Binaural Injection.

TV After accidentally listening to the standard sound mix on Saturday, I promised to provide an update once a gap had been found in my busy schedule for a rewatch.  Here we go:

Having spent the best part of a decade watching pretty much everything through headphones at home I've become accustomed to how a 5.1 sound mix appears through headphones in various ways, depending on how the sound design is interpreted by the various dvd or streaming services.  In the most impressive of cases, often those films in which sound has been given extra special attention, the likes of Star Wars or the MCU, the results can be extraordinary; the sound design team, already anticipating that headphones will be one of the ultimate venues for their work, seem to know how best to service the ear in close quarters.

Hearing films through the rather basic speakers integrated into flat screen televisions is always shockingly inferior, so if you are watching films by yourself, I'd say headphones are always the way to go.  One of my first stereo audio experiences while watching a film through headphones was during X-Men on the first dvd release, the scene in which Logan';s being coaxed through the corridors of the mansion for his fateful first meeting with Xavier.  The Professor's voice seems to be speaking from inside the walls, apparently inside the Wolverine's head and it's almost as though Patrick Stewart's voice is in the room with you, shifting around the sides of your head.

On those terms, Knock Knock Enhanced is fine, but its not that much more impressive than the average Hollywood sound mix when done properly.  It's certainly a good episode to choose, the creaking wood of the walls, slamming doors and knocking appearing all around the viewer's head.  The repetition from the vinyl remains in place as the shot shifts along the corridor and the Landlord becomes rather more creepy when he intones or shifts the air before appearing on screen.  The philosophy has clearly been to enhance what's on screen rather than work against it, not to be a distraction.

Where this comes unstuck is the implementation for dialogue and music.  The latter for the most part is a distraction.  There doesn't seem to have been an attempt to record the music binaurally so its mostly just the usual stereo sound mix.  But the words are unnatural in places as the sound designer has to compensate for the rapid edits and so voices begin sentences in one place then shift abruptly elsewhere in the ear because the characters have moved in shot which is less noticeable in the standard stereo because the sound is spread across both ears rather than consolidated in the left or right as is often the case here.  It's the audio equivalent of the uncanny valley.

Does binaural audio even work with pictures?  Perhaps it is different to typical film sound mixes but my ears are trained to accept to whatever's poured into them.  The best experiments I've heard so far have been in radio, where the shot restrictions are not in place and it's up to the listener to provide the pictures.  Characters are free to "walk" around our heads or we're able to "sit" in the middle of an auditorium and hear an orchestra, if not sit amongst them depending on the placement of microphones.  In the end, as the episode raced to its conclusion, I completely forgot that I was supposed to be watching an enhanced version anyway.  Which probably misses the point.