak specific lines of performances and try to increase the intelligibility of a given line, but it also gives editors access to thousands of effects at the click of a button.

And one Oscar winner told me that a lot of times it comes down to a mentality of, I have this toy, so I'm going to play with it.

So as they've been playing with all this stuff creatively, the necessity for that crystal clear, upfront dialogue has sort of fallen behind.

It's almost like that Jurassic Park line.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should.

The enticement of having total creative freedom to do whatever you want allows people to lose sight of the fact that they still have a story to tell.

Superhero movies, in particular, tend to use a lot of vocal effects on villains, which can sometimes make them hard to understand.

Here's Dormamu in Doctor Strange.

And here's Venom, once again played by Tom Hardy.

him.

Of course, creative vocal effects can be really awesome, up to a point.

It might be sort of a pendulum effect where it's gone a little bit past what the public is happy with.

Theory number three, the decline of sound stages.

Soundstages are big giant warehouses that are entirely designed for filming.

They're sealed off from the outside world, so you can get a really clean dialogue recording.

Back in the day, most movie scenes were filmed on soundstages.

Even for outdoor scenes, they'd use painted backgrounds to make it seem like the characters were out in the woods or out in the desert.

But over the years, more and more movies started to be filmed outdoors on location.

And it turns out, the real world is a much more complicated place to record in.

If we're doing something that is out on the streets or adjacent to real life, then we have to get a lot more creative with problem solving and deal with a lot more things like air traffic and the public and cars and trains, anything that makes noise.

On a film set, there are a few different ways to record dialogue.

Most of the time, there's at least one boom microphone, which is the kind that hangs down above the actors' heads.

And then, for instances where the boom microphones can't be placed in a appropriate spot, then we have body-worn wireless microphones.

Of course, these body mics can't be visible to the camera.

So production sound mixers have to get really creative with where to place them.

And if they're not placed in the optimal spot, the result is a subpar recording.

So, having a skilled crew that knows how to do that in a way that also plays nice with the cameras is a really valuable asset.

And that's something that perhaps anybody can do, but not everybody can do great, and even fewer can do amazingly.

Theory number four: sound is undervalued compared to visuals.

It boils down to sound is not respected enough on sets.

As big budget blockbusters have become more important to the movie industry, visuals have sort of taken precedence over what we hear.

Us humans, we're really visually driven creatures.

So for a lot of people, the visual aspects of a film tend to be more immediately clear than the audio.

Everybody on a film set understands visuals.

Studio executives understand that they can see footage and understand what they're looking at.

Sound is is more mysterious to people.

It's more intangible.

People won't have as much of an understanding of what is required to have intelligible dialogue.

You can see this play out in who's actually paid to be there.

On the average film set, you might see 50 people entirely focused on the visual, but only two or three people focused on sound.

And that means that when there's a choice between a take with a good visual and a take with good audio, the visual take almost always wins out.

If a production sound mixer goes up to the director after a take and says, Hey, that wasn't quite clean for me, can we get one more?

Sometimes the director just simply won't have time to accommodate that request and they'll just say, No, we have to move on, you can fix it in post.

So they'll basically pass the buck to the post-production team to be able to sort of work whatever magic they can to make things intelligible on the back end.

Theory number five: the love of loudness.

Once filming is complete, the next step in the chain is post-production.

Post-production covers everything that happens after filming.

That includes cleaning up the dialogue and adding sounds like wind, footsteps, explosions, and music.

And in the sound mix, all of these things can compete with dialogue.

Post-production sound teams often get pressured to push the music and sound effects really high in order to give a scene more visceral impact and emotion.

This is especially true if the script doesn't do a very good job of conveying that emotion.

But this love of loudness can start to cause problems.

That's because the filmmakers know their scripts inside and out, but the audience only gets one shot to understand these lines.

Editors are constantly trying to battle against this idea of passive listening, which is where they know what the characters are saying.

simply because they've read the script and they've been cycling through takes for weeks while they're working on the movie.

So they have sort of of been reinforced in a way that doesn't quite sound the same to fresh ears.

So, to recap, we've got five possible theories about why dialogue is so hard to understand:

one, the actor's delivery, two, an over-reliance on technology, three, the decline of sound stages, four, sound is undervalued compared to visuals, and five, the love of sweet, sweet loudness.

But there's one final theory that we haven't discussed.

What if the dialogue is hard to hear on purpose?

And what does our resonant sound designer, Dallas Taylor, have to say about all of this?

This topic raises my blood pressure because there's some aspects to this that I don't think sound people want to say to each other, and most certainly that sound people don't want to say to their clients.

That's all coming up after the break.

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In recent years, the dialogue in movies and TV shows has gotten so hard to understand that people of all ages have started relying on subtitles.

This problem can be caused by lots of different factors in the filmmaking process.

Usually, it's unintentional, but not always.

Theory number six: cutting-edge directors.

