Woah this is my screenshot
that’s crazy
It’s neat how much the image has degraded
Edit: original image
Title text: “If you can read this, congratulations—the archive you’re using still knows about the mouseover textâ€!
Fun fact: what that audio guy was describing is called “room tone” and correct it’s used for both patching and as a base sitting under all the other audio elements for the mix (music, dialogue, sound FX) and is a common practice after a on location shoot is wrapped to have the whole set “hold for tone”.
The reasoning being it captures the 3D soundscape of the ambient noise in the space and how those noises bounce off surfaces and people that our ears definitely notice when it’s missing like your post says! The reverb of a small office room and a gym would have very different room tones for example. And an absolute void in audio is extremely distressing and it’s why you almost never have absolute 0dB in a sound mix unless intentional.
Source: work in professional production
This is also why all online meeting tools and teleconference systems also have a background tone. It tells you that you’re still connected, you’re live.
I should know exactly what you’re talking about. But not sure I do. Will listen for the slight lack of nothing next time.
an absolute void in audio is extremely distressing
“Here, can you handle this?”
— Alanis Morissette
Genuine question, what do you do for outer space? I know what you mean by a complete audio void being unsettling, and I’ve seen sci-fi movies where using complete audio void for space enhances the anxiety of the scene very well. But when it’s not a complete audio void, what simulates space silence?
Well if you mean creatively, there’s lots of options. But yes, using a complete void of audio can also be an intentional creative choice to force you to feel certain things, I believe 2001 did this for a lot of the external space shots. Cut to black endings to a lot of movies use an empty block of audio too as a punctuation.
A lot of other movies/shows use a lot of different creative options. Like if you’re exposed in space you’d hear your heart and blood pressure sky rocket before stopping, maybe your last breath of oxygen molecules vibrating in your cranium like The Expanse did. You could maybe create the sound of an exposed star bombarding you too. Star Trek often uses ambient engine noises or their ships to fill any empty space in the mix. Another common example is if you’re in a space suit, you’d hear the internal machines and your heartbeat would be super loud. All of these are creative choices of course and not meant to be realistic, which nothing really is meant to be in a movie mix.
Is it not also useful to record the ambiant noise in order to subtract the noise from a record you want as clean as possible?
It will not allow you to just subtract the noise, as specific sound will slightly differ each time, but knowing characteristics might help. But if you plan on doing this, you’re better off with using several microphones in different places, afaik
Im confused. How exactly is the room tone used? Is replayed in the background during something like an A roll?
It’s used in a number of different situations, but its most common use is as fill during dialogue cuts: let’s say you want to put two different pieces of dialogue together, but have a natural pause between them, room tone is necessary to maintain continuity.
In a study during World War II regarding comprehensibility in radio communications, radio static was less destructive to understanding an interrupted statement than no sound at all.
Not a professional, but studied it in college. It’s mostly to either fill in gaps or loud noises.
One thing you can often do is get a “noise print” of the room, and you can isolate someone’s audio basically perfectly. From there you can create a room tone and slap it under the entire track. Now if you need to mute or something you just cut the talking track and the room noise carries over.
If you don’t get a good room tone, say you want to use someone looking at the camera, but the director was talking. If you try to filter out the directors voice, it’s likely going to sound weird because some of the tones overlap with the room. So you mute it and slap the room tone over and you’re good. They often get too much, because room tones vary ever so slightly. If you get a tiny half second sample, unless you get very lucky you’ll pick up that something is repeating or sounds weird. If you have 10-20 seconds you can loop that no problem.
There’s always an xkcd
Sparkling water tastes like when your foot falls asleep.
Terry Pratchett writes about this, how there is a difference between the sound of someone not being there and the sound of someone hiding and not making any noise.
He often writes about how things like bird song can be a type of silence and how a train that always passes at the same time every night, not passing at that time, can wake you up from its absence.
