Music and Soundscape in Television...

[Spanky The Dolphin]

So I'm watching Judging Amy in syndication on TNT like I often do when I don't have class this time of day. There's this whole portion of the episode that's set in a bar with a live band playing.

What often happen when they have live bands on TV shows occurs, which is that they don't sound like they're actually playing, and instead, sound like they're synching to a studio recording. The same thing happened yesterday when a scene showed the band going through a rehersal.

Now, I don't have a problem with the actual lipsynching itself. I know that they can't always find actors who can also sing at a professional level, or deal with the production problems that working with an actual band playing during shooting would produce. They can lipsynch until the cows come home and I'd be cool with it.

The problem I have is with how it sounds. Making a live performance sound like a studio recording totally ruins the experience for me. I notice it clear as day, and it pulls me completely out of the diegesis of the filmic world. In my opinion it wouldn't take that much effort to make the studio recording at least sound like it occurring live. Hell, even a kid with a sound editing programme can do that within ten minutes, so it irritates me that for years this hasn't been done by professionals.

So, comments? Additions?

[Robert Treder]

I know what you mean, but they don't make "live" bands sound live because live bands sound like shit compared to studio-recorded bands. They're trying to make everything as appealing as possible. This only really bothers me when it's on a show or movie where they should know better, but when you're watching Judging Amy, you get what you pay for (so to speak).
Another sound issue there is the very fact that you can hear what the characters are saying, and that they can hear what they're telling each other while delivering it in what I can only assume was a normal speaking voice. No bar with a live musical performance will have a sound level which permits comfortable normal conversation. Movies and TV shows routinely alter the aural reality of bars/clubs, but with obvious good reason. I look at these situations with a cost/benefit approach: compare the storytelling impetus for the loud setting against the detraction that would be caused by a realistic soundscape. If the realism is more important than the setting, they should have changed the setting, otherwise, it's fine. Usually it's not that big of a deal, and bars and clubs are good settings, since a lot of social activity takes place there, so you just accept it. But every once in a while, there's a scene that just pisses me off. Case in point:
In Training Day, Denzel Washington's character stops on the freeway to have a chat with Ethan Hawke's character. They get out of the car and start arguing. On an LA freeway. We, the audience, hear this as though they were having an argument in a backyard. The freeway sound is background. Now, I don't know if the filmmakers in question have ever actually been to a freeway, but those things are fucking loud as hell. There's no way we'd hear the conversation in question in the manner we heard it. Now, I know that having the argument on the freeway further establishes how "on the edge" Denzel's character was, and also gives a great sense of tension and danger to the scene, but they could have at least put a little more noise into it. Hell, give the characters subtitles if you need to, just don't bring me out of an otherwise good scene by this distracting nonsense.

[Dennis Toy]

In Training Day, Denzel Washington's character stops on the freeway to have a chat with Ethan Hawke's character. They get out of the car and start arguing. On an LA freeway. We, the audience, hear this as though they were having an argument in a backyard. The freeway sound is background. Now, I don't know if the filmmakers in question have ever actually been to a freeway, but those things are fucking loud as hell. There's no way we'd hear the conversation in question in the manner we heard it. Now, I know that having the argument on the freeway further establishes how "on the edge" Denzel's character was, and also gives a great sense of tension and danger to the scene, but they could have at least put a little more noise into it. Hell, give the characters subtitles if you need to, just don't bring me out of an otherwise good scene by this distracting nonsense.

they used to do that on CHiPs alot, you had ponch and baker talking while riding on motorcycles and you could hear them talk, in real life you couldnt hear them over the loud freeway noise.