When Mismatched Voices and Lips Make Your Brain Play Tricks

 https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/21/science/lip-reading-mcgurk-effect.html

The good news is, the human brain is flexible and efficient. This helps us make sense of the world. But the bad news is, the human brain is flexible and efficient. This means the brain can sometimes make mistakes.

You can watch this tension play out when the brain tries to connect auditory and visual speech. It’s why we may find a poorly dubbed kung fu movie hard to believe, and why we love believing the gibberish in those Bad Lip Reading Videos on YouTube.

“By dubbing speech that is reasonably consistent with the available mouth movements, we can utterly change the meaning of what the original talker was saying,” said John Magnotti, a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine in Texas. “Sometimes we can detect that something is a little off, but the illusion is usually quite compelling.”

In a study published Thursday in PLOS Computational Biology, Dr. Magnotti and Michael Beauchamp, also a neuroscientist at Baylor College of Medicine, tried to pin down why our brains are susceptible to these kinds of perceptual mistakes by looking at a well-known speech illusion called the McGurk effect. By comparing mathematical models for how the brain integrates senses important in detecting speech, they found that the brain uses vision, hearing and experience when making sense of speech. If the mouth and voice are likely to come from the same person, the brain combines them; otherwise, they are kept separate.

“You may think that when you’re talking to someone you’re just listening to their voice,” said Dr. Beauchamp, who led the study. “But it turns out that what their face is doing is actually profoundly influencing what you are perceiving.”

The McGurk effect was discovered serendipitously when a psychologist named Harry McGurk mistakenly believed he heard the sound “da” after watching a video in which the sound “ba” was dubbed over a girl’s lips saying “ga.”

Forty years later, scientists have demonstrated this effect in thousands of studies, in infants and adults, in different languages, in cases where the genders of the voice and mouth don’t match and even in cases when a person touches, instead of watches, a moving mouth.

But the McGurk effect is also limited. If you close your eyes and just listen, you’ll hear “ba,” and if you watch the lips silently, you’ll hear “ga.” If you reverse the dub, you don’t integrate the sounds either. The effect accompanies only certain syllables.

Why do some mouth and voice combinations produce the illusion and others do not?

As we encounter people talking — voices babbling, mouths moving — our brains are constantly making calculations to help them pin down what voices belong to what mouths. The brain asks itself: “Is it likely that these two things go together or not?” Dr. Magnotti said.

The McGurk effect is an instance when we mistakenly put them together.

“If they’re similar enough that there is something in the middle that matches with them, then you go and put them together,” Dr. Beauchamp said. That’s how “ba” and “ga” appeared to turn into the sound “da” for Dr. McGurk.

This discrepancy, where the sound “ba” and the mouth making “ga” do not equal the sound “ga” and the mouth making “ba,” exists because the brain chooses a likely voice and mouth match based on its experience with particular combinations in the past, the researchers say. The “ga” sound just doesn’t emerge from the closed lips it takes to say “ba.”

“In science we’ve assumed that people do that, always put together everything,” Dr. Beauchamp said. “It turns out that might not be right.”

He thinks the same decision process governing the McGurk effect causes us to put together President Trump’s lip movements with the bizarre things we hear on the soundtrack in the Bad Lip Reading video of his inauguration speech.

“The idea is that in the real world, if a voice and a mouth movement are so time-locked, they would almost have to be from the same talker,” Dr. Magnotti said. “As long as they match well enough, you can still see something that makes sense.”

In a complementary study published this month in The Journal of Neuroscience, Dr. Beauchamp and his student Lin Zhu determined that the brain most likely processes information about lip movements and sound in a part of the brain called the superior temporal sulcus.

Knowing where or how the brain makes these mistakes may one day help clinicians understand and improve your hearing as you age, Dr. Magnotti said. For now, you can keep enjoying the funny lip-reading videos.

Germany’s Top Film Dubbing Artists

Faces behind Voices: An Interactive Exhibit Puts Faces on Germany’s Top Film Dubbing Artists

 https://www.eturbonews.com/180048/faces-behind-voices-interactive-exhibit-puts-faces-germanys-top-film-dubbing-artists

 Most people have a clear mental image to go with many famous voices. For example, the tuxedo-clad secret agent with blond hair and blue eyes who works for Her Majesty: Daniel Craig. Not many are likely to associate it with Dietmar Wunder, a bald-headed, white-bearded German actor and accomplished dubbing artist. Yet he regularly lends his sonorous voice to Craig and many other Hollywood stars.

