According to a recent poll, over half of Americans keep subtitles turned on some or all of the time. Technically, the term “subtitles” means translations into your own language, but these days people use subtitles to refer to closed captioning, which was invented to help the hearing impaired. Today, people say they use the closed captioning for a variety of reasons — actors with accents, actors who mumble, background music that’s too loud, and distractions within their own homes. However, according to experts, the biggest reason for the rise of subtitles is an imbalance in sound between music, sound effects, and dialogue. As sound mixer Tom Fleischman explains, decades ago there was one overhead microphone. Actors were trained on stage, and they had to let the audience hear them. With the advent of lapel mics, acting styles have changed, and there’s a lot of whispering. The invention of digital sound recording didn’t help either. Suddenly, they were able to run 200 tracks at once, which makes it harder to get the dialogue to come through. Finally, in this era of too much TV, there’s often too little time and money to make sure every syllable is there in a word. So now you know why the world's gone subtitle crazy. Because you're in a noisy place. Because you can't understand the actors. Because your speakers are terrible. Because there wasn't time or budget for proper sound mixing. Because the subtitles can add to the storytelling. And, sometimes, because you’re hard of hearing.
