I was watching some eps of TNG last night (my family gave me season 1 last month for my b-day - woohoo!) And I started wondering something I never really thought of before.
I had always assumed communicator badges operated sort of like 2-way radios, essentially with a mic and speaker. But on Angel One the away team consistently stood and peered upwards when communicating. Which I had a hard time figuring out.
It looked as tho they were facing in a direction that the orbiting ship might be (unless, of course, the orbital path took the ship behind them!)
But wouldn’t it be against human nature for someone to look up and away if they were responding to communication emanating from their chest?
Or are the communicators’ speaker capability so advanced that they are able to cast their messages such that they appear to be coming from the direction of their source?
When I raised this with my family, I got little assistance. In fact, I believe smartass kid #1 said, “So, that’s the only thing you have trouble believing about Star Trek?”
Then smartass #2 derailed my question by instisting on debating whether the Federation was a Socialist society.
So, lacking comfort from my family, I turn to the teeming millions for advice.
Well, one high probability is the actors are fugging up and reacting to the source of the off-camera dialog they are responding to, likely a speaker somewhere among the lights, that is not the actual voice that will later get mixed in. That is, this is a sign of bad actoral handling of something that’s “not there” but will be added in post-prod.
But since in TNG even flushing the heads is done with the dnagblasted subspace fields, the technobabblists would probably make up the excuse that it is not a mic-and-speaker set up, but rather the commbadge sets up a subspace force-field that causes the air itself around your head to go into vibration to make sounds. In such a case, you could imagine that someone responding to a disembodied, out-of-no-particular-direction voice, would instintively tend to focus attention away from their surroundings to minimize distraction. Either that or close their eyes. So they could either look up or bow their heads, and the latter would look too much like it IS a common mic-and-speaker.
Meh. I always thought the combadge thing was dopey anyway. How are you supposed to change frequencies, or use them as a beacon to triangulate the position of your first officer when he’s high on spores?
Nah, I don’t think anyone’s going to come up with a reason for the sound to come from anywhere but the badge.
However, I really disagree with the idea that it’s “human nature” to look elsewhere when sound is coming from a badge. Suppose you’re talking with someone on a walkie-talkie who’s two blocks away, and you can see each other in the distance. Is it weird to look at the other person while you talk to them?
I disagree as well. One of my private amusements is sitting in a business meeting with several people on a conference call and watching grown adults staring intently at the speakerphone to which they’re talking (and listening).
Obviously, you can look anywhere you want, and the phone will still pick up your voice; and sometimes, extending the amusement, I do exactly that, talking to someone on the phone while looking at somebody else actually in the room; the discomfort is subtle, but palpable, as it’s evident I’m breaking some kind of “rule” even though nobody knows what it is. Despite that fact, in the real world, people just go on staring at the phone.
I find it funny because I always think about dogs: You point at something you want them to look at, and they look at your pointing hand.[sup]*[/sup]
And even though it makes no sense, we keep staring at the phone.
[sup]*[/sup]Yes, I know some behavioral studies have indicated that certain dogs have figured out that they’re supposed to look where you’re pointing, and that there’s evidence of evolutionary pressure in this slow change, but most dogs will still look at your hand.
What I never understood was how communicators sent their broadcasts in real time. If I say, “Bridge to Captain Picard”, how can it broadcast that in real time to a certain commmunicator, given that I didn’t name the recipient until the end of the statement? And the people invariably respond immediately, so it doesn’t seem like there was time to store the whole message, process it, and then broadcast it to a specific receiver.
Actually, it seems to me that starting at a conference phone makes it easier to listen to it, assuming your ears work equally well (if you were partly or wholly deaf in one ear, I expect you’d turn that ear toward the phone).
In any case, the need to look at the person you’re talking to isn’t that strong, or we’d have had videophones long ago. Personally, I prefer the audio-only because I’m not trapped by the video and can look at other things while carrying on a conversation.