On March 15, an interactive exhibition featuring him and other “Faces Behind the Voices” will open at Frankfurt Airport on Level 4 of Terminal 2 (near the SkyLine people mover station). It will acquaint visitors with the people behind the voices that German moviegoers associate with the faces of major actors. This traveling exhibition, initiated by Berlin-based photograph Marco Justus Schöler, portrays 30 of Germany’s best-known dubbing artists, all of them with a neutral expression and dress. This makes sense, since their voices are all that they actually project – and virtually everyone in German-speaking countries is familiar with them. Each of the pictures is enriched by an audio recording of the artist’s voice, including original film lines, anecdotes and little audiovisual puzzles.

Frankfurt has the honor of being the first airport to host “Faces Behind the Voices”. Last year the exhibit toured 20 different German train stations. With this latest cultural offering, Frankfurt Airport is continuing to pursue its goal of delighting travelers and guests with unusual offerings to keep them entertained during their stay.

The airport’s operator, Fraport, is commited to meeting the needs and wishes of individual travelers and visitors in keeping with its slogan, “Gute Reise! We make it happen”. It continually develops and implements new services and facilities to keep taking the customer experience at Germany’s foremost transportation hub to new levels of enjoyment and convenience.

 

 

Dubbing vs Subtitling

There always have been a long debate on Dubbing vs Subtitling




What do you think is your choice and reasoning for same? Do share with us














Watch this video to get some interesting ideas

So post your interesting comments on dubbing and subtitling

The secrets behind the award-winning dubbing of ‘The Simpsons’

  http://elpais.com/elpais/2014/07/08/inenglish/1404823791_229861.html

For dubbing to be good you mustn’t notice it: that’s the motto of Ana María Simón Rius, the 71-year-old actress responsible for adapting and directing the Spanish dubbing of such landmark American series as The Sopranos and The Simpsons.

Her daily work on the latter has just earned her, for the second year running, the award for best film and TV translation and adaptation work in Spain from Atrae (the Spain Association of Translation and Adaptation). Once again, she is sharing the prize with her right-hand woman, translator María José Aguirre de Cárcer, who also shares her same professional philosophy: the work has to pass unnoticed to make the product shine.

The steps that have to be followed before an episode of The Simpsons reaches Spanish TV screens are precisely measured. “As soon as you walk in they ask for the work to be done yesterday,” says Simón, who has spent the last 30 years working against the clock. She inherited the job of adapting and directing the dubbing of The Simpsons from actor Carlos Revillas after he died in 2000.

“It was very tough. What’s more Carlos also dubbed Homer. And there were a lot of complaints from fans over the change of voice. But what were we going to do? Right away I sat down with a half-finished script. I did voice auditions and I replaced him with Carlos Ysbert. We were working with tears in our eyes. But Carlos [Ysbert] took over the character and did a marvelous job.”

‘The Simpsons’ initially flopped in Germany: “They translated it literally, and people didn’t find it funny”

For the script to get to the dubbing actors in perfect condition it first has to pass through the hands of translator Aguirre. The 60-year-old says she loves languages so much that her husband often calls her a “nerd:” “Because I even love watching films in Danish,” she laughs. It was her ingenuity that came up with the Spanish translation of Bart’s famous catchphrase “Eat my shorts” – “multiplícate por cero” (literally, “multiply yourself by zero” – or “get lost”). The work of a translator does not consist of changing one word for another: “I endeavor to give the original work the utmost respect, but the jokes also need to be understood here, too. If not, the work has failed,” she explains. “Eat my shorts” doesn’t make much sense translated literally into Spanish, but if you simply translate it as “get lost,” it loses its spark. “So you have to invent another play on words to substitute the original,” says Aguirre, who has been battling with the series’ scripts since it was first broadcast in Spain in 1990, combining it with those of other hit shows such as The X-Files, Lost and Seinfeld.

