ABSTRACT

Sound's importance to the medium becomes obvious if one performs a simple experiment. The types of sound that are heard on television can be divided into three main categories: speech, music, and sound effects. Sound editors bring these three aspects together into a program's sound mix. Speech in narrative television most commonly takes the form of dialogue among characters. Music and speech go hand-in-hand on television. Commonly, sound effects are created in post-production work using the Foley process. Among the many purposes that sound serves on television, four will concern us here: capturing viewer attention, manipulating viewer understanding of the image, maintaining television flow and maintaining continuity within individual scenes. Any television sound shares three basic characteristics with the sounds people hear in reality: loudness, or volume, pitch and timbre or tone. The importance of sound to television is easy to overlook because it is often difficult to detect how sound has been manipulated by the makers of television programs.