When it comes to dialogue that's hard to understand, there's one name that comes up over and over.

Christopher Nolan, Christopher Nolan, Christopher Nolan, Christopher Nolan, Christopher Nolan, Christopher Nolan, Christopher Nolan.

Yeah, so obviously Christopher Nolan movies.

There's a scene in his movie Interstellar where Michael Kane's character is about to pass away and it is nearly impossible to understand what he's saying.

There is no need for him

to come back.

The movie that sticks out to me that I had the most hard time understanding was the Dark Knight Wises from a few years ago.

I remember there's two specific scenes where Gary Oldman is talking so quietly that I can't understand him.

For Timmett, the sound design was so loud over the top and in your face that the voices were muffled and kind of got lost in the sound mix.

I mean, it wasn't any particular character that was difficult to hear.

Everyone was difficult to hear it.

And we thought at first maybe that was an issue with the theater sound system because the music was so loud.

It was so much louder than the dialogue.

The music, it's all just like...

But whether you like it or hate it, for Nolan, this is a conscious creative decision.

Yeah, filmmakers like Christopher Nolan try to push the boundaries of sound design and really immerse the audiences in their cinematic worlds that they're creating, even if that means not being able to understand every line of dialogue that the characters are saying.

Nolan does it on purpose.

I think he's trying to emulate the way that natural hearing and natural sound and life works.

When the Hollywood Reporter asked Nolan about the sound of Interstellar, he said, quote, there are particular moments in this film where I decided to use dialogue as a sound effect.

So sometimes it's mixed slightly underneath the other sound effects or in the other sound effects to emphasize how loud the surrounding noise is.

Later, in a biography called The Nolan Variations, Nolan said,

We got a lot of complaints.

I actually got calls from other filmmakers who would say, I just saw your film and the dialogue is inaudible.

Some people thought maybe the music's too loud, but the truth was, it was kind of the whole enchilada of how we had chosen to mix it.

Now, just to be clear, I have a ton of respect for Christopher Nolan.

He's one of the only filmmakers right now who's getting huge blockbuster budgets to make original films with total creative freedom.

Some people, understandably, might be put off by some of his mix choices, but his films obviously connect with millions of people, including me.

Since Nolan is doing this intentionally, he's a bit of an outlier.

When most filmmakers make their sound mix enchiladas, they usually do want the dialogue to be intelligible.

So why does this end up happening in so many movies?

To find out, I sat down with Dallas to get his two cents.

I don't want to write about that first night.

In fact, it was about two hours long, stretched over multiple recording sessions.

But we'll do our best to summarize.

Along with hosting 20,000Hz, Dallas also runs a sound design and mix studio called DeFacto Sound.

They mix all kinds of things.

Films, trailers, commercials, documentaries.

So as someone who works with sound, what do you think the problem is?

In my opinion, the biggest problem is in post-audio.

All right.

It's not a problem with the theatrical mixers, though.

It is not the problem of the sound mixer on set.

I don't think it's the sound designers.

I don't think it's the sound editors.

I believe it's the fact that many of these films never get a proper separate pass or mix in a small room on small speakers.

Right.

I've heard that some might get that, but it's not nearly enough and probably not as heavy-handed as it needs to be.

So it's the film industry.

It's the film companies.

It's tough because it's a really complicated issue that involves production companies, the distributors, the streaming platforms, the contracts.

For me, it really boils down to like the home listening experience.

That experience is not being factored into the decision making.

Right, yeah.

The economics of films are really almost entirely focused on the movie theater.

That's where they make the most money.

So they're going to spend all of their time and energy making sure that in that movie theater, it is as big and as experiential as humanly possible.

Theatrical mixes usually have a huge dynamic range, meaning that there's a really big difference between the quietest sounds

and the loudest sounds.

A mix like that works well in a movie theater because most theaters are really large spaces.

The best compressor out there is our air.

A compressor is something that controls the dynamic range of a sound.

In other words, it evens out the volume.

So when we go into a gigantic movie theater, we have a lot of air between the speakers and our ears.

So we have this very natural, beautiful compressor that's taking that signal and just rounding everything off so smoothly.

Those speakers are really loud and it's pushing through all this air, but that air is causing friction and it's making that signal quieter.

So the louds are brought down and because of that, the quiets come up naturally and it makes it more comfortable.

And it's not just movie theaters that have this lovely natural compression.

Dubstages, which are the rooms where movies are usually mixed, have it too.

So let's say they're mixing an epic space scene for Interstellar.

You could imagine Christopher Nolan coming in, sitting behind the mixboard, and, you know, make it as big as it can possibly be and then, you know, suck it down to like nothing and be really, really quiet.

But when you hear that mix at home, the experience is very different.

At home, we don't have that warm air blanket because our speakers are just so close to us and they're teeny tiny, they're not moving a lot of air.

And that beautiful air compression that we have in a movie theater is entirely gone.

