Sounds alive

First published in Column 8 on 16^th October, 1991

Even given the trend in newer movies to overlap speech and add all manner of extra noise, I’d been puzzled for a while as to why, when these same films appeared on television, I found the dialogue increasingly difficult to pick up.

Since I can be woken at night by one of my kids rustling the blankets three rooms away, I knew the problem wasn’t deafness.

Recently we went and watched the video version of My Left Foot at a friend’s house. Between telephone calls, children getting bored, and my youngest son re-enacting World War II behind the couch, hearing the dialogue was difficult.

But that wasn’t all. Many of the words seemed to get washed away in a muddy flood. Extreme concentration was required, and not only because the main character’s speech was so impeded.

Frustration finally forced us to invention: after reading about the fact that much of our television – including the videos we play – is actually being transmitted in stereo, my son and I decided to do a bit of electrical engineering.

We stuck a stereo cassette player that had seen better days on our television, wired it to the video via the connection we’d purchased for copying my brother-in-law’s trip-to-NZ videos, screwed the speakers to the wall and hey presto, instant stereo.

And if you’ve never tired it, have a go. (Of course you can have a go more ‘professionally’ than we did.) As they say in the ads, you’ll be amazed at the difference.

Sounds that never get a chance to be heard above the general racket of the average living room now make their presence felt, coming across crisp and clear.

Contrast our viewing of My Left Foot with the first film we saw after introducing stereo – Mississippi Burning, with Gene Hackman. We’d watched it with normal television sound; later we played the recording back in stereo.

Now thunder rumbled in the background – there’d been no hint of it before – in fact, you wondered why the sky was often overcast. As Hackman and Willem Dafoe crunched across the grass, every blade could be heard bending and crying out for mercy. When one of the baddies came home and (yuk!) beat up his wife, the smashing and crashing nearly splintered the set – the television set, I mean.

The experience took me back to those marvellous days when cinemas were first fitted with wide wide screens and stereophonic sound. In the Regent Theatre, with its sound system hidden amongst the Arabian Nights decorations, I remember watching Lawrence of Arabia while magical Maurice Jarre melodies swept across every seat in the cinema.

Every booming bass note, every tinkle of Siamese cymbals was audible in The King and I, along with Deborah Kerr’s heavy breathing after Shall We Dance. The opening sequence of West Side Story brought strange whistling noises out of each quarter of the auditorium as the camera floated eerily above the deserted streets.

Now I know my living room will never quite equal the magic of a spacious 1500-seat cinema with its ceiling full of twinkling stars. Nevertheless a vastly improved kind of sound these days accompanies our television viewing.

Even Marlon Brando, method-acting mumbling in his Godfather role, would have his every word heard.

Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif in Lawrence of Arabia

I’m interested to read about this amateur method of stereophonic sound that we ‘installed.’ I have no memory of it now, and it seems most unlikely that I had much to do with its invention, being a bear of little brains when it comes to such things. I imagine my number one son (who would have been eleven at the time) was the ‘inventor.’

These days, of course, things have got much worse rather than better. You’d think that modern televisions would have vastly better sound than they used to, but in fact the sound seems worse, and we’ve resorted to using a round boom speaker that (mostly) clarifies what’s being said on-screen. But better still is the presentation of movies and TV series (on Netflix at least) with sub-titles. We watch practically everything that way, and it’s only occasionally annoying.