4 ms·

I was thinking about this a bit over a year ago while automating ID3 tagging on my library and started thinking about how there's no standardized lyrics in musi

• bombcar 5y ago
  Subtitles are actually a legal requirement for TV: https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/closed-captioning-television https://www.fcc.gov/consumers/guides/closed-captioning-telev... and I assume DVDs, etc descend from that. Such a legal requirement has never been implemented for audio files, but it would be nice to see something, though I'm not sure how easy it would be to argue it as a accessibility issue - it's easy to see how someone who is deaf/hard of hearing can watch a show with subtitles, but do they "listen" to music? Isn't music without sound just poetry?
  • spijdar 5y ago
    It's worth pointing out some songs intentionally don't have "authoritative lyrics", and some musicians leave the lyrics open to interpretation, or mix in phonetic gibberish intended to sound like words but with no clear meaning. It's probably linked to why both there are no accessibility requirements for lyrics and they're not widespread in audio formats, that (some) musicians would see it as removing a dimension from their art. (Although the same argument could be applied to movies, where a difficult to hear conversation could be "artistic expression", so I don't know where the line is drawn. FWIW, I'm the sort of person to watch movies with subtitles enabled even though my hearing is fine, and I prefer knowing the lyrics to music) Edit: unrelated to lyrics, but I wonder if people with hearing impairment or complete lack of hearing listen to music for the sensation. With the right environment, you could physically experience at least some types of music, as vibrations on the skin. With frequency shifting this could probably be optimized...
    • bombcar 5y ago
      Supposedly Beethoven's music is noticeably different as he began to go deaf later in life (I've heard stories that he had a piano with the legs removed so he could feel the vibrations through the floor). There is a "definitive" question that often cannot be answered; similar to over-analyzing anything - just trying to "say" what the word is may not be desirable or possible. And subtitling itself is an art I feel, you can really tell the cheap vs well done ones. And it's interesting to see how things are clarified (and lost) sometimes; we do the same where we always have the subtitles on. I've always felt there's room for jokes that nobody will see unless they have subtitles on, for example, imagine a standard high-school comedy, the nerdy kid is going to school and the happy music is playing and the subtitle says [UPBEAT MUSIC] - but suddenly the music turns darker and the subtitle changes to [BEATUP MUSIC].
    • jjice 5y ago
      > I wonder if people with hearing impairment or complete lack of hearing listen to music for the sensation I went to a university that has a relatively high deaf and hard of hearing population (probably near 5%), and one thing that was common was that those students would like bass heavy music, since you can kind of feel the song/beat. We'd have concerts on campus and have an interpreter on stage signing the lyrics of the song, and deaf students would often gather closer to the sub woofers.
    • mattkrause 5y ago
      You do sometimes seem subtitles that say stuff like "[unintelligible conversation]" or "[faintly] I know", which I suppose helps preserve the artistic elements.
  • jjice 5y ago
    That makes sense, since a friend of mine would always have to make subtitles for her student films. I believe there was also a lawsuit over some MIT lecture recordings that were available publicly but didn't have subtitles a little while back. I wonder how that turned out.
    • bombcar 5y ago
      I've noticed when uploading to Youtube it will ask some questions about subtitling - and one of the options is "never on broadcast TV in the USA".