In any case, I can imagine people get out of the habit of looking directly at the chest badge because doing so would hurt your neck and possibly make it harder to speak. I’d be a little surprised if a lot of people didn’t have the habit of just taking the badge off and talking directly into it like a miniature cellphone, but that just makes for confusing television.
I had always assumed that all communications were heard through every communicator throughout the ship until a friend pointed out “Then why don’t you always hear things like ‘3rd Science Officer Profit to Cook Third Class LoCocco’ broadcast all the time?”
It’s funny this came up, because when I was a kid, I used to think that the landing parties could see the Enterprise in orbit from the ground.
I know, stupid, but hey, I was like 8 years old, and reading the old Bantam Books novelizations of the TOS scripts, and several of the covers showed that kind of perspective. And then there was the scene in The Enemy Within, with Sulu and the rest freezing on the planet Alpha while the Transporters were inoperative and Kirk’s evil manifestation was raping Yeoman Rand, and Sulu begs for them to lower down a pot of coffee on a long rope.
For a long time, I actually wondered why they didn’t go find a long rope.
Perhaps the comm device patches directly into into your aural processors in the brain, bypassing the need for air to carry sound. Would be especialy helpful in non secure situations.
My friend and I were working on a parody of ST TNG many years ago. In one scene, a crewman asks Riker what he’s looking at while he’s talking on his combadge.
The thing that’s always bugged me is how do they know what speechs is intended for transmission and what is not. People move seamlessly from one to the other and the damn things keep up. How though!?!?
I really have to stop worrying how nonexistant technology works. It’s like asking how Wile E Coyote keeps surviving all those long falls
Ahem folks…? Read again: theory # 2 is that the commbadge, using subspace fields, or tachyons, or tunnelling beams or Rigellian pixie dust, makes the voice seem to come from around your own ears, NOT from the pin on your chest. The speakerphone is not a right comparison because in that case you KNOW the speaker and the mic are on that place in the desk, so of course you will aim your attention in that direction.
My money still is on that they’re looking at cue cards, tho.
… and for good measure, in the TNG All Purpose Whiz Bang No Problem What-You-Want-Is-What-You-Get techbabblese, there’s no microphone either – the Field also detects remotely, w/o any need for mechanical contact, what sounds are coming out of your mouth.
Arch - I don’t think your walkie talkie exaple compares. In that case, you are looking at the person who you know is the source of the transmission.
I can imagine a situation where you are gaining audio info, and look around to see what other info you can obtain at the same time. For example, if you get a walkie talkie signal from someone out of sight - or a cell phone call - you simply blat away while continuing with whatever you were doing (irritating the hell out of people around you as you do so.) Sometimes ST characters will continue with their efforts while communicating, such as when Jordi is examining some rock through his Timex watchband, while informing the ship that it is unlike anything he has seen before.
But often ST landing parties tend to freeze, and all look upwards at an angle in the same direction. If inside, they appear to be looking for cobwebs where the walls meet the ceiling. Which, come to think about it, tends to resemble my behavior during most conference calls at work…
I read within the last two or three years that some R&D lab or other is working on a cell-phone component that fits snugly over (or into, or something; don’t recall exactly) a user’s back molar tooth. The device can pick up your voice, of course, and its “speaker” works by transmitting vibrations directly into your skull so you hear the call but nobody around you does. Aside from the amusement of people talking to themselves without the cellular headset to distinguish them from the crazies, this would be ideal for those secure situations; everybody on a team can listen to a broadcast while outside observers perceive only silence.
I’d be willing to bet they’re just looking in the general direction of the camera, wherever it’s set up. Professional actors know that “face time” is valuable, especially in a medium like television where you’re competing for every second of exposure, and they’d rather have the viewer see them at a three-quarters angle at most rather than in profile or, worse, the back of their head. So when they get on the soundstage and the director’s got the camera up in the rafters for the master shot, the actors naturally look up toward it, and then have to keep looking up for subsequent angle pickups for continuity.