Is there any specific reason, in this day and age of digital production, why profanity bleeps in TV shows are so much louder than the surrounding dialogue? It’s not as if it needs to physically drown out the profanity; the bleeps are added in post-production where they can just replace the cursing with the bleeps.
I’m asking this after another night of getting no sleep. My wife and I live in a townhouse apartment, and there’s no bedroom door. Just an upstairs and downstairs connected by a staircase. So I’m upstairs trying to go to sleep, and my wife is downstairs binge-watching reruns of police reality shows. I have the window A/C running, and a white noise machine, and a YouTube “sleep music” video running. My wife adjusts the TV volume to where the regular dialogue is a low, barely-audible background murmur that blends in nicely with my relaxing sounds.
And then as I drift off to sleep, there’s a sudden, extremely loud barrage of bleep-bleep-bleepity-bleeping-bleeps jolting me back awake. These bleeps are louder than my wakeup alarm on my cell phone!
(And yes, I realize that high-frequency sound “cuts through” everything else, but these bleeps are genuinely much louder than everything else.)
Depends on the show. Some do bleeps, some just cut the audio, some play any number of there sounds over the bad words. Now, why does that one show do it? That’s anyone’s guess. Artistic choice, maybe?
It’s so incredibly annoying on On Patrol Live. Sometimes it will literally be minutes of almost nothing but constant LOUD bleeping. And I know they could simply mute the audio because they do that whenever someone says their identifying information.
There is nothing anyone could say on TV that I would find more offensive than those damn bleeps.
I wish they were encoded so you could turn them off and hear the original audio. It could be a feature on television sets, kind of like how closed captioning is.
A continuous tone can have a sound pressure level (SPL, usually measured in dBA) that is, for example, 50 dBA. The voices and music might reach peaks of 50 dBA (or higher), but it seems lower because it varies so much from millisecond to millisecond. A voice might AVERAGE 35 dBA with peaks of 55 dBA in the same program, but the continuous tone will be perceived as being much louder.
Also, the bleeps are often inserted without ducking the underlying speech. They can’t be too low in volume or they won’t do their job.
But I definitely prefer it when the program just ducks the profanity without adding the bleep.
I like how Craig Ferguson used to do it. The censors would cover his mouth with the flag of whatever country and then cover the profanity with a foreign phrase. Like this
In 2013, when a meteor exploded over the city of Chelyabinsk, Russia, I wondered while watching the news how many Russian speakers were watching the footage and laughing, while saying, “They must not know what those people are actually saying!” A few weeks later, PBS’ NOVA did a show about it, which has been re-run many times, and it was indeed censored.
I have a feeling this trend started after an early Spongebob episode where he and Patrick were discussing “sentence enhancers.” They did indeed use a dolphin sound.