Aguirre says that The Simpsons was initially a flop in Germany: “They translated the script literally, and people didn’t find it funny. In fact, Fox [the show’s producer] congratulated the Spanish studios because it was the best translation of The Simpsons that had been done. And in Germany it was the worst,” she explains proudly. “Translators need to do their research.

A line said by someone highbrow is not the same as one said by someone from the Bronx. And what’s more, it is essential that you don’t always trust what it says in the dictionary. I am always asking a doctor friend of mine about things, and he has often said to me: ‘It’s great that you consult me because I am fed up with seeing films about doctors where everything they say is absurd.”

 

Homer Simpson

When Aguirre’s translation is finished the script continues to the next phase: the adaptation. Here Simón takes charge of seeing which lines fit into the mouths of the characters: “There are times when you need a whole sentence to say in Spanish what you can in two words in English. And you have to adjust it. Or when an actor says ‘I put myself in your shoes’ and the Spanish translation is ‘me pongo en tu piel’ [I put myself in your skin]. But how are you going to say that if the actor is pointing at their feet, for example? You have to turn them around so that they don’t lose meaning and turn out funny. […] It’s not always easy, but it is a very nice, artistic job.”

After that it is time to record the dubbing, which is “always done by actors, who are the best dubbers. The voice of Bart, for example, belongs to Sara Viva. It seems as if she is made for the character, or the character is made for her. It is amazing,” explains the director, who in daily life admits that she alternates between watching dubbed and original version films. “They are not incompatible. I am in favor of people being able to choose. The important thing is that the work is well done.”
And that, in her world, means it goes on staying hidden.

 

 

Mexican dubbers speak up !

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-01-20/mexican-voices-popular-us-tv-stars-are-speaking-about-their-low-wages

 Mexicans have long reigned as the main voices in the Spanish language soundtracks of popular US films and TV shows, like The Simpsons, that air throughout Latin America. But given the reach of their voices, the voiceover artists make very little money. And now their work is moving to even lower-wage countries.

 If you’ve seen recent episodes of "The Simpsons" in Spanish, chances are you've heard Eduardo Ramírez. He's the voice behind Nelson, Otto the Bus Driver, Bumblebee Man and Lenny.

 

Ramírez is a theater actor by training. A few years ago, a fellow actor suggested he learn dubbing — being a voiceover artist for Spanish-language soundtracks — to earn extra cash. Ramírez quickly learned that performing voices for TV audiences was a different craft than stage acting. 
“They see a face and hear a voice,” Ramírez explained, “and the trick in dubbing is that they match, you know? That the people doesn’t think, 'Wait a minute, that voice doesn’t belong to that face.' That’s the tricky part.”

Dubbing is a sub-category of work and training in Mexico. And Ramírez has been pretty successful, so far. 

“You know, in theater, there are like 100 people who come to see you, but, for example "The Simpsons", all of Latin America have this dubbing that we made here in Mexico,” he said. That means millions of TV viewers across Latin America have heard Ramírez. So the money must be pretty good, right?

“No," said Ramírez, laughing. "Well, for example, in this agency where we work in 'The Simpsons,' for what I did yesterday, like 10 minutes of work, it was like $20- 25."
In Mexico, $20-a-day is still roughly four times the minimum wage. Plus, it only takes Ramírez about 10 minutes to record his character’s lines. So it seems like a decent living, until you consider the wide diffusion of the actor’s work.
“The thing is, this work goes to all of Latin America and maybe some parts of the USA, and so that’s where it becomes underpaid,” Ramírez said.

Ramírez is part of a growing group of trained actors who feel that their work is undervalued, especially as the dubbing industry gets more competitive and as companies outsource the work to other Latin American countries. The actors claim that fans are complaining about having longtime voices suddenly replaced.

The fight between actors and dubbing companies first flared in 2005. That’s when Humberto Vélez — for 15 years the voice of Homer Simpson, or Homero, in Spanish — led the show’s core crew of Spanish dubbers in Mexico on strike for better pay. The actors lost and were replaced. 

Mario Castañeda, the creative director at one of Mexico’s biggest dubbing studios, explained, “You can always say to the producers or to the dubbing company, 'Hey, I want to earn this money,' and then you have to realize something: you are not Homer Simpson, you are the voice.” 