So the louds are louder.

And because of that, the quiets seem even quieter.

But it's not just about compression.

It's about your overall viewing environment.

I mean, movie theaters are controlled spaces where you expect the volume to get really loud.

It's mixed in a way that's supposed to be experiential that doesn't take into regard any other people that would be around the sound source, neighbors, children, any of that.

So you take that mix and you immediately put it onto a streaming service and that mix does not translate.

Now, some streaming platforms and speaker companies have settings that are supposed to help with this.

For instance, there might be one that boosts the frequencies of the human voice, or there might be another that automatically turns loud sounds down.

I totally appreciate that speaker manufacturers and tech companies are trying to help with this, but these tools are really just reacting off of certain frequency levels or volume levels.

And no matter how good the algorithms or tools are, it will never replace a real person listening to this who's a professional.

So we have to abandon the idea that some sort of voodoo sound processing or some weird compression setting is going to fix this.

It's not.

Some people have suggested that video games might hold the answer.

In the settings of modern games, it's pretty common to see separate volume sliders for music,

sound effects,

and dialogue.

You've got to have eyes in the back of your head.

So, why couldn't streaming platforms offer the same thing?

In theory, it sounds pretty logical, but in practice, it might leave people fussing with those volume sliders even more, trying to find the perfect mix.

And if you think about it, forcing audiences to be their own sound mixers doesn't exactly feel like the right solution.

For me, the answer is having real people with real ears in small rooms with small speakers mixing these things and have that as an additional track on the streaming services that says something like living room mix or limited dynamic range.

And, you know, in my opinion, I think that track should be default.

And then you could flip over to theatrical mix.

In theory, the streaming companies could create these living room mixes themselves, but that's probably not very likely.

If the streaming company acquires the rights to a movie, it's a hard sell to have like someone else that the director's not with remix it because it's going to ruffle a lot of feathers of the studios and the directors and the original mixers by messing with that mix.

I mean, they put a lot of time and effort in crafting that.

So ideally, this whole process should happen way earlier and just be built into the post-production process.

The theatrical mixers should just scooch over into another room that's much smaller and then remix it with the director.

Unfortunately, for most movie studios, the home viewing experience just isn't a top priority.

In a culture where we prioritize visuals so heavily, it's very hard to convince a movie executive that, hey, we really need a TV mix on this.

They're going to say, I don't care about the TV mix.

We need need to go make $100 million in the theater.

At the end of the day, solving this issue will mean convincing the right people to spend just a little more money.

I think it's eye-opening to look at a film's budget.

So 95% of it is visuals and actors and all of those things.

Then 2% or 3% to music and then, you know, 2%, maybe 3% to post-sound.

So my argument is that it's just a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a line item of cost to have an expert go in and remix it in a comfortable level.

Will that happen?

I'm not holding my breath.

If it does happen, I am down to do that.

That would be my favorite job in the world: watching all kinds of movies and limiting the dynamic range to a comfortable level to where I could even put it at a slightly quiet volume and be able to experience the entire movie while I have an infant across the room sleeping.

Wouldn't that be nice?

Right.

So this is really just all a job application for you.

Oh, gosh.

Now that I think about it, I'm okay with this.

If the business people in Hollywood won't prioritize these living room mixes, then filmmakers might have to start insisting on them because streaming isn't going anywhere.

And as more and more people choose to watch movies at home, Eventually, these directors will have to ask themselves if they really want to make movies that the majority of their audience can't fully enjoy.

The way that I think about the picture is that in film, television, YouTube, TikTok, those are window frames into another world.

It's like you have a portal into another universe, but it is still contained to the four barriers that's around it.

Sound is the thing that comes out, it physically moves you, it physically vibrates you, it physically surrounds you.

It's the thing that mentally removes those barriers.

So when you have to turn on subtitles to understand it, your whole suspension of disbelief is deteriorated because now that window has words on top of it.

But when you pay a little bit more attention and you give it a little bit more, give it like 1% more of, you know, what the video budget has, amazing things can happen.

I have heard many, many TV mixes that are incredibly emotional.

It's just they are appropriately mixed in the appropriate space.

20,000 Hertz is produced out of the sound design studios of DeFacto Sound.

This episode was written, produced, and reported by Ashley Hamer.

It was story edited by Casey Emmerling and Andrew Anderson.

With help from Grace East.

It was sound designed and mixed by Brandon Pratt.

Thanks to our guests, Ben Pearson and Tom Curley.

And thanks to all of the listeners who sent in their stories, including Bruno, Charlie, Dewey, Jason, Joshua, Malcolm, Michael, Poppy, Ryan, and not one, not two, but three different Zachs.

Finally, Ashley hosts her own podcast where she explores the science behind different societal taboos.

It's called Taboo Science, and it's available right here in your podcast player.

I'm Dallas Taylor.

Thanks for listening.