Asklemmy

43822 readers

912 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
[email protected]: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Why did old american movies sound so different? (sh.itjust.works)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

23 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Whenever I watch old movies the characters always have a different tone than they have now. It seems to have changed somewhere from the 2000s. Is it just me or did something change?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm not OP but I notice it too. It's really obvious in the way people talk, not the quality of the audio but the style of speech. Really obvious if you go watch some black and white Holywood movie ( some Humphrey Bogart movie for example). It's less and less obvious the closer in time it gets, for me it disappears around the 80s.

I never know if people really talked like that or if it is stylised acting. It's not just the choice of words which obviously changes with the times, but also the tone and accent. Very hard to explain, I'm not good at this.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

There used to be a stylized “Mid Atlantic” accent that many actors developed and the news at the time would use the same accent. With more modern movies, there was a move to actors with regional accents of their own, as well as a change in the way acting stopped emphasizing “projecting” their voices so the people in the back of the theater could hear them. Since movie audio is all recorded and mixed digitally, any lines that didn’t record well just get ADRed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So, sort of a "Queen's English" or "BBC English" in the UK.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's more correctly known as "received English", old chap.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Ever so sorry young lad.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

In America we use BBQ English.