[200/366] two hundred days and I've got nothing to say

[cosmolinguist]

I spent today working on an essay and writing about Hamilton and audio description for Access for Us, so that's all the words I have I think!

Comments

[silveradept]

Audio description, much like captioning, seems like one of those things that should come standard with everything, and yet, does not at all do the thing. Even from places that can afford to do it on the regular.

[cosmolinguist]

The basis of my essay was how hard it was hearing friends who went to see it live before I did talking about how much it added to the experience to see what we only knew from the soundtrack before. Then, I was able to have the same experience of it as everyone else, but once they all could see it I was missing out because there was no chance of audio description.

[silveradept]

That's terrible. And now, I'm also trying to figure out how audio description would work with a musical like Hamilton, because there's near-constant singing along with the choreography. How do you balance the audio input so that the narration comes through without the song being lost?

[cosmolinguist]

Yeah I was interested in that too. Obviously a lot of the story is told in the "dialogue" itself, which is why people can know the story so well from the soundtrack. And there isn't a lot that can be fit in, but I do feel better having it there because it at least gives me the confidence that I'm not missing anything too essential to the plot and I'm not having to put in a lot of extra effort myself in an attempt to avoid missing things, which I always find exhausting and stressful.

[silveradept]

The story comes through in the dialogue, but I suspect at least some of that soundtrack gets reinterpreted in the presence of the staging, and whomever is supposed to provide that description seems to have the impossible task of choosing when to narrate and how much to narrate so as to provide an accurate setting of the visuals so that you aren't missing anything important.

For something like Hamilton, it almost seems like the audio description would have to be a rap on top of the rap, delivered swiftly and in time with the songs themselves, and mixed delicately so that you don't lose sense of the song or the lyric when the narration has to intrude on it.

Still, In glad they're making the effort. I don't always see descriptive audio as a language option for movies or television shows when they're released.

[jesse_the_k]

Hooray a new place to learn from your shiny brain.