Castañeda knows. He is one of Mexico’s most recognizable voices, having dubbed Bruce Willis and Jim Carrey films, along with TV shows like 'The Wonder Years' and 'Dragon Ball Z.' He thinks the dubbing industry increasingly sees voice actors as replaceable — especially with the rise of lower-cost studios in other parts of Latin America. Add to that, he said, the fact that non-Mexican actors are now mastering the coveted, generic Mexican accent.
“A lot of people is trying to get a better price, and some clients have switched to Argentina, to Venezuela, to Colombia, to Chile,” Castañeda said.

He estimates that Mexico’s dubbing industry has lost about one third of its business to competitors and that Mexican actors haven’t seen pay increases in more than 10 years. In the meantime, he argues, audiences have forgotten about the value once placed on having that subtly distinct voice.

“It’s like Mickey Mouse. I don’t know who Mickey Mouse is in the United States. Here in Latin America, it’s Arturo Mercado Junior. And he has been Mickey Mouse for more than a decade, I think. But whenever they want to change him, they just have to look for someone who can say, 'Haha, hello, come on Pluto!' and if they can find a guy that can do that, that’s the voice of Mickey Mouse,” Castañeda said.

And the way things are going, Mexico’s historic hold on the voices of popular TV shows, from Mickey Mouse to "Los Simpsons," may soon become a thing of the past.

David Blunkett's idea to dub foreign TV would restrict viewing pleasure

Live subtitling certainly has its problems, but don't throw the baby out with the bathwater – dubbing strips away nuance

'Blunkett’s beef is really with live subtitling, where time pressures create the kind of exaggerated typos he singles out'. Photograph: Graeme Robertson

David Blunkett is correct to point out the shortcomings of television subtitling, which he has said is not meeting the needs of deaf and hearing impaired people. He is right also to say that foreign-language dramas – he must have in mind hits such as The Returned or the original Danish version of The Killing – require dubbing if they are to be intelligible to the blind. And he is not alone in identifying a prejudice by programmers toward the younger end of the market. "Today, the way TV executives worship the cult of youth seems to be an unstoppable fetish," he complains.

Reading his thoughts, though, it's hard not to wish someone was subtitling or dubbing them into a coherent argument. The problem is partly that he is conflating separate issues. A failure in subtitles doesn't happen because everyone has left the magic subtitling machine unguarded while they're off trying to please the 18-24 year-old demographic – and Blunkett's beef is really with live subtitling, where time pressures create the kind of exaggerated typos he singles out ("looking for the prince of chemical and bionicle weapons" instead of "principally chemical and biological weapons").

Most garbled of all, though, is the logic he applies to dubbing. Foreign dramas should, he says, be widely dubbed in order to increase accessibility – which is like insisting that print be replaced by braille and audiobooks for all. Surely the idea must be to raise the entire audience to the same standard where possible, not to flatten out the experience for everyone by restricting pleasure across the board.

Dubbing will be anathema to anyone who values the differing cultural textures available to us in international cinema and television. Accent, pronunciation and cadence provide invaluable subtleties of meaning; to bland those out, to buff down the rough edges into a single language, is to emasculate, inhibit and compromise. One doesn't even need to be an arthouse buff with an Institut français membership card to appreciate this point: watch (or rather, listen to) the dubbed American versions of Mad Max or Gregory's Girl and it becomes clear how significant a contribution is made by the simple match between actor and voice, dialect and locale.
Not all countries enjoy the UK's purist approach to the matter of dubbing. Some of us will have had the experience of going to the cinema in France for the first time to see an English-language film, only to neglect to differentiate in advance the meaning of "vf" ("version francais") and "vo" ("version originale") in our copy of Pariscope. My first and only time was seeing The Quick and the Dead, in which a very young Leonardo DiCaprio delivered his lines in the tobacco-ravaged tones of a man several decades his senior.

In many countries, Italy and Germany in particular, the dubbing of foreign-language films is routine and comprehensive; there is even a continuity in the process, so that the same dubbing artists will be brought back each time for their corresponding actors. In other words, there are European voice actors who "play" Will Smith or Julia Roberts or Robert De Niro in each of those actors' films.

