Audio Description

You are suffering from schizophrenia.

stop saying that!

I attended Assertiveness Training, and now I tell the voices what to do!

I declare a mis-diagnosis:

The actual name of of the condition is schizaudio.

Schizophonia.

That would be the term I was grasping for.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror

I was visiting my aunt, uncle and cousin about a year ago. After dinner everyone was in the living room and the TV was turned 'Big Bang Theory'.

I'm not a fan of most TV and sitcoms that have essential quit trying for good writing (to elicit laughter among other things) which they believe has been superceded by the use canned laughter( to let everyone know they are expected to laugh) are really never something I look forward to positively.

But something was different.

Everyone noticed the narrative explaining what was being seen as it was happening. Perhaps it was just for that show, but it converted something that would have been tedious in absolute hilarity.

It may have also helped that everyone was puzzled and amused as to how and why it was occurring. About every 10 minutes, my cousin would chime in with a new outlandish 'perfectly reasonable' (to him alone) explanation.

My favorite of those was 'Closed Caption for the Blind'. Once he came up with that, it was reality. I'm sure if I brought it up the effect today, he would say 'Oh, you mean closed captions for the blind?' It wouldn't be right to mention the audio description feature and relegate 'closed captions for the blind' to the realm of unreality.

.

Black Mirror is highly entertaining.

Ha!.. Very funny. Sounds like quite a hoot! Very funny to share that with family. Strange how it was intermittent.

..It was really odd.. and funny here as well. I feel as if it was every show from season one, but I'm unsure? 'the missus and I' had watched them together and had begun to comment on how they had really gone over the top this season with the intense narration.

after a couple episodes of another very short season I found the show about volcanos.

I never thought hearing 'Four men appear on a precipice' would make me jump.

I agree.. Closed caption for the blind is totally reasonable.

http://www.narrativetv.com/faqs.html

I will have to look for this narrative feature, it sounds interesting. As for the show I find it terrifying and believe the authors are glimpsing into potential futures. The episode about the people who live in a high tech world of cubical rooms and work by riding treadmills while watching endless hours of shows and advertisements. The guy is prevented from continuing to watch what he wants to watch unless he watches the ads. You-tube already forces you to watch at least part of some ads before you the the video you want, how long till you have to turn your camera on so it can see that you are watching it?

I also think the movie Idiocracy is a potential future...

Drew K

Heck, every time I saw SAP was available, I just said "no thanks, I will get up and go get a beer."

I also thought SAP was "Spanish Audio Program". LOL

My four-year old son has an uncanny knack for figuring out electronics. A few months ago he hijacked our TV and changed a bunch of settings. One of them was the narration, which as you say is creepy when first discovered. Kid shows are full of things like "They all scream, wave their arms and run away"--I imagine watching a darker program with narration on is a weird experience.

He also enabled Spanish-language SAP, so whenever we'd tune in for the World Series the audio was the Spanish broadcast. Took me a while to fix that one, because he reset the controls/text to Spanish as well.

Actually, SAP stands for Second Audio Program which is often, but not always, in Spanish.

As for the OP and, "Black Mirror it was making sense.. that show is f'ing weird as all get out", that is how we feel about Doctor Who. Muting the sound for D.W. and listening to the narration might make it easier to follow!

It does take practice to pick up our mother dialect. It takes even more practice to wantonly kill Daleks.

When I was a four year old kid and I did something like that my peeps would stand me in the corner l ong enough for me to think about resetting anything else.

JE : I went to google, but all I could find was a reference to this law. I could not locate a program listing guide for the shows that have this feature. Can you provide a show listing,, I can enable it on my tv, I thought it would be interesting to listen to a description.

I , myself , "discovered" this (SAP) technology by pure accident. I have shared elsewhere that when I relocated for a new job (almost 3 yrs ago, now), I *left* my 2 flat-screen tvs on the wall(s) of my house... to be visited "occasionally".

Feeling the need for an occasional diversion, I looked to the "slimmest-trimmest-least expensive" option. I turned to my ["other"] most recently discovered interest; my Raspberry Pi units, picked-up for tinkering. The 27" monitor that I use as an extended desktop for my laptop, at the apartment, uses BOTH of its HDMI inputs now; one for the laptop, and the other for one of my Pi's. I rip the occasional DVD to a flash drive, and watch it using the Pi (with the sound played via the 1/8" stereo input to the rear of my Bose iPhone-dock, that also serves as my alarm).

ALL-THAT-SAID : every once-in-awhile, when a "scene-change" occurs, the system SOMEHOW changes to playing a different sound-track ... and (lo-and-behold), I will be listening to the original soundtrack WITH the narrative 'overlay'. (Also once-in-awhile, that soundtrack change will simply change the *language* track.) The most recent 'rip', on which this has occurred, was The Martian (Matt D). I had to purposefully get up and "stand-by" the (mouse) controls for the Kodi video-player, to "jump-on" re-setting the track, as the scene changes while he's doing his "farming".

{alas, the only words that I *missed*, several times, being in "some-other-language" until getting my timing right, were: "F-c- you Mars!" ... which, like so much OTHER vulgarity in SO many films, (IMHO), is SO unnecessary...!}