I used to live right next to a big ol’ belltower. It’d chime every hour and on special days, it’d be chiming throughout the day. A friend came to stay and was baffled at how I could sleep and work through it all
I grew up half a block from elevated railroad tracks and it’s the same. People visiting kept noticing the trains going by regularly, but I’d been tuning it out all my life and had to work to consciously hear it.
Later in life I visited my childhood home as an adult, and spent the night. It had been long enough since I’d left that I began noticing the damn trains, and I had trouble getting to sleep.
As someone who has done plenty of sound recordist work, it’s known as ‘room tone.’
Also, I feel seen because I’ve had to explain that so many times. Even to people who really should know.
I don’t work in a sound recording space, but I know this because I had to do a voice recording for a project in middle school.
The recording picked up some extraneous noise in between a couple sentences, so I opened Audacity, took the noisy chunk, and deleted it outright so that there was empty space. It sounded very weird for some reason… so I simply recorded over the gap with me doing nothing, as if I were in between sentences. It worked! And I had no idea why…
Granted, this was less ‘room tone’ than ‘white noise from the amount of gain on my shitty mic’, but same concept.
True silence is usually not an issue though, but there might be other reasons to record the silent room. Like getting the impulse response data, aligning the DC offset or getting the noise profile for noise reduction.
In other words: It’s mostly used a reference rather than the explanation given in the post.
Their metaphor still works though. The length of the wild sound tells me the OP might be talking about an older process before digital noise reduction was as common as it is now where less than half minute is enough. The idea that a “silent” room has a recognizable unique sound or even that a recording setup has a unique sound like internal mic noise is still valid for the metaphor of basically something that is perceptible to humans but difficult to give a well rounded answer as to the multiple variations that exist because they are generally so very subtle.
Like in regards to water and sound humans can tell hot liquid from cold when it is being poured or moved by sound. Actually explaining the difference in words requires a more complicated use of language but you basically know the differences when you hear it.
Since actual silence is very rare (Edit: on Earth before one considers the vacuum of space) and requires tech to purposefully create one can assume they mean just “a room where no one is talking” which weirdly itself is a more antiquated definition of silence .
‘Silence’ is a highly contextually defined word, with many social, physical, and metaphorical uses, each of which shifts, depending on your intent.
Three versions of the word are running through the recordist’s mind at this point: silence as in hold your tongue and twitches, as an artifact captured as ‘room tone’, and as the absence of unwanted electromagnetic signals in the toolset.
If you want to be fussy about usage of the word, you really have to pin down the intent of both speaker and audience.
To be fair, a simple word like ‘set’ is similar in complexity of usage. ‘Silence’, however, carries a lot of baggage wherever it is used.
Such is the case with most things in language. We really are translating thought through an imperfect medium to reassemble it on the other side in someone else’s brain. Linguistics being what it is that imperfection leads most of the time to pedantry. The idea of “silence” as an absense of sound translates very differently when you start looking at sound with the technological equivalent of a magnifying glass versus just the naked ear.
I know you’re referring to true silence as a patch over in movies, but https://www.classicfm.com/discover-music/worlds-quietest-room-microsoft-anechoic-chamber/ it seems like people have a real struggle with true silence in that it’s very difficult for anyone to even have an hour of true silence.
I just found this interesting is all
Yes it’s fascinating for sure, but a “scientifically silent room” is a very different phenomenon from someone watching a TV show on a TV not producing fake silence in their living room, where there is already noise and reverberation.
You can turn the volume down already if you want to experience the non-phenomen of not having a TV produce noise. It will not upset you, I promise.
The reason why people get disoriented in silent rooms is the lack of response from reverb and/or lack of sensory input at all.
Addition of ambient noise to an audio signal is for other reasons. With proper mixing and envelope control you will not experience cutting in and out of silence. However, audio production is a lot more complicated than just cutting audio together. It makes sense to create or simulate an entire “enviroment” at which to throw audio at, sort of like priming a canvas before painting.