Italy is unusual, though, in even dubbing (or "post-synching", to use the correct term for dubbing within the same language) its own films. This has a historical explanation – it is said that Mussolini insisted on foreign films being dubbed into Italian to stifle any subversive messages, and the practice simply spread to the domestic product. But there is also a scurrilous one: rumour has it that the inability of Italian crews to keep quiet during takes is one of the reasons that widespread dubbing became necessary.

It is important, though, that dubbing remains out of fashion in the UK. On a fundamental level, the dislocation between sound and image in even the most accomplished dubbing jobs undermines the verisimilitude of the viewing experience; suddenly what you see is no longer what you get. You're being fobbed off instead with the Reader's Digest abridged text, the Top of the Pops album cover version. Closed-captioning and audio description for those with visual or hearing impairments must be improved with some urgency. But allow us our differences. We will all be the poorer if we start hearing the same homogenous soundtracks

"fairness compensation" for dubbing actor

BGH confirms "fairness compensation" for dubbing actor

Jack Sparrow: having
an Orff day ...?

Marcus Orff , a German dubbing actor who lent his voice to Johnny Depp (playing Jack Sparrow) in the German language version of Pirates of the Caribbean.  In an appeal arising from a case initially decided by the Berliner Kammergericht in 2011 (case reference 24 U 2/10 of 29 June 2011) the German Bundesgerichtshof (BGH) had to decide on Mr Orff’s claim for additional compensation based on §32a(2) of the German Copyright Act (UrhG).

By way of background: §32a UrhG provides for so-called “fairness compensation” in cases where there is a disproportion between the fee paid and the success of the work or creation.  Bearing in mind the success of the Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise at the German box office, as well as its related DVD releases and the TV licensing of the films, Mr Orff was of the view that his fee of roughly 18,000 Euros was not a fair consideration for his contribution: as the German voice of the lead actor he had made a decisive contribution and should therefore be paid a supplemental fee of 180,000 Euros.  Even though §32a UrhG expressly refers to 'authors' it is also applicable to performers, see §79(2)(2) UrhG. Under German copyright law, performers (such as actors and dubbing actors) can be considered as authors provided that their creative contribution to a work amounts to an intellectual creation in its own right. In this case, however, the only question to be decided was whether the compensation received by Mr Orff was adequate.

A great cinema? Somewhere you can
comfortably view "Pirates of the Caribbean"

The Berlin court had held that, while there could theoretically be cases where a fee received was disproportionate to the success of a film and an artist may be entitled to a supplemental fee, this was not the case here: a dubbing actor was not entitled to “fairness compensation” where his actual contribution was of merely ancillary importance to the film, for example where a film consisted mostly of technical effects, had numerous supporting actors and where the lead actor appears only infrequently. Looking at the German version of the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Berlin court found that it mostly consisted of technical effects, had numerous extras and supporting actors and that the actual contribution of the main actor, and thus of his German voice Mr Orff, was comparatively small. As such, the court concluded that Mr. Orff’s contribution to the films -- while not insubstantial -- was certainly covered by the fee already paid to him. 

Forget the cash,
just give me
the sparrow

On appeal, the BGH disagreed with the Berlin court and held that Mr Orff was indeed entitled to further compensation (case reference I ZR 145/11 of 10 May 2012).  The BGH took the view that the contribution of a dubbing actor who lends his voice to one of the main characters of a film was not of mere ancillary importance to the overall film and that the fee paid was not a fair consideration for his contribution.  Bearing in mind the success of the film, there was a disproportion between the fee paid and the success of the work.

Referring to its earlier case law in relation to the old version of §36 UrhG, the court made it clear that §32a UrhG may indeed be applicable to the work of dubbing actors who lend their voice to main characters of a film, provided their contribution was not merely "marginal". The BGH expressly disagreed with the lower court and found that Jack Sparrow's part and his appearance was more than just of marginal importance.

The court thus clarified that a dubbing actor may be regarded as a "co-author" of a work.  In its decision the BGH also provides quite detailed guidance as to when one may assume a disproportion in the sense of §32a UrhG and confirms that financial gains based on distribution of the (dubbed) film abroad can be relevant if the parties have agreed on German law as governing law.  The case will now be remitted to the Kammergericht.