As the year continues, many of these posts will be philosophical in nature. Some will be in contradiction to previous postings. These are not intended as truths or assertions, they’re merely thoughts…ideas. Think of this as stream of consciousness over a wide span…
For many years I was guilty of believing that, and I’m not disparaging the importance of sound here, vision was biological dominant over the sense of hearing…that this is just how our brains are hard-wired. One of the examples that always made me acquiesce to this belief is the way vision affects the perceived localization of sound sources. With closed eyes or obscured vision, you may perceive the source as being in a specific location only to have that perception shift as soon as your vision is added to the equation. We make use of this behavior in film all the time. Dialog is typically panned up the center, but our brain “corrects” that when we see a character speaking off to one side…particularly when we have some distance from the playback speakers (as we do in movie theaters).
As you may have guessed, I don’t believe that dominance idea any longer. The thing that broke that belief? Science. Studies which show that music can affect the way we perceive the taste of wine, or ones that show we can be fooled into believing that a chip (crisp for those of you on the other side of the pond) that we ourselves are eating is fresh or stale simply by having the appropriate sound piped to our ears. If sound can affect how we taste, how is it potentially (and subconsciously) coloring our visual experience? There’s an amazing interplay between all of our senses, and I’m glad I was finally nudged out of the mildly defeatist mindset I previously held.
Coincidentally, I was reading about the McGurk effect yesterday. I know you’re a psychoacoustics enthusiast and was wondering if you or other contributors have written any articles about this phenomenon.
I got a bit confused when you cited that our brains “correct” the dialogue’s panning position. Don’t you pan it slightly to the sides when there are characters standing between, say, the left and centre speakers?
It’s rare to actually pan dialog, and for a number of reasons. The convention is to keep dialog in the center channel in both film and television. There are exceptions, of course (the film “Gravity” is an excellent example of that), but the majority of works do not pan critical narrative dialog.
Oh, and to answer your other question…a psychoacoustics presentation with a number of examples can be found here: https://designingsound.org/2014/12/designing-sound-discussion-group-psychoacoustics-for-sound-designers/
That’s very interesting material, Shaun. Thank you for taking your time to do it.